January 6 defendants pursue millions in claims through obscure federal process

We are seeing the tRump acting attorney general refuse to put in writing and under oath that the slush fund tRump “settled with himself” over. The courts are demanding the DOJ and the Treasury swear under oath that the idea of such a fund controlled only by tRump is dead and never to be resurrected. The current acting AG refuses because that was the tRump goal all along. As soon as court scrutiny is droped they are planning to do the illegal act anyway. These people don’t think laws and rules apply to them and especially never apply to their dear leader tRump. Here is a slightly older article of their attempted work around if the courts stop them entirely. From what I have read the Jan. 6th insurrectionists have already applied to this payout fund and that some may have gotten money from it. Paid to be tRump thugs to do his bidding to stay in power. Hugs.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/17/january-6-defendants-compensation-process?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Federal Tort Claims Act, over which DoJ has total discretion, provides workaround to Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund

Pro-Trump protesters occupy the US Capitol, including the inaugural stage and viewing stands in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers are pursuing legal claims for millions in compensation from the Trump administration using an obscure federal process with minimal oversight, but which offers the Trump administration a way to compensate those responsible for violence even after scrapping its “anti-weaponization fund”.

The defendants are pursuing their claims using the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows individuals wronged by the government to file claims for monetary damages. The justice department has complete and unchecked discretion over whether to settle the claims, giving the Trump administration a powerful vehicle to reward those responsible for violence on January 6. The claims would be paid out from the judgment fund, a perpetual appropriation allowed for by Congress and the same pot of money Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund was going to draw from. All of the defendants seeking compensation received a pardon from Trump.

There was fierce bipartisan pushback to the “anti-weaponization fund” proposed by the administration last month after Trump reached a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In particular, members of Congress were concerned that people who harmed law enforcement officers on January 6 might receive compensation. “If you’ve been convicted of assault on a cop … doesn’t seem to me like people who are victims,” Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, told NBC News.

While the “anti-weaponization fund” appears to be on ice for now, FTCA claims and lawsuits could provide another avenue for payouts.

“It risks turning the judgment fund into exactly the sort of slush fund that the ‘anti-weaponization’ was going to be,” said Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former director in the civil division’s tort branch at the justice department, who worked on FTCA claims and now is the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.

“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,” she said.

The justice department agreed to settle FTCA claims filed by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, for $1.25m each earlier this year.

Many of the January 6 defendants are represented by Peter Ticktin, a Florida attorney who is a longtime friend of Trump. He said he had filed about 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.

There may also be advantages to pursuing compensation through FTCA claims instead of the weaponization fund, said Mark McCloskey, a Missouri attorney who is representing many January 6 defendants. There were no restrictions on who could apply to the weaponization fund, making the pool of applicants so big that it could lower the per capita recovery, he said.

“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, what kind of format of a filing they would have required, or anything like that,” he said. “I never thought the weaponization fund, as a practical matter, was very meaningful. 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 money are Kenneth Joseph Thomas, an Ohio man who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after being found guilty for assaulting several police officers. Video showed him shoving multiple police officers and throwing himself into a line of officers as he shouted for other rioters to “hold the fucking line”. Also seeking compensation is John George Todd III, a Missouri man sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty on several charges, including injuring a Capitol police officer.

Both men are among nine plaintiffs seeking at least $1m each in damages in an FTCA suit filed 29 May in Washington DC. They say they are entitled to damages because they were unfairly and vindictively prosecuted by the government.

Andrew Taake, a Houston man sentenced to six years in prison and who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon, is also seeking at least $2.5m in damages. Taake is entitled to damages because he received inadequate medical treatment and an unfair trial, his lawyers said in their FTCA lawsuit, filed last September in Washington.

Bhattacharyya said she believed the justice department could defend itself against the “malicious prosecution type claims” the January 6 defendants were bringing, and she hoped it would do so. When Trump filed his $10bn lawsuit against the IRS, the justice department did not try to defend itself against the suit.

“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.

Those who pleaded guilty or were convicted of assaulting police officers should still be entitled to payouts, McCloskey said. “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,” he said. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in the January 6 prosecutions.

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 since the lawsuit did not name proper defendants and certain requirements were not met before the suit was filed.

