First They Stormed the Capitol, Now They Want to Get Paid for It

Some nerve is almost breathtaking. A group of people convicted over the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol is suing the government and demanding compensation, paid by the taxpayers whose Congress they trashed that day. The perpetrators from back then now present themselves as the injured parties. An attack on the heart of democracy, recast as a claim for damages.

Their rights were violated, the lawsuit says. “Targeted, arrested, prosecuted and punished,” is how Lisa Eisenhart, a former nurse from Georgia, describes her situation, solely because of her “First Amendment protected speech and assembly activity.” In her language, the storming of the seat of Congress becomes an assembly, and the prosecution becomes the persecution of an innocent woman. Violence gets declared speech, punishment becomes arbitrary abuse. The language flips the roles, and the paperwork of a civil lawsuit makes it official. The truth carries different images. Police officers were attacked that day and windows were smashed. Congressional property disappeared, offices inside the Capitol were trashed. On that January 6, it was not opinion speaking, it was violence against the counting of the vote. The officers who took the beating that day are not suing for compensation now.

Eisenhart wore a tactical vest and pushed farther into the building than most. She is said to have urged the crowd to fight the police. A tactical vest and combat gear do not fit a woman presenting herself as a victim of circumstance. Someone asking for sympathy looks different. At her side was her son, Eric Munchel, a bartender from Nashville, whom they call the Zip-Tie Guy. Dressed in black tactical gear, he carried plastic restraints, apparently grabbed from a police checkpoint inside the building. The man who brought restraints for others now feels shackled by the government himself.

Munchel got 57 months in prison, Eisenhart 30. In her lawsuit, she accuses the government of “vindictive prosecution,” along with “discriminatory conditions of confinement” and “deliberate indifference” to her health. According to her, the result was “severe physical, emotional, reputational and financial harm.” The taxpayer pays for the smashed windows and is now supposed to compensate the person who did the smashing, paying twice for the same crime. The offense becomes a source of income, the prison sentence becomes a claim that others are supposed to settle.

The man with the restraints as the injured party, his mother as the victim, and the bill goes to the public. None of this is an accident, it is the next step in a rewriting that turns the attack on Congress into a misunderstanding. First the act is denied, in the end it is supposed to pay off. Once it becomes that, the next storm gets easier. Set the fire and then sue for the damage caused by putting it out, that only works in a time that has lost its sense of shame.