This Is It: The Last Chance To Hold Trump Accountable For Jan. 6

WASHINGTON — It’s the sound of thousands of fists slamming on doors and windows that lawmakers can still hear when they close their eyes and take themselves back to Jan. 6, 2021.

The terror that coursed through their bodies as rioters — many armed — breached the U.S. Capitol and demanded Donald Trump remain in power is something they can still tap into. The weight of a single question that raged in their minds that day still fresh: Would they get out of the building alive?

“These insurrectionists were calling to kill [then-Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said. “They were threatening to kill all of us. I didn’t know if we were going to get out.”

At one point, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said, he opened a “go bag” containing a gas mask.

“I had never done that before or since,” he said. “You never think a day like that will come.”

Trump has so far evaded responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 — namely, allegations that he conspired to intimidate lawmakers to keep them from certifying the results of the 2020 election. His election victory in 2024 stopped former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal case against him cold.

But Lee v. Trump, a civil case brought by a group of lawmakers, has survived every bid Trump has made to bury it for four years. And soon, the judge presiding over the case will make a critical decision that could be the very last chance the country will ever have to hold Trump to account in a court of law for Jan. 6.

In a series of exclusive interviews with HuffPost, some of the lawmakers suing Trump discussed their yearslong fight for accountability for one of the most shameful days in U.S. history.

Jayapal was recovering from a knee operation on Jan. 6, which limited her mobility as she scrambled to safety from rioters beating down the doors, smashing through windows and screeching threats.

She spent hours inside a room with fellow legislators, including Republicans who refused to wear masks even though COVID-19 was surging at the time. When she got home that night and poured herself a “stiff drink,” she said she told her husband they were going to get COVID. They both tested positive days later.

“It was very, very stressful and led to some long-term COVID impacts for my husband, too,” she said. “He had a heart attack we were pretty sure was brought on by that because he’s one of the healthiest guys you could ever meet.”

She counts herself lucky not to have been physically attacked. On Jan. 6, over 140 police were assaulted by rioters. Five police who defended the Capitol later died, including some by suicide. Four people in the crowd died on the scene — including rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by police while climbing through a shattered glass door and ignoring multiple commands to stand down.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) was on the third floor of the gallery inside the House, squeezed between narrow rows of seats where reporters often sit to watch proceedings, as he heard a “growing crescendo of speech that seemed out of order.”

He understood the severity of the moment when a police officer commanded lawmakers to put on gas masks stowed under seats in the gallery.

“That crystallized for me the danger we were in,” he said.

Some lawmakers were hyperventilating, Johnson said. Another colleague, he remembered, was on the ground having a panic attack.

“It was like we were trapped,” he said. “We were told to stay right there. All of the banging, all of the noise was getting louder than ever.”

He was one of the last lawmakers to leave the chamber. It would take time, he said, for reality to sink in.

“It was like we were under attack, survival mode then dealing with the aftermath of it in a state of shock basically,” he said. “I didn’t want to share what had happened. I just didn’t want to talk. I was processing it.”

“I started having all sorts of different emotions: anger, sadness, and self-doubt, sullenness … a little bit of depression,” he added. “If you would clap your hand, it would kind of trigger a noise like what I heard — the banging. It took several weeks for me to really get back to normal and even now thinking about it, it really brings forward some really deep feelings.”

Nadler was in his nearby office with a staffer when the attack started. He could see rioters clearly from a view in his office and moved to another office nearby that he thought might be safer.

“We barricaded the doors and kept watching on television and then we heard what sounded like pounding of feet and lots and lots of people going by in the hallway right outside the door,” he said.

He and his staffer stayed there for several hours.

It would take hours for the Capitol to be secured, and for lawmakers to be able to return to what they were there to do: certify the 2020 election results. The certification is the last step before a president is inaugurated. It’s a crucial event where members of the House and Senate meet to count the Electoral College results received from the states and hear objections. Objections can only be upheld if both the House and Senate agree.

