Dylann Roof, the then-21-year-old white supremacist who murdered nine people at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, should not have been able to buy the .45-caliber Glock pistol he used. But failures in the FBI’s background check system allowed that sale to proceed. In 2021, the Justice Department paid $88 million to settle claims brought by survivors and victims’ families.
Those survivors and victims’ families were able to negotiate a settlement because of a law most Americans have never heard of: the Federal Tort Claims Act.
When the federal government’s negligence shatters a life, ordinary people ought to be able to hold the government to account.
That statute exists because when the federal government’s negligence shatters a life, ordinary people ought to be able to hold the government to account. I know how the law and the settlement process works. I was the DOJ’s chief spokesman when that settlement was announced. Settling with the victims and survivors, who did nothing by attending Wednesday night Bible study and welcoming a stranger into their circle, was one of the things our government got right.
Now look at what’s happening.
Hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, people who stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power and were then pardoned en masse by the president they were fighting for, have filed claims against the federal government under that very same Federal Tort Claims Act. One Florida lawyer, Peter Ticktin, told ABC News that he has already filed claims for roughly 200 clients and expects to file claims for 200 more. Another lawyer, Mark McCloskey, dropped off nearly 400 administrative claims for Jan. 6 defendants in December, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Under the law,” the Journal reported, “claims can go to federal court if a government agency denies them or doesn’t make a decision within six months, meaning the ones McCloskey dropped off could soon ripen for litigation.”
At one point, it appeared that the Jan. 6 defendants would all be able to draw from the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” President Donald Trump was seeking to establish before lawmakers in both parties cried foul. Ticktin told The Washington Post that a fund “makes it all a little bit easier,” but he said “if there’s no such fund at all, the government needs to settle these lawsuits.”
Sit with that. In the eyes of the law, people who assaulted police officers, stormed the Capitol, sent members of Congress scrambling to secure locations and desecrated and defaced a seat of our government, can invoke the same statute as the families who buried their loved ones in Charleston.
That should turn your stomach. It turns mine.
The pressure that Democrats and Republicans put on Trump to nix the weaponization fund has appeared to work — to an extent. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney, told Congress the fund is dead.
“Not moving forward, ever?” Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., pressed him.
“Correct,” he answered. Senators want it in writing. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said he needs to be sure the fund isn’t merely “mostly dead” but “completely dead.” And Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wants to “stick a fork in it.”
Anthony Coley
Anthony Coley is a political analyst for MS NOW. He was director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs in the Biden administration from February 2021 until January 2023. Before that, his previous roles included deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department’s Office of Public Affairs and communications director for U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.