Vanity Fair: Meet the Legal Group Fighting to Dismantle Right-Wing Political Violence

By Chris Smith, Vanity Fair. Read the full article here. 

Now for some good news about the January 6 insurrection. It’s provisional at best, and it can’t make up for the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick or compete with the hours of anti-democracy propaganda on talk radio. But the legal aftermath of an earlier right-wing riot is providing a model that may, eventually, help hold organizers of the insurrection accountable—and maybe even chip away at the infrastructure of American political violence.

One year ago, Karen Dunn and Robbie Kaplan were at home—in Washington and New York, respectively—watching on television as the attack on the Capitol unfolded. They were appalled, but they also quickly felt a queasy familiarity with the new events, because the two lawyers were immersed in assembling a case against the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “I still have this image in my head of the QAnon shaman,” Kaplan says. “Seeing him at the Capitol and thinking, This is the same kind of virulent hatred and, arguably, insanity that we saw in Charlottesville.”

“It might have been a little less shocking to Robbie and me because there were very similar themes and tactics on display that day at the Capitol to what we had seen in Charlottesville,” Dunn says. “And we understood the meticulous planning that had gone into Charlottesville, and we knew you could very much draw a straight line from there to January 6.”

Perhaps history will repeat itself again, this time in a more productive way. In November 2021, Kaplan and Dunn—who served as pro bono lead counsels for the nonprofit legal organization Integrity First for America (IFA)—won their Charlottesville lawsuit. A jury found the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally liable and ordered more than a dozen prominent white supremacist and hate groups to pay $26 million in damages. One month later Karl Racine, the Washington, D.C., attorney general, sued the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for their alleged roles in January 6—with Racine citing the same 1871 law that was part of Dunn and Kaplan’s strategy, the Ku Klux Klan Act. “Our team will pick every brain that we can around every filing, every piece of evidence that went into the Charlottesville verdict,” Racine tells me. “We’re fans of that work, and we’ve consulted with them.”

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