Donald Trump's Own Judges Are Ruling Against Him

Judicial appointees of former President Donald Trump are ruling against him in various legal issues in which he is entangled.

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected Trump's efforts to claim presidential immunity from civil lawsuits against him for his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, at least for now.

Among the three judges who issued the ruling was Judge Gregory Katsas, whom Trump appointed to serve as a U.S. Circuit judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2017. Katsas was also on Trump's list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees.

"The sole issue before us is whether President Trump has demonstrated an entitlement to official-act immunity for his actions leading up to and on January 6 as alleged in the complaints," the three-judge panel wrote in a 3-0 ruling. "We answer no, at least at this stage of the proceedings."

Former President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom during his civil fraud trial in New York State Supreme Court on October 18, 2023, in New York City. A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump could not invoke presidential immunity in civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Jeenah Moon/Getty Images

Trump's legal team declined Newsweek's request for comment.

Friday's ruling is part of a continuing trend in which Trump appointees are ruling against the former president in cases related to the 2020 election and the Capitol riot.

In July, Trump lost the $475 million defamation lawsuit he brought against CNN after Judge Raag Singhal, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Trump in 2019, ruled that the use of the phrase "the Big Lie" was opinion and not factual, thus failing to meet the standard for defamation.

Trump was also shut down by some of his own appointees in December 2022, when a federal appeals court in Florida overturned a decision that blocked the Justice Department from using the documents discovered during the Mar-a-Lago raid.

"The record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified," Judges Andrew Brasher and Britt Grant wrote. "In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal."

Britt was appointed by Trump in 2018 and Brashar in 2019.

Katsas, however, filed a concurring opinion on Friday that emphasized while speech at political events are "normally" unofficial, there are "rare cases" in which comments made at that type of event could be immune from lawsuits, using the example of President George W. Bush's first public response to 9/11, which happened while he was reading a book to schoolchildren.

"The immunity question thus turns on whether President Trump made the January 6 speech in an official or private capacity," Katsas wrote. "Today, we do not definitively resolve that question. Instead, we hold only that we cannot resolve it on a motion to dismiss.

"The Court's approach is well-tailored to identify campaign speech that can reasonably be viewed only as unofficial. It does not threaten to strip immunity from other kinds of presidential speech. It is flexible enough to accommodate rare cases where even speech made during a campaign event may be official. And it is cautious, in leaving open both the question whether the speech at issue is entitled to immunity and, if not, whether the First Amendment nonetheless protects it."