Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) has finally been served, via his wife Martha, with a lawsuit that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) filed accusing the Congressman of having a role in inciting the deadly January riot at the Capitol. Brooks was one of the speakers at an outdoor rally in D.C. in the hours leading up to the violence. At that same rally, then-President Trump himself spoke, encouraging attendees to “fight like hell” against imaginary election fraud.
The lawsuit against Brooks also names Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani as defendants, and each one of the Congressman’s co-defendants waived service, meaning that they opted to formally forfeit their opportunity to be served with a copy of the lawsuit. Brooks did no such thing. Instead, the Alabama Congressman “gleefully dodged the Swalwell team’s attempts to serve him for weeks, tagging the congressman in tweets teasing his location and mockingly asking why it was so hard for them to track him down,” as summarized by Talking Points Memo.
Brooks and Swalwell work together as members of Congress, but one party isn’t permitted to serve the other party in a lawsuit with a copy of the case. The delivery of the required materials unfolded at Brooks’s residence, where the process server — meaning the individual tasked with handing off the documents — briefly followed the Congressman’s wife into the Brooks’s garage right after she apparently arrived home. Brooks has claimed that his wife was “accosted” by the process server, although flagging people down and getting them to take documents is the individual’s literal job. According to security footage from the Brooks residence, the process server was inside the garage for around 14 or 15 seconds, and that’s it.
The garage door was open when the process server — who says in a new court filing that they’d been waiting nearby after unsuccessfully trying the front door — entered it. Watch footage of the lawsuit getting served below:
Mo Brooks’ wife is finally served with Jan 6 insurrection incitement lawsuit from Eric Swalwell’s attorney. (Video courtesy Mo Brooks’ security camera). pic.twitter.com/B8bxHcT3jM
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 8, 2021