The Trump administration faced immediate and bipartisan backlash after it announced it was creating the loosely controlled $1.8bn fund to resolve a $10bn lawsuit filed by Trump related to the leak of his tax returns. Some Republicans objected strongly to the idea that those who assaulted police officers could receive payouts.

“The concern my constituents and I have is that money possibly going to folks who hit cops,” Nick LaLota, a Republican congressman from New York, told NBC News. “Especially when there is video evidence, they shouldn’t get a dime from our government.”

Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator 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. Among other things, 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.”

First They Came For The Immigrants…

Emma Vigeland welcomes Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist covering security and US politics at KlipNews, discussing the 15 anti-ICE activists indicted by the Justice Department.

A Holistic Plan for a White Christian Ethnostate

https://lucid.substack.com/p/a-holistic-plan-for-a-white-christian

This will backfire: no one can take away our identities and histories

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Jun 06, 2026

Every autocracy has a central ideological mission. The current United States government wants to transform America from a multiracial democracy into a White Christian male-dominated ethnostate. This fanatical mission is increasingly influencing the administration’s policies, propaganda, and visuals produced by this United States government.

Their goal is to change who counts as an American, who can have leadership roles in government and society, who can vote, and who can walk the streets without fear of being imprisoned or deported.

This agenda of authoritarian transformation is the connective tissue binding the many news stories we see each day, whether it is the Trump administration deporting an estimated 17,500 immigrants to countries they have never visited, to White Christian Holy Warrior Pete Hegseth blocking promotions by female and Black Navy officers, to the wrecking of the Voting Rights Act.

Remember that Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at Trump’s Inauguration festivities, and that other Nazi salute given soon after by Steve Bannon at CPAC? They were not aberrations or provocations, but rather the opening shots of a race war now unfolding.

That war seeks to remove agency and mobility and rights and freedoms of non-Whites, while implementing schemes of population redesign, reducing the numbers of immigrants by disappearances, mass detentions, and deportations by government authorities.

MAGA is now a potent project of White race hegemony that feeds on several vectors: the long and tragic history of violence and legal and other effacements of Black people in America, the history of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the example of authoritarian racial utopias that promoted some while cleansing society of others.

Foreign Policy, National Security Policy, and Elections

Transforming a multiracial and multifaith democracy into a White Christian ethnostate requires a holistic approach, and for months I have been tracking the attempts to achieve greater cohesion of government policy around this goal.

In a recent speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended “Western civilization” as the shared identity of the United States and Europe and depicted mass migration as a threat to that civilization.

I have also examined how suppressing free and fair elections fits into this scheme.

Here I add the tool of population reengineering, which is embraced by White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, Musk, and many other MAGA luminaries. A throughline of the far-right from Benito Mussolini to Musk is Great Replacement Theory, the idea that Whites are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, necessitating measures to save “civilization” from “erasure” and Whites from annihilation.

The Fascists provided the template. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Mussolini declared in 1927. “The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” In a speech that year, Il Duce cast himself in the role of a “clinician” who undertook “necessary hygienic actions” to defend Italian people from criminals, leftists and other political dissidents. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly.

A vast network of penal colonies, confinement zones, and prisons appeared to “quarantine” the “abnormal.” This “therapeutic” approach to governance, as official Giuseppe Bottai called it, was later applied to Italian Jews, and in Italian Ethiopia the regime experimented with apartheid-style racial segregation to stop the wrong kinds of babies from being conceived.

This idea of state action to protect White Christian civilization and the “natural family” –one man, one woman, and both white–continues among the far right today, as does the attachment to Great Replacement theory.

“I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack,” stated Giorgia Meloni, a neo-Fascist, in March 2019. As Prime Minister, Meloni champions White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.

Having the right kinds of babies in the right numbers and keeping out undesirable races and births was a mainstay of the former Viktor Orban government. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Hungarian Family Minister (and future President) Katalin Novak in 2019, echoing Mussolini. Novak had to resign from the presidency after she pardoned a pedophile, but she continues to advocate for “saving nations” from “a collapsing global birthrate,” this time through x-y, an organization she founded in 2024.

Musk, Meloni, and Novak at the launch of x-y.

X-y has been supported by Musk, who shares Novak’s preoccupation about Whites being replaced and civilization ending. A Washington Post investigation found that Musk posted 850 times in recent months on the topic of population and Whites being “a rapidly dying minority,” which triples his posting rate on these subjects in the previous 2 years.

