Jan. 6 rioters want cash to follow their newfound freedom.
Some in the group, pardoned en masse by Donald Trump within hours of the president’s January inauguration, have been lobbying the administration for restitution, The New York Times reports.
Lawyer Mark McCloskey revealed last week that he has proposed to the Justice Department a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee” to determine financial damages that the government would pay to the 1,500 or so individuals who had their sentences pardoned or commuted. Amounts would be settled on a case-by-case basis, he told far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
McCloskey, known for pointing a gun at social justice protesters near his house in St. Louis in 2020, added that his preference was for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to run the panel.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Justice Department and Pirro for comment.
McCloskey told The Pundit that though there may be some challenges to seeing the restitution committee come into fruition—a two-year statute of limitations for the claims, for instance—receptive figures inside the Justice Department would hear him out. Ed Martin, Pirro’s predecessor and currently director of the newly-formed Weaponization Working Group, was at the top of the list, he explained.
“He’s 100 percent on our side,” McCloskey said, per The Times.
Trump himself acknowledged the topic of restitution to his supporters back in March.
“A lot of the people that are in the government now talk about it because a lot of the people in government really like that group of people,” he said during a Newsmax interview. “They’re patriots as far as I’m concerned.”
Two months later, the Trump administration settled with the family of Ashli Babbitt—who was fatally shot while trying to enter the House Speaker’s lobby on Jan. 6—for nearly $5 million.
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