Rioters supporting President Donald Trump storm the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File).
The Department of Justice stated that certain defendants from the January 6 events, whose cases were invalidated by the Justice Department under former President Donald Trump, should receive refunds for restitution. The DOJ argued in a recent court filing that there is no longer a valid reason for the government to withhold the funds.
One of the individuals affected is Stacy Hager, who was arrested in Texas for his alleged participation in the riot. Hager was initially charged and convicted for various offenses related to the events at the Capitol, including entering restricted areas unlawfully, engaging in disorderly conduct, and violent behavior on Capitol grounds.
Following Trump’s broad pardon of January 6 rioters, Hager was among over 1,500 defendants who received clemency during the president’s second term in January. The DOJ highlighted that Hager’s case, along with others with similar convictions that were voided, stands out because he was not merely pardoned but informed that his case was completely annulled while it was still under review.
“Here, Hager’s conviction was ‘invalidated’ when the D.C. Circuit vacated it, and thus ‘there is no longer any basis justifying the government’s retaining funds exacted only as a result of that conviction,’” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Dreher in response to a motion filed by Hager on Feb. 28 for reimbursement of fines, fees and restitution.
“This Court subsequently dismissed the case as moot,” Dreher said. “The government thus agrees that, so long as the Clerk of Court confirms that Hager in fact made the special assessment and restitution payments he seeks to have returned, Hager is entitled to reimbursement of those payments.”
According to Hager’s original Jan. 6 complaint, federal investigators found that he was boasting about his participation in the 2021 Capitol attack on his Facebook page, even posting pictures and videos of himself trespassing, the DOJ said.
“Hager also posted words to the effect of, ‘it’s war, don’t go quietly,’” his complaint alleged.
“The publicly available information on the subject account showed, among other things, a photograph of Hager and an unidentified male on the lawn in front of the U.S. Capitol on January 6,” the document added. “Hager was wearing a ‘Trump’ baseball cap, a gray outer jacket, a dark navy or black colored coverall and appeared to be waving a Texas state flag, with the other male waving a United States flag.”
More from Law&Crime: ‘Bad all around’: Trump admin’s top DC prosecutor says charging of Jan. 6 rioters is DOJ’s ‘greatest failure’ since Japanese American internment camps
The Tuesday filing by the DOJ comes after U.S. Attorney Ed Martin — the Trump administration’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C. — has previously said that certain Jan. 6 defendants deserved “reparations” for how they’ve been treated by the government.
“I believe that everyone who has been targeted on January 6, they should get a big pot of money,” Martin explained during a podcast in January. “Like the asbestos money we got for asbestos victims,” he said.
Martin, a conservative activist and 2020 election denier who previously served as the head of the Missouri Republican Party, said last week that he’s “expanded in scope” his office’s investigation into federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 defendants under a felony obstruction statute, comparing them to Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps during World War II. Martin also announced that his office was probing alleged leaks that have emanated from the prosecutor’s office recently.
In an email to staff that was reviewed by Law&Crime, the interim U.S. Attorney for the nation’s capital announced that he would be continuing to “look at” how and why so many of the cases brought against alleged Jan. 6 rioters were charged using the obstruction statute 18 U.S. Code § 1512(c)(2), which involves charging an individual who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding” of Congress. Based on the statute, Martin dubbed the investigation “The 1512 Project.”
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Notably, the first charges under the statute brought against Jan. 6 rioters were filed Jan. 19, 2021, when Trump was still in office. Martin demoted several of his Washington, D.C., office’s senior leaders last month to handling low-level misdemeanors, reportedly as retribution for their work on prosecuting cases involving the president’s allies and Capitol rioters.
At the start of April, more than 100 former federal prosecutors signed onto a letter calling Martin an “egregiously unqualified political hack who has never served either as a prosecutor or judge,” imploring the Senate to reject his nomination.
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