Mike Johnson Opposes Government Paying Restitution To Jan. 6 Rioters

WASHINGTON ― House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday he does not support paying millions of dollars in restitution to rioters who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and were pardoned for crimes committed during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Doesn’t sound like that’s appropriate to me, but I have to look into it, I don’t know,” Johnson told HuffPost.

Johnson’s stance shows there are limits to Republican support for the rioters, who Trump called “political prisoners” and pardoned en masse on his first day in office. On Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, dozens of those convicted marched on Congress to demand that Trump do even more to help them, including paying out restitution.

In December, Mark McCloskey, a St. Louis, Missouri-based personal injury attorney, submitted claims for compensation on behalf of about 400 former rioters, with damage amounts sought ranging from the hundreds of thousands to the millions of dollars.

“A lot of my guys are at the edge of suicide, and they’re homeless, and their lives can never get back on track,” McCloskey told HuffPost. “They can’t get jobs, because soon as they apply for a job, they get Googled.”

The Justice Department has already settled a wrongful death lawsuit from the family of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was shot to death while trying to break into an interior room of the Capitol, to the tune of $4.9 million. A spokesman for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the other claims.

During the march on Tuesday, the former rioters thanked Trump for their pardons, with several saying the government owed them more.

“A lot of these people are still struggling to not only find jobs and just to be able to provide for themselves again… Just with the idea that we were at J6, it’s so hard to really find gainful employment,” Thomas Smith, who marched carrying a banner asking for “J6 PRISONER RESTITUTION,” told HuffPost. “I think that the government should do what they can to make people whole again.”

Smith, one of McCloskey’s clients, was sentenced to nine years in prison for assaulting police, among other charges. He’s one of the 1,500-plus pardoned by Trump on the first day of his second term.

McCloskey, best known for brandishing a rifle at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, said the Justice Department told him there wasn’t much appetite for paying the “J6ers,” as they call themselves, but he’s hoping to get in touch with the president about it. Trump, after all, has filed his own claim for $230 million in damages over the Justice Department’s purported violations of his rights.

If the department doesn’t respond within six months or rejects the J6ers’ claims, McCloskey said he could escalate to lawsuits. But he’s got reason for optimism, pointing to the commutation of former GOP congressman George Santos’ prison sentence ― something McCloskey said he was told wouldn’t happen the last time he visited Washington.

“I asked, ‘Well, what about my buddy George? Is he going to get commuted?’ And they said, ‘Not till after the midterms.’ And, you know, five, six days later, he gets commuted,” McCloskey said. “So when the president wants to do something, then it happens.”