Federal suit targeting Jan. 6 extremist groups goes for the jugular: Their finances

Worked with the KKK way back when, they're still just a shadow of what they once were.

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Whether the group will survive in its current form remains to be seen, but the objective in Racine's suit will test the limits in the fight against far-right extremists. The legal strategy behind it was used as recently as last November in the civil trial in Charlottesville, Virginia, against organizers of the far-right rally that erupted in deadly violence in 2017.

And it's a tactic that has worked before.

In the 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center took the United Klans of America to court after two Klansmen lynched a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Alabama. A jury awarded his family $7 million. The white supremacist group, however, could not scrounge together the payment and had to turn over the deed to their Tuscaloosa headquarters — their lone asset — to Donald's mother.

In 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League successfully sued the leader of another white supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, for his part in inciting the 1988 fatal beating of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon. The family of Mulugeta Seraw was awarded $12.5 million in damages, and the head of the group, Tom Metzger, found himself in financial ruins over the litigation, losing his home and filing for bankruptcy protection.

Like the case against the White Aryan Resistance, the suit targeting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers hinges on proving at trial that they violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a rarely used federal law codified after the Civil War to protect civil rights. The litigation has a good chance of succeeding, experts on hate and extremism in the U.S. say, because it sources the information that's being collected as part of the congressional investigation into what role the two groups played in the planning and execution of the assault on the Capitol.

"That's pretty damning — it's coming from the federal government," Randy Blazak, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who is involved in efforts in the Portland area to combat hate speech and extremist activity, said of the lawsuit.

Racine's lawsuit alleges that the two groups and their leaders "worked together to plot, publicize, recruit for, and finance their planned attack" on Jan. 6, 2021, by conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in order to secure Donald Trump's second term as president."...

1.) 'Last lynching in America' shocked Mobile in 1981, bankrupted the KKK
By Leada Gore | [login to see]

Updated Mar 07, 2019; Posted Apr 26, 2018

https://www.al.com/news/2018/04/last_lynching_in_america_shock.html