Jan. 6 Cop-Beaters Are Now Suing the Government for $2.5M Each

The 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Is Gone. The Money Isn't.

You may remember the brief, bipartisan moment of clarity last month when Congress looked at Trump's proposed $1.8 billion 'anti-weaponization fund' and said, actually, no. Even Josh Hawley, a man who once raised his fist in solidarity with the January 6 crowd before sprinting away from them hours later, told NBC News that people convicted of assaulting cops don't exactly sound like victims to him.

So the fund got shelved. Problem solved, right? Wrong. As The Guardian reports, the Trump administration and its allies have found a quieter, older, almost entirely oversight-free way to accomplish the same thing. It's called the Federal Tort Claims Act, and it's been sitting in federal law for decades, patiently waiting for exactly this kind of abuse.

What the FTCA Is and Why You Should Be Furious About It

The Federal Tort Claims Act was designed to let ordinary people sue the government when a federal employee causes them harm. Think: a postal worker rear-ends your car, or an FDA inspector destroys your business through negligence. It's a legitimate, useful law.

Here's the problem. The Justice Department has complete and unchecked discretion over whether to settle these claims. No congressional vote. No public approval process. No restrictions written into the law about who qualifies. The money comes from the same judgment fund that Trump's scrapped slush fund was going to draw from, a perpetual congressional appropriation that refills itself. And the Trump DOJ can simply decide to settle any claim it wants, for any amount it wants, with no one able to stop it.

Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former director in the Justice Department's civil division tort branch who now works at Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told The Guardian exactly what this looks like. 'It risks turning the judgment fund into exactly the sort of slush fund that the anti-weaponization fund was going to be,' she said. 'If someone files a bogus claim,' she added, there's effectively no limit on what the fund can pay out.

Meet Some of the People Asking for Millions

Peter Ticktin, a Florida attorney and longtime Trump friend, has filed around 400 FTCA claims on behalf of January 6 defendants and told The Guardian he expects to start filing lawsuits in bulk now that the mandatory six-month waiting period has expired. Four hundred claims. Let that number breathe for a second.

Among those already in the system: Kenneth Joseph Thomas, an Ohio man sentenced to nearly five years in prison after being found guilty of assaulting multiple police officers. Video of Thomas shows him shoving cops and hurling himself into a police line. He is among nine plaintiffs asking for at least $1 million each in a suit filed May 29 in Washington DC, arguing they were unfairly and vindictively prosecuted. Then there's Andrew Taake, a Houston man who pleaded guilty to assaulting officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon and received a six-year sentence. Taake is seeking at least $2.5 million, according to The Guardian, on the grounds that he received inadequate medical treatment and an unfair trial.

The Legal Argument Is Exactly as Wild as It Sounds

Mark McCloskey, a Missouri attorney representing many January 6 defendants, laid out the theory with admirable candor when speaking to The Guardian. Those who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers, he argued, should still get paid because 'the vast majority of people that pled guilty to or were found guilty of such offenses were either coerced into confessions based on threats of life imprisonment and threats against their family or went to trial in courts where the evidence was faked, rigged, perjury was testified to and fair trials were not had.' There is no evidence of prosecutorial wrongdoing in the January 6 cases.

Bhattacharyya told The Guardian she believes the DOJ could actually defend itself against these malicious prosecution claims. Most of these defendants were indicted by grand juries, many pleaded guilty voluntarily, and they were sentenced by federal judges. 'Those sorts of malicious prosecution claims are eminently defensible,' she said. The catch is that defending them requires the DOJ to want to defend them. When Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, the Justice Department didn't even bother mounting a defense. The Trump DOJ is not exactly a neutral actor here.

We Have Seen This Movie Before

The FTCA has already been used this way. The Guardian reports that the Justice Department settled FTCA claims filed by Michael Flynn and Carter Page for $1.25 million each earlier this year. Those settlements set the template. They showed that the Trump DOJ would use this mechanism to cut checks to political allies without public debate, without congressional approval, and without anyone being able to do much about it.

McCloskey told The Guardian he actually prefers the FTCA route over the weaponization fund because it has 'a statute with teeth' and the pool of claimants is smaller, which means bigger individual payouts. So the administration's allies are not just using this as a workaround. They think it's a better deal.