DOJ payout to Mike Flynn has J6-ers lining up at the trough
Flynn’s claims were entirely without merit, and a federal
judge had already dismissed them once. But the Justice Department decided to
pay him anyway, calling it a righteous vindication of Trump’s constant whining
that he was illegally targeted by the FBI and Robert Mueller.
"Those who instigated the Russia Collusion Hoax and
Crossfire Hurricane abused their power to mislead the American people and
tarnish the reputations of President Trump and his supporters,” a DOJ
spokesperson told ABC.
“Today’s settlement, secured by this Justice Department, is an important step
in redressing that historic injustice."
Encouraged by this blatant corruption, Trump’s most ardent
supporters are demanding their own cut. This week, a group of January 6 rioters
filed a class action lawsuit demanding recompense for the injuries they
suffered when they attempted to overturn the election.
The stage is set for the wholesale looting of the federal
coffers by Trump and his MAGA allies.
“Flynn Facts”
Barack Obama warned Trump not to hire Mike Flynn, whose
erratic leadership style and tendency to spout what his subordinates called “Flynn
facts" got him fired as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in
2014. But Trump chalked it up to sour grapes and announced that Flynn would be
his national security adviser, setting off a chain of events that wound up
defining his first term.
In December 2016, Flynn got picked up on a wiretap of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak promising to reverse sanctions the Obama administration was imposing to punish Russia for its interference in the just-completed election. That made Flynn vulnerable to blackmail, since there was zero chance the Kremlin hadn’t also recorded the conversation. And when the Washington Post published details of the call on January 12, 2017, Flynn made matters worse by publicly denying that he’d discussed anything of substance, insisting that he’d merely exchanged Christmas greetings.
On January 24, 2017, FBI agents visited Flynn and asked him
point blank if he’d offered sanctions relief to Russia. Flynn, who’d had a
security clearance for decades and had to know by then that the agents had the
call on tape, said no. This was clearly a lie, but it was also a crime under 18
USC § 1001, which makes it illegal to lie to federal agents. Eventually, the
situation became untenable and Flynn resigned on February 13.
Trump then privately pressured FBI Director James Comey to
“go easy” on Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him, admitting to NBC’s
Lester Holt and to Kislyak
himself during an Oval Office meeting that he’d fired Comey to end the
Russia investigation.
Comey’s ouster led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as
special counsel, engulfing the administration in turmoil. And the rest, as they
say … is history.
Mueller’s team discovered that Flynn had been working as an unregistered agent for Turkey at the same time he’d been calling to “Lock her up!” Hillary Clinton. He’d even pitched a plan to kidnap Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, a legal US resident despised by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and send him to Turkey “without going through the US extradition legal process” — all for the low price of just $15 million.
In November 2017, Flynn pled
guilty to one count of making a false statement to the FBI, admitting
under oath that he’d acted as an unregistered Turkish agent. He repeated the
confession in open court in December 2018, but Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected
the plea for being too lenient, warning Flynn that he’d get jail time if he
didn’t first render significant assistance in the case against his former
business partner.
Instead, Flynn fired his original lawyers and hired Sidney
Powell, who moved to withdraw his guilty plea and pressured the DOJ to drop the
case based on highly spurious allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Eventually, Attorney General Bill Barr caved, but, before the case was
dismissed, Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020.
This was an incredible run of luck, but instead of being grateful, Flynn filed a lawsuit against the US government in 2023 alleging malicious prosecution and abuse of process.
The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) lays out the very limited
circumstances under which the federal government will waive sovereign immunity
and allow you to sue it. You can sue for malicious prosecution
under FTCA, but it’s almost impossible to win because something called the
“discretionary function exception” effectively immunizes government actors for
anything they do that involves an exercise of judgment.
Flynn’s complaint was sloppily pled, substituting incendiary allegations for anything conforming to actual law. It was also doubly time-barred, since Flynn had failed to file the required administrative complaint, called a Form 95, within two years of his “injury” in 2017, and then he failed to file his lawsuit within a year of his administrative complaint as required by the FTCA.
The case was assigned to Judge Mary Scriven of the Middle
District of Florida, who granted multiple extensions, allowing Flynn to amend
his case and drag out the process for more than a year. When she finally
dismissed it in December 2024, she did so without prejudice,
meaning that Flynn was permitted to refile a third time.
