Many other cases against Trump — criminal and civil — have failed, but following a Washington D.C. court hearing, Lee and others said they believe they can win.
by Eli Wolfe Dec. 19, 2025 (Oaklandside.org)
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Barbara Lee was on the floor of Congress when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a violent effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Today, Lee is no longer a congresswoman, but the mayor of Oakland is still trying to hold President Donald Trump accountable for his alleged role in encouraging the attempted insurrection.
On Friday, Lee appeared in federal court in Washington D.C. for an important hearing in a lawsuit she’s involved in against the president. The suit, which was filed nearly five years ago by the NAACP and several members of Congress, accuses Trump of conspiring to stop certification of the election results that removed him from office.
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Trump held a rally for thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse, a park near the White House, on Jan. 6, 2021. After his speech, many attendees marched to the Capitol, where they scaled walls, broke windows, and fought with police officers while lawmakers hid or scrambled to safety. During the ensuing mayhem, one rioter was shot dead by Capitol Police, and scores of people were injured, including police officers.
Many participants in the riot were subsequently charged, sentenced, and imprisoned. A grand jury also indicted Trump in 2023 for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the election. The charges were dismissed shortly after Trump was reelected in November 2024. And as president, he pardoned over 1,200 people who had been convicted for crimes committed during the attack on the Capitol.
According to the attorneys behind the lawsuit, this is one of the last civil actions challenging Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol. If the court dismisses the case, it will mean there are “no legal means to try to hold President Trump accountable for his role on January 6, 2021,” said Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll who is representing Lee and other plaintiffs.
Speaking outside the courthouse, Lee told reporters that no one is above the law, but “I believe that the discussion today in court revealed the fact that there are some in this country that do believe a president could be above the law.”
Trump’s legal team has argued that the case shouldn’t move forward because he has presidential immunity against civil lawsuits. His attorneys also asked Judge Amit Mehta to reconsider a previous ruling in which he declined to dismiss the case on the basis that Trump was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech on Jan. 6.
Mehta has received the arguments from both parties and is expected to make a ruling in the future.
Lee was an outspoken critic of Trump while she was a member of Congress. As mayor of Oakland, Lee has continued to criticize the president for pushing federal legislation that cut funding for healthcare and food assistance, and for making misleading statements about Oakland’s crime rate.
Tensions spiked in Oakland in October after federal immigration agents were deployed to a Coast Guard base near the city for possible operations in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area. Lee and other city leaders responded by reassuring residents that they were prepared to deal with any enforcement actions.
The NAACP first filed suit against Trump on behalf of Rep. Bennie G. Thompson on Feb. 16, 2021. Ten other members of Congress, including Lee, joined the lawsuit two months later. The lawsuit also named as defendants the Proud Boys, a neofascist group, and the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia, because their members participated in the riot. The lawsuit relies on an 1871 law that was originally drafted to protect people from Ku Klux Klan violence.
“January 6 was not only an attack on Congress, it was also an attack on the voting rights of millions of Americans,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “The court remains the only independent venue capable of establishing a factual, apolitical record of what occurred. We believe in this process, and we believe accountability will prevail.”
In March 2023, when Joe Biden was president, the Department of Justice issued a recommendation to the court hearing the lawmaker’s lawsuit that a president’s speech “on a matter of public concern is not protected by absolute immunity if it constitutes incitement to imminent private violence.” The following year, a federal court in D.C. denied Trump’s request to stay the litigation pending the resolution of the criminal case against him for his alleged role in the attempted insurrection. That case was dismissed shortly after Trump won the presidential election in November 2024.
Lee, who became the lead plaintiff in the civil suit in 2023, thanked the Capitol police officers who defended lawmakers from rioters on January 6. She said several reported being called racial slurs during the riot. Lee also thanked the NAACP and shared that her mother was one of the plaintiffs in a legal case the organization filed in Texas to integrate Texas Western College.
“The NAACP has a tradition of fighting for equal justice under the law,” Lee said. “This is another one of those cases, we’re moving forward.”
Let’s be real…
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Tasneem Raja
Editor-in-Chief, The Oaklandside
Eli Wolfe
Eli Wolfe reports on City Hall for The Oaklandside. He was previously a senior reporter for San José Spotlight, where he had a beat covering Santa Clara County’s government and transportation. He also worked as an investigative reporter for the Pasadena-based newsroom FairWarning, where he covered labor, consumer protection and transportation issues. He started his journalism career as a freelancer based out of Berkeley. Eli’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, NBCNews.com, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Eli graduated from UC Santa Cruz and grew up in San Francisco.More by Eli Wolfe
