Donald Trump Threatened With New Legal Headache

Former President Donald Trump could soon face another legal headache as a new complaint looks set to emerge out of a major incident that occurred during his last year in office.

Trump is currently facing a barrage of legal issues, including four criminal cases, the first of which, the Manhattan hush money payment case, is set to go to trial on April 15. He is also in the process of launching appeals against various civil rulings, including ones in which he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll and for a business fraud scheme in which he inflated the worth of his assets.

Trump has claimed innocence in all of these cases and accused them of being efforts to harm his 2024 presidential campaign, though legal experts have broadly agreed that much of the evidence against him is legitimate and damning.

In a report published on Friday, Law & Crime revealed that a new amended complaint is planned to be filed against the former president by April 12. The development stems from the 2020 lawsuit, Buchanan v. Trump, in which Trump was sued in his official capacity as president by protestors who alleged they were unconstitutionally cleared away by police during an incident in June 2020.

Amid the mass countrywide protests in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, protestors in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., were forcibly cleared from the area by police using tear gas and batons. This was done at the direction of then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr to clear a path for Trump to walk from the White House to St. John's Episcopal Church for a photo-op of himself holding a bible.

The federal government ultimately settled the case, but damage claims against Trump and other officials in Buchanan were later thrown out, owing to protections for federal officials from civil suits. Now, however, the team behind the suit has been cleared by a judge to file an amended criminal complaint in light of a January 2021 Interior Department's inspector general report which found that Lafayette Square had not been properly cleared and that police had not followed acceptable practices. Another report from that office the following June concluded that the U.S. Park Police had planned to clear the protestors prior to Trump's appearance, but it did not include details about the other agencies involved.

According to Law & Crime, Gibson Dunn, the law firm representing the Buchanan plaintiffs, intends to file the new complaint soon. Negotiations will also determine whether or not Trump will be kept on the case, with Law & Crime writing that it would be "hard to imagine he would be able to divorce himself from it."

"We anticipate filing our claims against Mr. Trump by April 12, as the Court directed in granting our motion to amend in part," Lee Crain, a partner at Gibson Dunn, told the outlet in a statement. "Our clients look forward to seeing Mr. Trump in Court and holding him accountable for his and others' attacks on the rights of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square."

Newsweek reached out to Trump's team via email for comment.

Speaking with Newsweek about the matter on Saturday morning, Dave Aronberg, the state attorney for Florida's Palm Beach County and legal expert, said that the path forward for the defendants is unclear at this stage.

"This has been a long, winding road for plaintiffs, and it's still not clear whether the plaintiffs will be able to sue Trump individually or whether he will ever have to sit for a deposition in this case," he said.