But in 2025, with Trump back in the White House, the DOJ decided that actually it would like to lose a case it had already won and was certain to win again. Last September, the parties informed the court that they were in settlement talks, and on March 27, they announced that the case had been resolved. ABC was first to report that the government was giving Flynn $1.25 million of taxpayer money.
Feeding frenzy
Flynn’s payout wasn’t the first time Pam Bondi’s Justice
Department decided to cut a check based on MAGA vibes alone. She’d
already paid $5
million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot during the January 6
insurrection as she tried to break into the House speaker’s lobby in the
Capitol. The DOJ fought that case vigorously, right up until Trump’s personal
lawyers took over and decided this “martyr” deserved a payout.
Ed Martin, the loon who couldn’t even get confirmed by this
Senate as US attorney for DC, has called for “reparations” for the victims of
January 6 — by which he means the insurrectionists Trump pardoned. And despite
Martin being shoved toward the exit, various J6-ers are heeding the call.
Five Proud Boys filed a lawsuit last June in the Middle District of Florida claiming the FBI “illegally” intercepted their group chat planning to overthrow the government. Four of the five named plaintiffs, including the militia’s leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy. They’re now alleging that the government violated their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights and owes them $100 million. The Justice Department has not yet indicated any intent to settle this case.
But where Flynn filed under the FTCA, the Proud Boys are
making what’s known as a Bivens claim after the 1971 Supreme
Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, which authorized
lawsuits against government employees in their personal capacities for
constitutional violations. To be clear, neither FTCA or Bivens is
an easy vehicle for plaintiffs to recover for police or prosecutorial
misconduct. The discretionary function exception makes it all but impossible to
recover under the FTCA. And the Roberts Court has so severely pared back Bivens to
the point that lawyers joke that it only applies if your name is Bivens. The
Flynn settlement suggests that FTCA claims, however flimsy, are the DOJ’s
preferred vehicle for handing out cash.
The J6 plaintiffs have apparently heard that message loud
and clear. Two days after notice of the Flynn settlement was docketed, they
filed a proposed
FTCA class action suit — once again in the Middle District of
Florida. Of the three named plaintiffs, one is a former Proud Boy who was charged with
assaulting officers in the attack on the Capitol; the others participated in
the riot and complain that they were exposed to pepper spray and tear gas.
The complaint describes a “peaceful” protest and accuses
police of indiscriminately deploying tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls,
flash-bangs, and batons against the crowd on the west side of the Capitol. (Try
not to think too hard about the thousands of people exposed to pepper spray and
tear gas at the hands of ICE goons in the past year — this way madness lies.)
The case sets out three groups of putative class members. Group One comprises 35 individuals, including the named plaintiffs, who submitted Form 95 claims and waited out the required six-month period without a response, which is legally considered a deemed denial. That group includes Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy who used a stolen riot shield to smash a Capitol window and was the first person to breach the building. (He’s also a plaintiff in the Bivens case.)
Group Two contains 11 people who filed Form 95s but whose
six-month waiting period hasn’t run yet. And Group Three consists of “many
others who meet the proposed class membership definition but have not submitted
Forms 95.” The theory is that the government just ignores all the claims
anyway, and so forcing complainants to file Form 95s and wait the six months is
a futile exercise that courts may ignore. That’s not how FTCA — or
administrative law! — works. The vast majority of FTCA claims receive no response
from the government. But that doesn’t mean you can simply skip the form and
waltz into court demanding relief.
Like Flynn, the January 6 cases are categorically barred
under the statute of limitations. The rioters had two years to file their Form
95s, meaning the dead drop date was January 6, 2023. Once those were deemed
denied (in July 2023), the last day they could have sued was January 6, 2024.
But Mike Flynn’s case was untimely and without merit, and the government didn’t
care. The bet here seems to be that this Justice Department is
racing to hand out cash to Trump’s allies, and they’re going to “settle” these
FTCA cases for everyone.
The corruption is staggering, dwarfed only by the
president’s own greed. Trump filed his own defective, time-barred FTCA claim
demanding $230 of taxpayer money for the Mar-a-Lago search and the Russia
investigation. Maybe the plan is to normalize theft, getting the public used to
watching the president dole out taxpayer money to his supporters so that we’ll
hardly notice when he hands himself almost a quarter billion dollars.
And after that, Trump’s got a $10
billion claim in the pipeline against the IRS because a contractor
leaked his tax returns in 2020, so … looks like a bunch of Trump supporters are
going to get a really big tax refund check pretty soon.
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