Turning Insurrectionists Into Victims
Trump’s anti-weaponization fund may be dead, but the message lives
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly everyone charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. That accomplished the legal objective — freedom, erasure of consequences, the end of prison sentences for the rioters. But that wasn’t enough.
Last month, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” born from the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. According to a Justice Department statement, the fund would have the power to issue “formal apologies” to and compensate people who claim they were victims of politically motivated government investigations. In exchange for dropping their lawsuit, President Trump and his family would receive such an apology.
The backlash to the fund was immediate. And after weeks of public criticism, lawsuits, and a temporary block by a federal judge, yesterday Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the administration would not be moving forward with it (though other key elements of the settlement likely still stand, including immunity from prosecution by the government for Trump and his family). But the retreat misses the point. The fund’s mere announcement did more work than the fund itself ever would have.
The fund’s real purpose
The unusual origins of the fund initially fueled concerns about corruption and political patronage. Critics argued that the arrangement would have been an unprecedented blurring of the line between public policy and private grievance, transforming a settlement involving the president’s own claims into a vehicle for advancing a broader political agenda — and that the agenda was clear.
While the administration insisted the fund would have been open to anyone, the intended constituency was never seriously in doubt. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, said he’d expected to seek between $2 million and $5 million. Before the fund was canceled, hundreds of other pardoned rioters were also expected to file claims.
This was never simply about money. It was never about mere loyalty, or grift, or rewarding the base. Those things are present, but they are not the architecture. The fund’s deeper purpose was to accomplish something pardons cannot: to reframe not just what happened to January 6 defendants, but what January 6 itself was.
A pardon is mercy. It forgives punishment while leaving the underlying verdict intact. Compensation is something categorically different. It suggests the prosecution itself was wrong — that the people charged weren’t criminals who received clemency, but victims who deserve restitution.
If you accept the argument that the prosecutions were unjust, then what the defendants did wasn’t wrong. If what they did wasn’t wrong, then January 6 wasn’t an attack on democratic certification — it was a legitimate act of resistance by people who believed, with cause, that the election had been stolen. The fund wasn’t just meant to rehabilitate the rioters, it intended to retroactively validate the premise that sent them to Washington in the first place.
This is the rewrite the administration appears to be actually after. In pursuit of the same goal, the Justice Department has already mass-deleted its own news releases about January 6 prosecutions that took place during the Biden administration, including cases involving defendants who drove electroshock devices into officers’ necks and attacked police with metal flagpoles. The erasure is part of the same project, which asks Americans to see those defendants differently: not as people who committed crimes and later received clemency, but as people who were wronged by the government.
But the narrative is difficult to reconcile with the record established in court. More than 1,000 January 6 defendants pleaded guilty. Many admitted entering restricted areas, obstructing Congress, or assaulting police officers. Some expressed remorse. Others acknowledged they had been swept up in false claims about a stolen election. In the months and years after the attack, a number of defendants publicly stated that they believed they had been misled by Trump’s election-fraud narrative.
That same narrative extended beyond the Capitol attack, and the administration has gone to bat for others who took up his cause.
Trump has championed Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk convicted of breaching election equipment in pursuit of voter-fraud claims. Because her conviction was a state crime beyond his clemency powers, Trump issued a symbolic pardon and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to pressure Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, to commute her sentence. Polis ultimately did, and Trump celebrated on social media: “FREE TINA PETERS!”
After being released this week, Peters immediately resumed promoting claims that the election had been stolen. The pattern is the same: cast the prosecuted as persecuted, and the prosecution itself becomes evidence of the conspiracy. The legal system didn’t hold wrongdoers accountable. It targeted patriots.
The same logic has animated Trump’s attacks on election officials who rejected his fraud claims and his continuing insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. Viewed in that context, the anti-weaponization fund was not simply about January 6. It was part of a broader effort to vindicate the movement that emerged from Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.
Compensation as counter-narrative
This past weekend, former Vice President Mike Pence accused the administration of using the fund to whitewash the history of January 6.