An Optics of White Supremacy

We can expect X and other MAGA-friendly social media platforms to increase their messaging about a supposed race emergency, and we’ll likely see the Trump administration become more aggressive in its attempts to create an optics of White hegemony in government spaces.

This idea of an all-White governing class was tested in Trump’s first term, as I warned in a 2018 CNN essay on White House interns.

There will also be a ramping up of removals of non-White immigrants from the public sphere, as the massive Amazon-style warehouses ICE is repurposing for people would indicate.

Our Identities Cannot Be Erased

This administration will never succeed in wrecking our multiracial and multifaith society, no matter how much damage it does to our democratic political system. It is who we are. Our identities cannot be taken away from us. And the attempts at mass disenfranchisement will backfire; a new civil rights movement is already starting.

In trying to create a homogeneous society and ban talk of diversity, this government is merely drawing attention to what makes the United States special, and the power of our roots, identities, and traditions. These will serve us well in the coming years as we pursue peaceful resistance to restore our democracy.

CBS Reporter Visibly Terrified On Air For Reporting On Trump Corruption

Climate activism is getting a glow-up on Pattie Gonia’s environmental drag tour

In one-of-a-kind performances, drag queens and kings call for the protection of the planet — and all people.

This story was originally reported by Jenae Barnes, Climate Reporter of The 19th. Meet Jenae and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Under a single spotlight, a tall figure in a hooded robe strutted onto the stage, their back to the audience. After a suspenseful beat, three words in large bolded lettering lit up the screen behind them: “NATURE IS GAY.”

With a twirl to the crowd, Pattie Gonia unveiled their ginger-red hair and matching mustache, dancing in an earthy blue-and-green crop top and skirt barely covering their chiseled body. The crowd of over a thousand broke into roaring applause.A 2019 video of Bill Nye the Science Guy, pulled from his appearance on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” punctuated the dramatic reveal. “By the end of the century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another 4 to 8 degrees,” Nye said. “What I’m saying is, the planet’s on fucking fire.”

These are just the first few seconds of environmental activist and drag queen Pattie Gonia’s “Save Her” tour, a one-of-a-kind show that calls for the protection of the dolls — and the planet. The drag queens and kings who created and star on the tour aim to counter the exclusion of their communities by promoting the inclusion of everyone.

For eight years, Pattie Gonia, who goes by Wyn Wiley out of drag, has amassed an impressive following of over 2 million people across their social channels and through their environmental activism on and off the stage. They’ve pushed boundaries, set records and earned accolades, including being featured as one of TIME’s most influential creators in 2025, named as one of National Geographic’s 33 “agents of change” and invited to speak at TED Talk. They have also raised millions of dollars for environmental and social justice non-profits, co-founded the environmental equity organization Outdoorist Oath and a job board to help the queer community and allies find work in the environmental sector.

Last year, Pattie Gonia completed a 100-mile trek from Point Reyes National Seashore to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in full drag — hair, heels and all — to raise $1 million for non-profit environmental and social justice organizations.

Pattie Gonia performs on stage. — Pattie Gonia performs at the “Save Her! Environmental Drag Show” during Climate Week, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Brooklyn, New York. (Alyssa Goodman/AP Photo)

Last month, they did it again, completing a five-day hike at Yosemite.

As show attendee and D.C. drag king Lionel Bitchie said, “She’s not one of the most followed drag queens for no reason.”

But they haven’t done all this work without ruffling a few orange-tinted feathers — and sparking division even among their own fans. During the 2024 presidential campaign season, they were targeted in a Trump campaign ad. Most recently, Pattie Gonia has been in the news for getting sued by the clothing brand Patagonia.

The lawsuit arose after Pattie Gonia filed a trademark application for exclusive rights to use the Pattie Gonia brand on commercial products and events, a move that Patagonia claims would compromise its brand identity. The drag queen responded on social media, posting that suing a climate activist is a “betrayal” of Patagonia’s core mission. Patagonia, for its part, acknowledged their shared goal of caring for the planet and the outdoors, but has held firm on the conditions to end the litigation.

Online, people in Pattie Gonia’s own fanbase have expressed conflict. While some view the lawsuit as harmful to the queer community and stopped using Patagonia’s products as a result, others disagree the clothing brand unfairly sued the drag artist.

