MAGA Lawyers Shiv Each Other Over Trump’s J6er Fund
Trump has created a $1.776 billion reparations pot for his “victimized” followers. The greedy maneuvering started quickly.
IN APRIL, LAWYER MARK MCCLOSKEY bowed out of his quixotic quest to win reparations for January 6th rioters.
Denizens of the internet may remember McCloskey from a widely debated (and even more widely memed) incident from six years ago, when he and his wife brandished guns in front of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matters protesters walked by. More recently, in his day job, McCloskey spent over a year working with fellow lawyer Peter Ticktin, a high school classmate of Donald Trump, attempting to win some kind of payment for the J6ers who fought Capitol Police officers and trashed Congress.
But last month, sick with what he would later describe as a terminal lung disease, McCloskey said the effort to make the rioters whole would have to go on without him.
“Due to personal reasons, I am unable to continue the fight at this time,” McCloskey wrote to his clients on April 10.
Then something miraculous happened. On May 14, ABC News reported that Trump would drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and instead accept a settlement for $1.7 billion to create a fund to pay victims of what his administration has called Justice Department “weaponization.” That money could very well go to former January 6th defendants, perhaps with a cut to their lawyer along the way. Who’s to say?
Well, wouldn’t you know it, just a day after news of the settlement broke, McCloskey announced that he had started to feel a lot better, telling clients in another letter I obtained that his “personal prognosis is not as bleak” as suspected. Divine intervention at its most miraculous: He could work on their cases once again.
“With God’s help and your prayers, we can prevail!” McCloskey declared.
The convenient timing of McCloskey’s return to health has not gone unnoticed in the fractious world of January 6th participants, with some reparations-hungry rioters mocking him for coming back right when the money looks set to start flowing. Meanwhile, according to a series of bitter emails from the two lawyers that I reviewed,
