Pardoned January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers are pursuing millions of dollars in compensation from the Trump administration through the Federal Tort Claims Act, an obscure process that gives the Justice Department unchecked discretion over whether to settle claims. The claims are paid from the judgment fund, the same perpetual appropriation that would have funded the administration’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which faced bipartisan opposition and appears to have been shelved.
The administration’s proposed anti-weaponization fund drew fierce pushback from members of Congress concerned that people who harmed law enforcement officers on January 6 might receive payouts. “If you’ve been convicted of assault on a cop … doesn’t seem to me like people who are victims,” Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, told NBC News. Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York, told NBC News: “The concern my constituents and I have is that money possibly going to folks who hit cops. Especially when there is video evidence, they shouldn’t get a dime from our government.”
With the anti-weaponization fund on ice, attorneys for January 6 defendants are pursuing compensation through the FTCA, which allows individuals to file claims for monetary damages from the government. Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former director in the civil division’s tort branch at the Justice Department who worked on FTCA claims and now is legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, said the process risks turning the judgment fund into “exactly the sort of slush fund that the ‘anti-weaponization’ was going to be.” She added: “If the treasury department is not going to enforce the restrictions on the use of the judgment fund, which is to settle impending or imminent lawsuits where there’s some risk of liability, then there’s no limit on what you can use that judgment fund money for, so long as someone files a bogus claim.”
The Justice Department agreed to settle FTCA claims filed by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Carter Page, his former foreign policy adviser, for $1.25 million each earlier this year.
Florida attorney Peter Ticktin, a longtime friend of Trump, said he has filed around 400 FTCA claims on behalf of January 6 defendants and expects to start frequently filing lawsuits now that the six-month waiting period has expired. Missouri attorney Mark McCloskey, who is representing many January 6 defendants, said the FTCA provided more structure than the proposed fund. “The weaponization fund, for the brief fleeting moment which it allegedly existed, had no policies, procedures, or anything that would indicate what kind of evidence they would have required,” McCloskey said. “Whereas the FTCA gives you a statute with teeth that you can, as long as you can prove your claim, you have a right to recovery.”
Among those seeking compensation are Kenneth Joseph Thomas, an Ohio man sentenced to nearly five years in prison for assaulting several police officers, and John George Todd III, a Missouri man sentenced to five years for charges including injuring a Capitol police officer. Both are among nine plaintiffs seeking at least $1 million each in damages in an FTCA suit filed May 29 in Washington, D.C. Andrew Taake, a Houston man sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting police officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon, is seeking at least $2.5 million in damages, according to a lawsuit filed last September.
McCloskey said those who pleaded guilty or were convicted of assaulting police officers should still be entitled to payouts, arguing that they were coerced into confessions or subjected to unfair trials. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in the January 6 prosecutions, the Guardian reported.
Bhattacharyya said she believed the Justice Department could defend itself against the “malicious prosecution type claims” the January 6 defendants are bringing, and hoped it would do so. “Most of these plaintiffs were indicted by grand juries, brought before a court. Many of them pled guilty, others were convicted, they were sentenced by judges, and so those sorts of malicious prosecution claims are eminently defensible,” she said.
In Taake’s case, the Trump administration is defending itself against the claims and seeking to have them thrown out. In February, a federal prosecutor in Washington wrote that many of the claims should be thrown out because the lawsuit failed to name proper defendants and certain requirements were not met.
Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, introduced legislation last month that would bar anyone convicted of an offense related to January 6 from receiving a payout from the federal government. The bill would amend the FTCA to prohibit those who were pardoned for actions related to January 6 from being eligible for claims. “President Donald Trump still wants to pay off violent insurrectionists who attacked police officers on January 6th, despite any claims from members of his administration that say otherwise,” Schiff said in a statement. “Our taxpayer dollars should not be used to pay out criminals, and we can pass a law right now to prevent this president or any future administration from paying off their friends and political allies.”