Pattie Gonia said the timing of the lawsuit, filed on January 21, hits especially hard because it has come at a time when marginalized communities have been under fire. Several climate, gender and equity-related terms have been erased and banned from federal agencies. The Trump administration has rolled back key protections and visibility for LGBTQ+ communities, including limiting access to gender affirming care, removing mentions of LGBTQ+ history in national parks and banning transgender service members in the military. It also has slashed environmental safeguards for clean air and water, gutted funding for national parks and public lands, and expanded the use of polluting fossil fuel industries.

All the while, Pattie Gonia has embraced their own form of protest in the national “Save Her” tour, focusing it on climate activism and partnering with local drag queens at each of the tour’s stops, in more than 20 cities. At the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. — a historically inclusive space for Black performers steps from U Street’s former Black Broadway and a 20-minute drive from the White House — artists and attendees weren’t afraid to get political.

“A lot of time drag can be escapist, and not confronting the reality of dealing with fascism and climate decline, so I like drag that is a call to action and inspiring,” local drag artist and attendee Brooke N. Hymen said. “Pride month can be a celebration and it should be, but it should also be resistance against the forces that want to see us eliminated. And I feel like climate activism goes hand in hand with trans and queer activism.”

“Drag is political, so in a way this is like a rally,” Lionel Bitchie added.

One by one, each act gave their own climate-themed performance, with the majority of them stripping down to their “Fuck Donald Trump” pasties and underwear. Between acts, a parodied Smokey the Bear logo on stage read: “Only you can prevent fascist liars.”

Two people pose for a portrait. — Drag artists Brooke N. Hymen (left) and Lionel Bitchie (right) attended Pattie Gonia’s 9:30 Club show. “Drag is political, so in a way this is like a rally,” Bitchie said. (Jenae Barnes for The 19th)

“It’s a fantastic outlet for joy and rage all in one,” said attendee Kirby Callaway, who works in the environmental space. She said when she saw Pattie Gonia perform at a previous drag show, her “cheeks were hurting because I was smiling so much.”

“It’s so unique, [and] so much of the way that I interact with it in the real world is very doom and gloom,” Callaway said. “I don’t feel like a lot of places get to celebrate and find joy and laugh at these issues.”

Co-headliner and drag queen Sequoia (yes, like the tree) donned an upcycled outfit made of clothing relics from their closeted past and did a performance about the gender fluidity of plants and animals. The screen behind them displayed the words, “Nature is queer, and so am I.”

Going for a wildly humorous take on the issue, drag king Uncle Freak shuffled on stage to perform a striptease as a geriatric man, complete with a fake white mustache and a receding hairline that even NASA couldn’t find on the Hubble telescope. The environmental theme? How climate change worsens the effects of aging.

“Climate change accelerates biological aging in older adults by increasing vulnerability to extreme heat, dehydration and air pollution,” read the screen they pointed at with their cane on the stage.

But the show wasn’t all fun, games and nipple tassels. D.C. drag royalty King Molasses performed to Phil Collins’ ‘80’s hit “In the Air Tonight,” using the tune’s famous crescendo of intensity to parallel the “rising tension” of the climate crisis.

“In the Air felt very correct, in the sense of this urgency that we are now as a people finding ourselves in when it comes to saving the planet. By saving, I mean the impact of technology, of data centers, the climate skewing hotter, the ice caps melting, storms getting more severe,” the inaugural winner of the “King of Drag” reality TV show told The 19th. “There are so many things that are becoming more and more pressing at an alarming rate. And there will be a point where the consequences of our actions will be impossible to ignore.”

A person performs on stage. — King Molasses performs to Phil Collins’ ‘80’s hit “In the Air Tonight.” (Maya Lopez)

Pattie Gonia came on and sang a heartfelt “bird song” about resilience and visibility in times of hardship. “No one can erase us, we’re here and we’re staying, we sing cause we made it, we made it through the night,” they sang as the crowd softened during the piano-accompanied tune and several people melted with tears and hugs.

Co-headliners Sequoia and Vera! joined Pattie at the climax of the show to perform a piece on social justice in front of the backdrop of an American flag. Written on each stripe, a different call to action: “Eat the rich. Protect the dolls. Free Palestine. Black lives still matter. No one is illegal on stolen land.”

