On Tuesday, at a campaign event in Savannah, a man stood up and introduced himself to Mike Collins, Jon Ossoff’s rival Senate candidate, as “a non-violent Jan. 6-er from here in Savannah.”
His name is Dominic Box. A federal judge convicted him on two felony counts of civil disorder and four misdemeanors for what he did at the Capitol on January 6th.
Before he got Trump’s pardon, he served 18 months in prison.
Box asked Collins, the Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, whether he’d support “some form of compensatory relief” for January 6th participants and others harmed by “a weaponized political system.” Later, he told reporters that his goal at events like this is to be “productively provocative” on behalf of January 6th defendants.
He sure was.
Collins answered that “a lot of things have been politicized and weaponized.” And then he said that “when the federal government harms you, then yes, they have a liability too. That’s easy. Yes.”
That’s what the Republican party is today. You can walk into a campaign event, identify yourself as a pardoned felon, and their candidates will immediately start kissing your fucking feet.
Collins’s answer, Jon Ossoff immediately recognized, was “disgraceful.” And once he demanded that the Republican candidate “recant his support for taxpayer-funded payouts to January 6 violent traitors,” the Collins campaign tried to walk his remarks back.
A Collins spokesperson explained that he “believes Americans who’ve been wronged by their government ought to have a path to seek justice” but does not support “a blank-check fund or automatic taxpayer-funded payouts.”
Well, sure. But J6ers weren’t harmed by the government. They were harming the fucking government. And Collins still thinks these were fundamentally good guys.
Box was obviously asking about a specific project of this administration: the Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” It was announced as part of a settlement resolving Trump’s own lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns.
If Trump has his way, there will be a five-member commission, appointed by the Attorney General, reviewing claims from people who say they were victims of government “weaponization.” They’ll get paid, and the government will issue a formal apology.
Then came the pushback.
Credit where credit’s due, it was bipartisan. While Senators Wyden and Merkley introduced bills to ban taxpayer payouts to January 6th convicts, Senators Padilla, Durbin, and Klobuchar led a letter demanding the administration reject “cash rewards” for rioters. Even some Republican senators, like John Cornyn, balked. Weeks later, the DOJ announced it was pausing the fund.
But a paused fund is not a dead fund. ABC News found J6ers still pursuing payouts through other legal paths, and Trump kept defending the concept after the Senate fight.
And in May, two of the officers who defended the Capitol that day sued to kill it. Harry Dunn, formerly of the U.S. Capitol Police, and Daniel Hodges, still an active D.C. Metropolitan Police officer, filed the first legal challenge to the fund in federal court. As their complaint puts it, the fund “is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.”
I know both of those men. Hodges was the officer the mob crushed in the Lower West Terrace tunnel doorway, screaming. Dunn held the line inside the building itself. The men holding that line, in these guys’ view, deserve “compensatory relief.” And none other than Mike Collins, US Senate candidate in Georgia, agrees.
Even per the bullshit statement that his campaign put out, he still accepts the premise that J6ers were victims of the federal government. He supports “a path to seek justice” for Americans wronged by their government, he says.
Bullshit.
Who, exactly, was wronged by the government? These guys chose, of their own accord, to storm the Capitol.
None of them deserve a single fucking cent.
If you follow this blog closely, you’ll know I’ve written about Collins before. Last time I talked about this guy on here, he’d just finished scrubbing his white-nationalist son-in-law off his campaign website. He’d also made a series of crypto trades suspiciously timed to the introduction and passage of legislation in his own chamber. The guy, in short, is a dishonest scumbag.
To put it mildly, Collins’s opponent for that Senate seat spent those same weeks…differently. Ossoff chairs a Senate investigations subcommittee, and he’s used his power to bring accountability everywhere he can. He’s published an investigation into a military-housing contractor that left mold in homes on two bases. (Unlike Collins, he’s interested in honoring the men who serve this country.) Then he sent letters to RFK Jr. that helped force answers on the cyclospora outbreak.
You don’t have to like Ossoff or be a Democrat to understand the fact that one candidate spent the summer running investigations of the government, and the other spent his summer running from accountability.
Collins, really, doesn’t believe in accountability at all. Roughly 140 police officers were injured on January 6th, and the men who did it were pardoned. Then one of the guys itself asked him if he deserved a payout, and Collins agreed. In fact, he said it was “easy.”
Well, that’s the easiest question any political candidate should ever face, and Collins gave the wrong answer.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.