Trump Suffers Devastating Legal Defeat That Could Financially Crush Him

An appeals court handed Donald Trump a significant defeat on Friday, agreeing with a lower court's ruling that the former president CAN be sued in civil court for the events of January 6th. Trump is facing several lawsuits from injured parties that day, and now that the cases have repeatedly been given the green light, it could spell financial disaster for Trump. Farron Cousins explains why this is such a brutal ruling against Trump.

Listen to our videos in an audio format by subscribing to our podcast

Don't forget to like, comment, and share! And subscribe to stay connected!

Connect with Farron on Twitter

*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Donald Trump suffered a crushing legal blow on Friday when a three judge panel from an appellate court said that you, sir, do not have immunity from the civil lawsuits you are facing from injured police officers from the Capitol Riot. This is a big one. Now, it may not seem as big, obviously, as the criminal investigations into Donald Trump. After all these are civil trials. They're not determining whether he's gonna go to jail. It's just gonna determine whether or not he's liable. And that's the key word for the injuries that these police officers sustained during the attack on the Capitol. The lower court had already said, yeah, you do not have immunity because when you gave that speech at the stop the steal rally, you were not doing that in your official capacity as president. You were instead doing it as candidate Donald Trump. The appeals court agreed. They said, yeah, this was not an official presidential proclamation.

This wasn't part of your regular duties. You didn't even have to go to that. You did this as a candidate that was trying to win an election, albeit, you know, probably illegally, but it was still the action of a candidate, not a president. Therefore, you are not covered by immunity and therefore you are getting sued, buddy. Boy. So why is this such a big deal? Right? You know, obviously this is not going to bankrupt Donald Trump, but it is going to significantly hurt him financially. 'cause not only obviously is he going to have to pay the legal fees for his lawyers to defend him in this one, but based on everything we now know, which is far more than we knew when these lawsuits were filed, it stands to reason that Donald Trump's gonna have to pay out a significant amount of money, likely after already having paid out Eugene Carroll two, maybe even three times now, having paid New York for that trial that he already was ruled to have lost.

So yeah, this is gonna sting, Trump's gonna be out millions and millions of dollars, possibly just in the legal fees for this one. So it's gonna hurt him pretty, pretty badly. And I say that because I don't think at this point that he can lose. Here's why. At the time when these lawsuits were initially filed, we did not have all the information that we have today. So when these lawsuits were initially filed, I have gone and done segments talking about, Hey, I support these lawsuits. I just don't know that they can be successful because they're trying to argue basically that Donald Trump inspired these people to attack the Capitol. Now, what has happened since then, we have had hundreds of trials and plea deals for Capitol rioters.

And one of those Capitol rioters told us, I mean, I mentioned one in a segment earlier today. They've told us I was manipulated by Donald J. Trump. Trump said words, I thought he meant for me to go do this. So I did it. And now these police officers that were injured on January 6th, they now have all of that that they can use at the trial. Hell, they could call these capitol rioters as witnesses in the civil trial. They could put 'em up on the stand and say, explain to us, 'cause you said it in court that you were manipulated by Trump to do this. Explain to us how that happened. Why is he responsible for what you did? And they can one after another. We could take this for months if we needed to tell that story in front of a jury. That is what is so powerful now.

And that's what's so damning against Donald Trump. If he had a legal team that was worth a, they would already be telling him, settle, settle, settle, settle, settle. Because you are not going to win this because of all of the public statements we have about the people who did it that blame you for it. They have said it under oath that you had them do this. And for the record, just so everybody remembers, since this is not a criminal trial, you do not have to have intent, okay? Like with the criminal trial for Donald Trump, and for the record, everything else in the criminal trials can be used against him in this one as long as it's public.