After the chaos of Jan. 6, the long-standing process underpinning the certification was made less ambiguous with the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. (The law was originally written in 1877.) Deadlines for states to send electoral certificates were more clearly enumerated with the revised law, for example, and the role the vice president plays in the certification — which was always considered ceremonial — was clarified as a “purely ministerial” role.

Trump’s interpretation of the 1877 Electoral Count Act was particularly tortured. He baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election and insisted that the certification could be unilaterally stopped by then-Vice President Mike Pence.

“States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people,” Trump said on Jan. 6 from the Ellipse. “And I actually, I just spoke to Mike. I said: ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.’ And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.”

Trump’s stolen election lies had gone on for weeks before Jan. 6. It was no secret that Republican allies of Trump in the House and Senate had planned on objecting when the certification came around. Many Republicans broadcast their plans to object on social media and a plan to hold out fake electors as real unfolded in public.

What had been a mostly boring, procedural ceremony — an element necessary to the peaceful transfer of power — had become a white-hot point of contention.

“Without [the certification], it’s not a free and fair election,” Jayapal said. “It’s the foundation of our democracy. … It’s why, despite everything that happened, we had to come back and certify it that night. Nobody wanted to, in the sense of, like, everybody was in trauma, shock and fear, and all those other things. But there was never a question that if we were given the opportunity, if insurrectionists were stopped, as they ultimately were, that we would have to go back right then and certify the election.”

Years removed from the moment, she said she is still haunted about something from that day.

“[The certification] almost didn’t happen because those people and Donald Trump almost stopped us from doing the work. I literally think they were trying to murder democracy in that moment,” she said.

In February 2021, the Senate acquitted Trump of inciting an insurrection. The lawsuit was filed the next day.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) first filed the claim. The NAACP and the law firm Cohen Milstein represented the case. Nadler, Jayapal and Johnson joined the lawsuit in April 2021, along with Democratic Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Veronica Escobar (Texas), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.) and then-California Reps. Karen Bass, now the mayor of Los Angeles, and Barbara Lee, now the mayor of Oakland. (Thompson removed himself from the lawsuit after becoming chairman of the Jan. 6 committee. With subpoena powers, he felt it was necessary to avoid “even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” and Lee took over as head plaintiff.)

Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump violated the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act by whipping people into a frenzy and, with the assistance of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, intimidated lawmakers to keep them from performing their duties in certifying the 2020 election.

When he rules in the weeks ahead, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will decide whether Trump’s conduct around Jan. 6 was done in his “official capacity” or if he operated mostly as a “private” candidate seeking reelection.

A candidate seeking reelection is acting in his own self-interest, not an official capacity. For the purposes of the suit, Trump wants to be seen as an official actor.

His calls to supporters to reject the certification, his demands that Pence send the certified results “back to the states,” and his failure to immediately summon help to the Capitol — and instead blast out campaign-focused messages on social media — are prime examples of “private” and “campaign seeking” behavior, according to the lawmakers’ lawsuit.

Mehta already ruled in 2022 that some remarks Trump made during his speech from the Ellipse, like telling supporters to “fight like hell,” were not done in an “official” capacity. Trump appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which agreed that Trump’s conduct was likely that of an office-seeker, not an officeholder.

It was huge when Mehta refused to dismiss the lawmakers’ civil case, said Joseph Sellers, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

“It was the first time in this country’s history that a court had found a president wasn’t entitled to immunity for conduct occurring while he was president,” he said.

The appeals court then instructed Mehta to review more evidence tied to Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 and decide definitively what occurred.

If Mehta finds Trump acted as an office-seeker, the president is likely to make a beeline for the appellate court — or go to the Supreme Court — and demand the case be thrown out or the ruling reversed.

But it’s not clear how successful that strategy would be this time around. The court’s conservative majority has been favorable to Trump, but a major ruling from last year could actually hurt him, Sellers said.

When justices ruled on the presidential immunity question in July 2024, Chief Justice John Roberts said presidential conduct was divided into three categories: official acts carrying total immunity; official acts occurring within the “outer perimeter” of official duties, requiring at least the “presumption of immunity”; and unofficial acts that aren’t immune from prosecution.

Roberts said there must be analysis of the “extensive and interrelated allegations” to decide what conduct is what.

