Michael Whatley, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for US Senate, said last week that he approved of President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion fund to pay Trump supporters convicted of crimes, including the rioters who broke into the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and attacked and injured more than 150 police officers.
Trump and his administration have branded the fund, created by the Justice Department at Trump’s behest, as an “anti-weaponization” effort that would compensate people Trump claims were wrongfully prosecuted under the Biden administration. Details have not been released about how the fund would operate, but in his second term, Trump has issued nearly 1,600 pardons for those convicted of crimes connected to the riot, including at least 50 North Carolinians.
Whatley, one of Trump’s earliest supporters, gave his approval of the fund during a Republican campaign event in Brunswick County on May 20, calling the Jan. 6 criminal cases a “ridiculous prosecution” after an attendee asked if he would be on Trump’s side on the issue.
“I will be, because I have been with him since 2015,” Whatley said.
His comments were first reported by Punchbowl News, which obtained an audio file from the event.
The fund did not get such a warm reception in Congress, however, where even some Republicans harshly criticized the idea of issuing reparations to Jan. 6 rioters.
Sen. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican whom Whatley is seeking to replace in the Senate, called the idea “stupid on stilts.”
“Under what circumstances would it ever make sense to provide restitution for people who either pled guilty or were found guilty in a court of law?,” Tillis told the Spectrum News Reporter Reuben Jones last week.
“I mean, my God, do you see where this would head? These people don’t deserve restitution,” he said.
‘The most brutal attack on the [Capitol] since the War of 1812’
Even for some Republicans who have fully backed controversial Trump policies in the past, it was a political bridge way too far to pay the rioters who tried to attack them.
A bipartisan congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 attacks documented injuries to more than 150 police officers. The rioters also broke into congressional offices, destroyed papers, and threatened to kill Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and to hang Vice President Mike Pence.
The riot was “the most brutal attack on the [Capitol] since the War of 1812,” the report said.
In a statement three weeks after the 2021 attack, Gus Papathanasiou, the head of the US Capitol Police Labor Committee, the labor union for Capitol officers, detailed the severity of the injuries law enforcement officers sustained while trying to defend the Capitol and the lawmakers seeking cover inside.
“I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained head injuries,” Papathanasiou said.
“One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake,” he said.
Trump has said that the prosecutions of these rioters were politically motivated and based on lies. That is not at all true.
The Jan. 6 report was based on more than 1,000 interviews, 1 million documents, and more than a hundred subpoenas, its authors said.
Soon after news of the fund was announced, two police officers who helped defend the Capitol on Jan. 6 sued the Trump administration to block it.
The fund, the lawsuit says, “will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened Plaintiffs’ lives that day, and continue to do so.”
Dozens of the Jan. 6 rioters who received pardons were later arrested again, on charges ranging from from possession of child pornography to sexual assault, child molestation, and aggravated kidnapping.
In his bid to fill Tillis’ seat, Whatley has centered his Senate campaign on two main pillars: highlighting his complete support for Trump and his policies and seeking to frame his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper, as soft on crime.
