Is the DOJ Subsidizing Insurrection?

Your tax dollars could be flowing to white nationalists and conspiracy theorists

On June 6, the US government settled a lawsuit brought by the family of January 6th insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, who was shot while storming the Speaker’s Lobby of the House of Representatives. On the same day, the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio and four other members sued the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) for $100 million for violating their constitutional rights while they were committing seditious conspiracy and other crimes related to the Insurrection. Just a month prior, Tarrio met with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump reportedly told him that he was “working on making things right.”

Are we seeing coordination “to make things right”?

In March, Trump floated the idea of a compensation fund for the insurrectionists. But a coordinated campaign of settling these “weak and unsound” lawsuits out of court would present an end run around Congress. Certainly, it would be faster and easier than winning the political fight that would ensue if the administration were to ask Congress to create a Capitol insurrectionist compensation fund for the very white nationalists and conspiracy theorists who set out to stop the certification of the 2020 election. In some cases, they planned to capture and kill these very same lawmakers. It’s a hard sell, even for this Congress.

The suspicious timing of Babbitt’s settlement and of the suit brought by the Proud Boys, a group that the DOJ once said played a “crucial role” in leading and planning the Capitol Insurrection, warrants far greater scrutiny. The announcements of the settlement and lawsuit closely followed Trump's meeting with Tario. They raised the question of whether these actions were planned with the deliberate purpose of paying off Trump’s insurrectionist supporters.

Tom Manger, the retired Chief of the US Capitol Police, said the Babbitt settlement "sends a chilling message to law enforcement nationwide" to our nation’s police officers. Coordination of bogus lawsuits would take it a step further. It would mean that the DOJ colluded with the American president to create an end-run around the constitutional budget process to pay off white nationalists and conspiracy theorist insurrectionists. It would mean that the DOJ's civil division, specifically the attorneys connected to the settlement — Joseph Gonzalez, Brett Shumate, and Jonathan Guynn — participated in a conspiracy to execute the payments. And it would mean the president of the United States has created a payment mechanism outside the bounds of the Constitution and oversight of the taxpayers, whose funds are now subsidizing white nationalists.

Bar association ethics complaints do not have statutes of limitations, and the potential federal laws that may have been broken here, if any, would have statutes of limitations that extend beyond January 2026, when a Democratic Congress could potentially be seated.