The Trump administration’s “anti-weaponization fund” to payout Jan. 6 rioters and other perceived victims of “lawfare” might be dead, but the defunct Department of Justice initiative just won’t go away in the high-stakes Georgia Senate race.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), the GOP nominee, was questioned Tuesday at a town hall in Savannah, Georgia, by former Jan. 6 defendant Dominic Box if he’d “support either the victims of political weaponization fund, or some form of compensatory relief, not just to January 6ers like myself, but all Americans — Left, Right, and center — who have become victims of a weaponized political system?”
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Collins responded: “A lot of this has been politicized and weaponized. And when the federal government harms you, then yes, they have a liability to. That’s easy. Yes.”
On Wednesday, Collins walked back some of those remarks.
In a statement provided to the Washington Examiner, the Collins campaign clarified that the congressman “does not support a blank-check fund or automatic taxpayer-funded payouts to anyone simply because they were prosecuted for January 6.”
“Mike Collins fully supports holding the government accountable when federal agencies abuse their power and believes Americans who’ve been wronged by their government ought to have a path to seek justice,” added spokesperson Meyer Siegfried.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is seeking to capitalize in his battleground reelection on remarks from his Republican rival about his position on the former $1.776 billion program.
The saga underscores the political toxicity of the controversial fund for Republicans while offering a window into how Democrats may use it on the campaign trail heading into the November midterm elections.
Ossoff seized on the initial remarks from Collins and challenged him to “publicly retract his support for these taxpayer-funded payouts to violent insurrectionists.”
“The statement from a press secretary is vague and meaningless, and Georgians deserve to hear answers directly from a sitting congressman who’s running for the United States Senate,” Ossoff told reporters Wednesday.
Box viewed Collins’s initial response as an endorsement of the anti-weaponization fund and praised him on social media, where Box posted a clip of their interaction. He referred to Collins as “the first U.S. Senate candidate to go on record supporting compensation for January 6 political prisoners and all victims of political weaponization.”
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The fund, announced earlier this year as part of a settlement between the federal government and President Donald Trump for the leaking of his tax returns, created a political firestorm for Republican lawmakers. GOP opposition eventually forced the DOJ to scrap its plans, and further consternation from Republican holdouts to confirm Attorney General Todd Blanche resulted in additional legal concessions from him to ensure the program cannot be resuscitated.
Prompted Monday by a reporter in the Oval Office about whether the fund was still alive, Trump responded: “That’ll be up to Todd Blanche.”
