Trump immunity ruling brings focus on Indian-origin judge Amit Mehta

Washington: Indian-American judge Amit Mehta has come into focus after he ruled that US President Donald Trump's speech ahead of the violence that rocked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not subject to presidential immunity.

Mehta, a federal judge of the US District Court of the District of Columbia, in 2022 rejected Trump's effort to dismiss three lawsuits accusing him of bearing responsibility for the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Last August, Mehta had ruled that Google had broken anti-trust laws to maintain its dominance in online search.

Born in Patan in Gujarat in 1971, Mehta was nominated as a judge to the US District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama.

Mehta came to the US as a one-year-old and went on to pursue his B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Georgetown University in 1993 and his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1997.

After law school, Mehta worked in a law firm in San Francisco before clerking for Susan Graber of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Following his clerkship, Mehta worked at a Washington, DC-based law firm.

He is also a former Director of Facilitating Leadership in Youth, a non-profit organisation dedicated to after-school activities and mentoring for at-risk youth, according to his profile on the website of the US District Court, District of Columbia.

Mehta has revealed at least one personal detail about himself in his rulings: his love of hip-hop.

On April 1, Judge Mehta ruled that evidence produced so far in the litigation brought by police officers and Democratic lawmakers indicated that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse – the park south of the White House – on January 6, 2021 was political in nature and not subject to the immunity the Supreme Court has found for a president’s official acts.

Mehta also concluded that a call Trump placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, pleading with him to find 11,780 votes so Trump could be declared the winner, was political in nature.

“These are the words of an office-seeker imploring a state official to alter the outcome of Georgia’s election, not those of an incumbent President acting in his official capacity,” the judge wrote.

While the judge ruled that the speech and many other Trump activities appeared to be unofficial, he said a handful of Trump actions — including his directions to Justice Department officials and social media messages prepared during the riot — had enough official character that they couldn’t be used against Trump in any trial.

“The court’s decision today is not a final pronouncement on immunity for any particular act,” the judge wrote. “President Trump remains free to reassert official-acts immunity as a defence at trial," Mehta said.

On Thursday, another Indian-American lawyer challenged Trump's order to end birthright citizenship.

Smita Ghosh, a senior appellate counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Centre, is part of a group of attorneys contesting before the US Supreme Court Trump’s executive order, signed on the first day in office after re-election as President in January.