“It’s noteworthy that when the presidential immunity question was before the Supreme Court, the court cited the ruling in our case on what the standard was for what is considered ‘outside the perimeter’ of the presidency — and therefore private conduct — multiple times,” Sellers said. “That suggests that the Supreme Court is comfortable with the standard that the Court of Appeals adopted, which is the same standard we applied before the District Court.”

Jayapal said this moment in the legal fight is important for many reasons, but chief among them: It could enshrine a record of the insurrection.

If Trump doesn’t face any consequences, she said, she worries there could be another day like Jan. 6.

Trump has long tried to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 from his bully pulpit, but he can’t do that as easily in a court of law.

“I see how Trump’s second term is already so much worse, and I would argue that is in part because he was allowed to return to office and was never held accountable in trying to steal the 2020 election,” Jayapal said. “He was never held accountable for claiming that he was acting in an official capacity when he clearly wasn’t.”

Trump called Jan. 6 a “hoax” only weeks ago. He continues to falsely claim, against intelligence community assessments and independent inspector general findings, that FBI agents were responsible for agitating the mob on Jan. 6. In the lawsuit, Trump has defended his conduct on Jan. 6 as necessary and normal for a president concerned with goings-on across government.

One of Trump’s first moves when he reentered the White House was to pardon over 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including those who violently assaulted police. He issued pardons and commutations for members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of organizing a seditious conspiracy to stop the transfer of power.

“So many of these people who were convicted were let go. People serving their sentences. People awaiting trial. People who had pleaded guilty or served their time — they were given pardons,” Johnson said.

“There are dangerous folks released out onto the streets,” he added.

A number of the people Trump pardoned have been reoffenders, including for gun charges and sex crimes against children.

The pardons made America seem like a “dystopian place to be,” Jayapal said.

Republicans formed a new Jan. 6 committee this fall, three years after the House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 issued its final report. That report found Trump relied on “nonsense” claims of fraud to advance his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, pressured state and local election officials to say the election was “corrupt,” delayed his response to send help to the Capitol, and more.

According to the committee’s final report, Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 left Pentagon officials feeling so uncomfortable that they told investigators they were reluctant to deploy the military to quell the mob because they feared Trump would issue an “illegal order” to use the troops for his own coup attempt.

“Trump tries to rewrite history … but you can’t rewrite history,” Nadler said. “You can try to ‘1984’ it, but the truth is the truth.”

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, told HuffPost this litigation has always been about ensuring there are “guardrails” from tyrannical power and protecting the peaceful transfer of power.

“When individuals violate those guardrails, we need to go above partisanship and political alignments and really focus on [the question of] what type of society and nation we want to be,” he said.

“Nations grow, societies thrive when we learn from history, good and bad, as opposed to seeking to redefine history,” he added. “What we’re seeing with this administration and Congress is they are trying to redefine history despite Americans from across the country from all walks of life, witnessing with their own eyes what was taking place at the Capitol. And what was taking place was an insurrection.”

Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, he said, are a “textbook” example of what the Ku Klux Klan Act was created for: to stop the strong-arming of those tasked to uphold a democracy.

Since the tidal wave of rioters bearing Trump’s name on flags and banners stormed the Capitol, political violence and extremism has been on the rise across the U.S.

Reuters found political violence had ticked up by at least 200 cases since the Capitol assault in 2021. Anti-government extremism has increased, too, with government officials being more regularly targeted. A University of Maryland report found the percentage of violent events that targeted government officials and facilities more than doubled in the first half of 2025 compared with that period in 2024.

Among many other things, an Arizona state lawmaker publicly called for Jayapal to be hanged in September.

The lawmakers argue there is a perfect storm brewing: increased political polarization, lack of trust in a justice system, and rules being flouted or abused by the president.

But the lawmakers have been playing the long game. The very long game.

Johnson said he is “more confident today” that democracy can survive Trump.

During the No Kings protests, some 7 million people marched across the country against Trump, he noted. Democrats have been beating Republicans in elections this year.

The “monster will be put back into the box,” he said.