Amid rampant erasure, censorship and oppression of the queer community and environmental advocates, the tour is more than a late-night rendezvous; it’s a rallying cry, Molasses said.

“The opportunity that this tour gives all of us artists is that drag allows us to play and show something that feels like entertainment,” Molasses said. “But if we can do it in a particular way, we are able to not only entertain but are able to call our community to action.”

‘Brink of constitutional crisis’: DOJ declines to end $1.8B ‘anti-weaponization’ fund in writing

On Friday, the Trump administration declined to submit a court-requested sworn declaration to a federal judge, noting that the $1.8 billion so-called “anti-weaponization” fund was officially obsolete. Instead of solidifying that claim in writing, the DOJ wrote in a notice to the court, “Such declarations are unnecessary and the compelled testimony of senior officials from the Executive Branch implicates serious separation of powers concerns.”

New records show ICE investigators gaining access to voter files in two counties

The host points out that despite the rhetoric coming from the White House and tRump there have been only 100 cases of non-citizen voting in 43 years. That is an incredibly small number. But the tRump administration wants to decide which citezens can vote and who can not. It is minority rule over the majority, it is single party rule like in dictatorships such as China. It is the end of democracy. All so tRump and republicans can stay in charge so the wealthy can raid the treasury and the entire wealth of the country leaving the people as slave labor to the upper class. Hugs

New reporting from Axios offers a window into just how far the White House is willing to go to pursue baseless claims made by President Trump for years. The group Democracy Forward obtained new records showing ICE agents went directly to local officials in Texas and North Carolina to obtain voter files. “We need to be very vigilant and we also need to be outraged,” says Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward. “It’s going to be incumbent upon every single American to make up their mind that we’re not going to have our voices silenced.”

Trump’s Iran Ultimatum Explodes in His Face | Armageddon Update

A bunch of clips from The Majority Report on a verity of subjects

In this on Sam and crew show clips of tRump talking sexually about other world male leaders and make jokes about tRump’s sexuality. They also mention how he rambles disjointedly and his dementia seems worse. Hugs

Emma and Ken discuss the new memorandum on terrorism that targets activist, protestors, and people who post online. It is an attempt to stop people from expressing a negative opinion of the tRump administration and the horrific actions they are doing. They talk about how the administration really believes that just talking badly about ICE actions is doxing them and any doxing is terrorism. The administration feels that no one has 1st amendment rights and that anything done to protest the administration is terrorism. The fear it inspires is discussed along with the cost incurred by the defendants. Hugs

Sam and Emma are talking about how the tRump administration is using the FBI to attack and interfere with democratic voting groups who work to get voters to the polls, raise funds for democratic candidates, investigating civil rights some times with out warrants showing up on the doorsteps of volunteers implying they had committed a crime. The agents are demanding publicly sometimes in front of family members that people answer questions, give them communications, the agents are on fishing missions and intimidation. As Brian says telling people about an election is fraud. Hugs

I post this last one by Matt Binder filling in for Emma and Sam showing how Riley Gaines will say anything for money and just how stupid she really is. She has made money hand over fist using her hatred for trans people get right wing contracts and show deals talking about any talking point the right wing wants to push and emphasize. Hugs

The Right’s Anti-LGBTQ Hysteria is Now Indistinguishable From Satire

While I detest the end song he plays I love Mark’s take on issues. He doesn’t pull his punches and lays out the facts. In this case it is important to watch to the end where he elaborates on the current attempt to genocide trans people by making them illegal as Russia has. Now requiring that no business, event or medical facility that takes any government money can allow any kind of support or positive affirmation of trans people. He talks about how important it is to let trans youth socially transition and live as the gender they identify with, and to get puberty blockers to not go through the wrong puberty. He mentions trans children figure out their gender the same way and ages that cis kids do. Hugs

Panic over the existence of LGBTQ+ people is becoming so ridiculous it’s almost impossible to tell if it’s satire or not. In this video we’ll look at some of the most ridiculous examples of right-wing hysteria over queer people. Well also talk about how conservatives have successfully weaponized their outrage against queer people and how culture influences politics.

The Humanist Report (THR) is a progressive political podcast that discusses and analyzes current news events and pressing political issues. Our analyses are guided by humanism and political progressivism. Each news story we cover is supplemented with thought-provoking, fact-based commentary that aims for the highest level of objectivity.