Let’s be precise about what happened on January 6th, 2021, before we talk about the money, because the money only makes sense once you understand what these people actually did.
They chanted “Hang Mike Pence” in the halls of the United States Capitol. They beat police officers with American flags and fire extinguishers and their own bare fists. They hunted Nancy Pelosi through her own office. They zip-tied themselves up for the members of Congress they planned to take hostage. They smeared their own shit on the walls of the building that belongs to every American. More than 140 officers were injured. Several died. And the mob filmed all of it themselves, in real time, grinning.
Now they want to get paid for it.
The Justice Department — the same DOJ that is currently blocking state investigators from accessing evidence in the murders of American citizens by ICE agents — just cut a check to Michael Flynn for $1.2 million of your money. Flynn, a retired, treasonous general who pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, had his charges dropped by a loyalist attorney general, got a presidential pardon, and then sued the government for $50 million, claiming he’d been wrongfully persecuted. A federal judge threw the case out in December 2024, ruling that Flynn had failed to meet the basic legal elements of his own claim. The case was over. And then Trump’s DOJ settled anyway, handing Flynn more than a million dollars and releasing a statement calling it “an important step in redressing that historic injustice.” The historic injustice of prosecuting a man who said, under oath, that he did it.
That was last week.
Ten months before that, the same DOJ agreed to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt. Two separate investigations cleared the Capitol Police officer who shot her, with the internal review finding his actions “potentially saved members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters.” The Biden Justice Department opposed the lawsuit. A trial was scheduled for July 2026. Then Trump came back, reversed course, and wrote the check. The Capitol Police chief said he was “extremely disappointed” and that the settlement “sends a chilling message to law enforcement nationwide, especially to those with a protective mission like ours.” That response to a statement from his own department’s commander was met with silence from the administration. The message was the point.
And now, because the template has been set and the money is flowing and there is no floor to this, 46 people who stormed the Capitol are suing for emotional distress. They have filed a class action in Florida accusing Capitol and DC police of “indiscriminately” launching chemical agents and munitions at what their lawsuit describes as a peaceful crowd. The same crowd that, on video recorded by the participants themselves, beat officers unconscious, broke through barricaded doors, shattered windows, and terrorized elected officials hiding under their desks. One of the lead plaintiffs was charged with assault and pardoned. Another eligible class member was convicted of assaulting officers with pepper spray and cut off his monitoring bracelet and fled before sentencing. Another is a man convicted this year of child molestation who, prosecutors say, tried to silence his victim with the promise of a government payout from his January 6th case. All of them want to be compensated for the trauma of being pushed back by the officers they were attacking.
This isn’t even the worst of what’s been unleashed. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington documented at least 33 pardoned January 6th defendants rearrested, charged, or convicted of crimes since Trump and his soft spot for rapists and child molesters’ blanket clemency took effect. Six are charged with child sex crimes, including sexual assault and possession of child pornography. Two are charged with rape. Five were caught illegally possessing firearms, including two with prior domestic violence convictions. One man pardoned for his Capitol breach role was arrested seven months later for sexually abusing two children in Florida, one under 12. According to prosecutors, he tried to keep the children quiet by telling them he’d share the millions in government restitution money he expected to receive. He used a presidential pardon as a grooming tool. A federal jury convicted him on five criminal charges in February. Another pardoned defendant was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop days after receiving his pardon, after police found a loaded handgun in his car.
Jack Smith told Congress in January that it was “reasonable” to expect pardoned rioters would continue to commit crimes. That was an understatement.
Now hold all of that in your head and read this: in January 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, inside her car in Minneapolis. Video evidence directly contradicted the government’s account of what happened. Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota’s US Attorney’s office resigned rather than comply with pressure from DOJ leadership — not to investigate the agent who pulled the trigger, but to dig up dirt on Renee Good’s widow. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was initially invited to investigate alongside the FBI. Then the FBI reversed course, cut them out, and locked them away from the case materials, the scene evidence, and the investigative interviews. Disgraced former Homeland Security Secretary KKKristi Noem told reporters that Minnesota “doesn’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.” Three weeks later, Minnesota was forced to sue the federal government just to access evidence in the deaths of its own residents.
CNN reviewed 20 videos of ICE and Border Patrol agents using chemical sprays and canisters during immigration operations — and found that all of them appeared to violate either CBP policy or local policing standards. In Minneapolis, agents sprayed a bystander in the face at a protest. In Phoenix, an agent fired a blast of chemical spray out a truck window at people filming from a sidewalk while the vehicle drove away. In Chicago, an agent fired a 40mm chemical shell directly at the face of a journalist from less than ten feet away, one minute after a supervisor was caught on video saying “If you need to deploy gas, deploy fucking gas.” A pastor was shot in the head with a pepper ball outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. A reporter covering an enforcement operation was pepper-sprayed in her car. There was no protest happening at the time.
Here is the DOJ’s position on accountability for all of that: there is no basis for a civil rights investigation.
So let’s make sure we all understand the legal framework as it now stands in the United States of America. If you smear shit on the walls of the Capitol, beat police officers with their own equipment, chant about hanging the Vice President, and get convicted of seditious conspiracy, you can sue for emotional distress and probably get paid. If you are an ICE agent who fires pepper spray out of a moving truck window at people standing on a public sidewalk, the Justice Department will not investigate you. If you shoot a woman in her car and the video doesn’t match your story, the DOJ will block the state from looking at the evidence and pressure federal prosecutors to investigate the victim’s family instead. And if those prosecutors refuse and resign rather than comply, that’s fine — there are plenty of loyalists to replace them.
The Proud Boyz leaders filed their own separate $100 million lawsuit last June, citing Trump’s own executive order calling their prosecution a “grave national injustice” as evidence of damages. The DOJ initially moved to dismiss it. Then they settled with Flynn. The message to every pardoned defendant watching is now undeniably clear: file the paperwork, wait for the check.
Senator Mark Warner called the Flynn payment “outrageous and indefensible” and said it “suggests that accountability depends on who you are and who you know, not what you’ve done.” He is correct, but he’s also being gentle about it. What this actually is, is a protection racket funded by the public treasury. The people who tried to end the American democratic experiment are being paid back for their trouble, and the people enforcing a mass deportation campaign with weapons fire and chemical sprays on sidewalks are being shielded from any review whatsoever.
The tab for the coup is being handed to you. And the people who ran it are still running things.
We are not going to let you forget a single word of it.
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