His personal experience of that day undoubtedly colors his opinion: during the Capitol attack, rioters erected a gallows outside the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” after he refused Trump’s demands to block certification of the election. Secret Service agents rushed Pence and his family to safety as the mob moved through the building.
“I mean, it’s deeply offensive to me,” he told CBS in an interview, “that you could have a fund that could even possibly compensate people who assaulted police officers or vandalized the Capitol on January 6.”
His objection cut to something precise: governments compensate victims of terrorism, discrimination, and wrongful imprisonment. They do not compensate people convicted of attacking democratic institutions — unless the point is to argue, officially, that those institutions were the actual wrongdoers.
The officers who defended the Capitol that day understand this with particular clarity. Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges — both injured during the assault, both plaintiffs in a lawsuit to block the fund — argue that compensating people who attacked the Capitol violates the constitutional prohibition on using federal funds to pay debts incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States. But their objection goes beyond the legal argument. They were confronting a specific inversion: that the people who attacked them might collect government checks certifying that they were the ones who suffered.
That is not reconciliation. It is the state endorsing a counter-history years in the making. It moved through various phases — denial, then minimization, then the beginning of the reversal, with Trump describing convicted January 6 federal defendants as “hostages“ throughout the 2024 campaign, casting them as casualties of a corrupt system.
The fund represented the next phase: material and institutional confirmation. When the Justice Department itself creates a compensation mechanism for January 6 defendants, it is not merely making a political argument. It is inserting that argument into the machinery of government, giving it the weight of official policy.
The irony — and symbolism — are hard to miss. The administration argues that the justice system was weaponized against its supporters. Yet one of the defining features of Trump’s second term has been the use of government power against many of the officials who investigated January 6 and Trump himself.
FBI personnel involved in January 6 investigations have faced scrutiny, reassignment, or dismissal. Career Justice Department officials connected to Trump-related investigations have been pushed out. Former prosecutors, investigators, and public officials involved in cases touching Trump have become targets of new inquiries, public attacks, and demands for accountability. By targeting the investigators themselves, the administration is completing the inversion: if the people who built the cases were the wrongdoers, then the people they prosecuted were, by definition, the victims.
The backlash
The response to the fund made clear that the administration’s message was coming through unmistakably — and many weren’t on board.
Ethics watchdogs condemned it. Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation to kill it outright. A federal judge temporarily blocked it entirely.
And, critically, the opposition crossed party lines. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he was “not a big fan” and did not “see a purpose for that,” while Republican senators warned Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that the fund threatened to become a political liability.
Even some of the fund’s most obvious beneficiaries expressed ambivalence. Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, called it corrupt. The rewrite project had been made too visible, too transactional. But that’s different from saying the underlying narrative was rejected.
In fact, during his remarks stating that the fund wouldn’t move forward, Blanche still doubled down on justifying the idea behind it: “The reasons for the fund—it’s something that President Trump talked about for a long time, which is the fact that there were a lot of people in this country who had their government weaponized against them,” he said. “The reasons for the fund ... remain as important as [they] were before.”
Indeed, though the fund itself didn’t survive, a signal has already been sent — to the movement, to future actors, and to the historical record. The issue was never really about $1.776 billion. It was about who gets to write the meaning of what happened between November 2020 and January 6, 2021 — and whether the government itself can be made to ratify one answer.
Trump understands, even if his critics sometimes don’t, that legitimacy is not just a legal category. It is a narrative one. Control the story of who was wronged, and you control the story of what the wrong was.
Each piece, on its own, can be explained away. Together, they suggest something more deliberate: a sustained effort to make the official version of January 6 a matter of genuine dispute. Not necessarily to win the argument, but to ensure the argument never ends.
 | A guest post by
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It is astonishing to me that so many who watched with horror the events of January 6 unfold-live on our screens- can succumb to the fiction that they didn’t see what they actually saw.
Are our elected representatives serving their constituents or something else entirely?
‘Weaponization’? To quote Inigo Montoya ‘You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.’