January 6 Rioters Pardoned by Trump Sue Over “Emotional Distress”

Rioters who took part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, and were then pardoned by President Trump, are now suing Capitol and D.C. Police for excessive force.

Several of the rioters filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida Friday alleging that U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia fired chemicals and pepper spray into the “peaceful crowd” that day.

The lawsuit also claims that the demonstrators were hit by billy clubs and strikes to the head, which caused injuries, including “chemical burns, concussive trauma, emotional distress, and other damages.” The plaintiffs say they were “overwhelmingly peaceful” until police used force against them, and that they weren’t given warnings.

The lawsuit’s allegations are rich, considering that 140 police officers were injured as a result of the rioters, who breached the Capitol building and caused extensive damage. At least seven people died in connection with the insurrection, including Ashli Babbit, who was shot by police, and Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked by the mob and died the next day. Four police officers committed suicide in the days and weeks following the attack.

Just days into his presidency, Trump pardoned over 1,500 rioters convicted for their role in the insurrection, including members of the radical Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy. But being let off for their crimes on that day isn’t enough for these people, who now want a payday from the police. If anyone should be paying, it should be the man who egged the rioters on—but Trump has gotten off scot-free.

Well, that was quick. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims about negotiations with Iran.

Less than an hour after Trump declared Monday that the U.S. was in talks with a “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME,” Rubio presented an entirely different picture of Iran’s leadership.

“We have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they are the ones that have the power to deliver,” Rubio said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’re gonna test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case. There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past.

“We always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail. That we are dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace,” Rubio said.

So which is it, a 47-year-old regime or a brand-new one?

Iran’s regime hasn’t actually changed all that much—and it certainly hasn’t been replaced. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Still, Trump claimed last week that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

Former national security adviser John Bolton also disagreed with Trump’s assessment last week.

“The faces may change, but the ideology remains the same,” Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The regime will change when the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are gone, and we’re not at that point yet, quite obviously. But it’s another way for him to say that we have won the objective and therefore are victorious and can leave.”

That’s one possible explanation for Trump’s outrageous regime change claims. Another might be that the president just wanted to make a splash before the markets opened. Either that, or Trump truly has no idea who he’s dealing with.

A woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was just 13 years old has had new details about her story verified, following work from the South Carolina–based newspaper The Post and Courier and Substack journalist Ellie Leonard.

The anonymous victim was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019. She claimed to have been sex-trafficked by the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abused by a variety of Epstein’s associates during the mid-’80s.

These associates allegedly included the president. The woman claimed Trump assaulted her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1984, back when Trump was a New York real estate mogul. She said she bit Trump’s penis after he unzipped his pants and forced himself on her, leading Trump to smack her in the face. This allegation was initially withheld from the Department of Justice’s Epstein files release before being quietly released on March 3 after a storm of controversy.

The woman also alleged abuse by a man named “Jim Atkins” during the same time period. Leonard identified “Jim Atkins” as Jimmy L. Atkins of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, earlier this month. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 69.

On Sunday, The Post and Courier uncovered records that confirmed details of the woman’s testimony on Atkins. This included Atkins’s relationship with an Ohio college, his age, his hair color, his general appearance, and details about his employment in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Of course, the validated details about Atkins do not implicate Trump in any way. The White House, and the president himself, have furiously denied the woman’s claims since her testimony was publicly released, falsely claiming that the president has been “exonerated.” But every other detail of the woman’s testimony that turns out to be true gives more credibility to the rest of her story.

The Trump administration’s mishandling and smothering of the Epstein files do not exactly give one confidence in their truthfulness. As The Post and Courier reported, 30 pages of files relating to the accuser remain missing from the public view.

Recently appointed College Republicans of America political director Kai Schwemmer—an open supporter of white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes—can envision a world in which slavery is legal.

The Guardian discovered a paywalled video from July 2025 of Schwemmer debating on the Modern Day Debate streaming channel with another right-winger by the name of Shell Shock. They were asked whether they prefer a world where “abortion is banned and slavery is legal” or one where “slavery is banned and abortion is legal.” Shell Shock chose the former. Schwemmer agreed.

In that same call, he said that a 15-year-old who was sexually assaulted by her uncle should still deliver the baby and that he was against gay marriage, and he questioned women’s right to vote. “I believe they currently have the right to vote. But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing,” Schwemmer said, referring to a right-wing proposal to have male heads of households vote for the whole family.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the current Brigham Young University student who will now potentially become the most important youth outreach operative in the country.

“Appointing Kai Schwemmer, a longtime ally of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as political director signals the College Republicans of America is normalizing antisemitism and white supremacy, full stop,” often embattled American Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said last week. “Schwemmer has appeared at Fuentes’ conferences, streams on his platform and has spread conspiracy theories about ‘Zionists’ in America.”

Republicans are eyeing massive cuts to health care spending in order to scrounge up $200 billion for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran.

Top Republicans are looking for ways to offset the massive price tag the Pentagon has requested in order to pass the additional funding for U.S. military operations in Iran through a budget reconciliation bill, Axios reported Monday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington is looking to revive cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that funding these reductions would save the federal government $30 billion but would increase out-of-pocket premium costs and drive up the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034. Arrington is selling the move as “fraud prevention.”

The discussions over cuts are in the early stages, but are likely to face opposition from moderate Republicans, who won’t support health care spending cuts in an election year.

Arrington suggested that the budget reconciliation bill would target fraud across a range of means-tested programs that assist low-income families, Roll Call reported. He pointed to the earned income tax credit, a refundable tax credit that boosts the income of low-income, working parents who claim a child. Arrington claimed that one of the most popular tax credits “loses 30 cents on the dollar.”

“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” he said.

The reconciliation effort should target “widespread fraud, there is a boatload of waste and fraud,” Arrington said in the House.

Republicans seemed content to make struggling Americans suffer in the service of Trump’s increasingly expensive vanity war that has no clear objectives.