Trump administration considers money for pardoned January 6 rioters

Washington: President Donald Trump said his administration was considering whether to establish a compensation fund for pardoned rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop certification of the election that he lost to former President Joe Biden.

In an interview with conservative television station Newsmax, Trump said Tuesday that people in his administration were discussing the possibility of paying restitution to the rioters.

Asked whether he was considering some kind of "compensation fund" because the rioters lost wages and other opportunities while they were prosecuted, Trump said, "There's a lot of talk about that," adding that "people in government really liked that group of people."

"They were patriots as far as I was concerned," Trump said. "I talk about them a lot. They were treated very unfairly."

In one of Trump's first official acts, on his first day of his second term in office, he issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Trump had referred to the rioters as "hostages" and victims of an unjust legal system, and had long maintained that the pro-Trump mob, who assaulted police, smashed windows, ransacked offices and threatened to hang his vice president, had engaged in largely peaceful protests.

In the interview Tuesday, Trump maintained that they assembled "peacefully and patriotically." He also falsely claimed again that he had won the 2020 election.

Trump also said during the interview that he would look into the case of Ashli Babbitt who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to jump a barrier and enter the speaker's lobby through a broken window during the attack.

Told by the interviewer that the Justice Department is still defending the government against the wrongful death lawsuit her family filed, and asked if it should be settled, Trump said he was "going to take a look at it." The president also said he would look at the status of the officer who shot Babbitt and is still a federal employee.

"I'm going to look into that, because what happened to Ashley Babbitt is, is so sad," he said. "That whole, that whole story, that whole period of time, and what they what they did was so bad. It was an evil period of time."