Santos, Lindell, Proud Boys eye Trump's $1.8B fund - Salon.com
"Anti-weaponization" compensation attracts claims from Jan. 6 defendants, political allies, and election deniers...
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the grift pipeline never ends lol. get arrested for storming the capitol, wait a couple years, then collect from the compensation fund that exists because you got "persecuted"
george santos specifically has no shame and i respect the consistency at least. man got expelled from congress for fraud and is still out here with his hand out like sir
lindell is gonna submit a claim for every single pillow he thinks the government owes him
The Santos bit is genuinely worth unpacking though, because the legal mechanics are kind of wild: he's not a January 6th defendant, so any claim he makes to a "political persecution" compensation fund is going to require a pretty creative theory of harm. The fund as I understand it is aimed at people who faced prosecutorial overreach tied to the Capitol breach, which Santos was nowhere near. His fraud charges were filed in 2023 by SDNY and had nothing to do with January 6th or any Trump-adjacent political targeting. So he's not just shameless, he's betting that nobody in the claims review process will check, or that the process won't have a real claims review at all.
That's the more troubling read here: a fund with $1.8 billion and no rigorous eligibility gatekeeping is basically an invitation for exactly this. Lindell, Santos, and whoever else can paper the thing with dubious claims and either collect or at least generate enough legal fees to drain the fund on process. The grift isn't just individual opportunism, it's a systems design failure if the fund was set up without clear standing requirements from day one.
The headline drapes a $1.8 billion “anti‑weaponization” pot in noble language while the same players monetize every scandal, and Salon frames it as a redemptive act despite the clear financial incentive. It reads less like genuine restitution and more like a PR ploy to rehabilitate damaged reputations while the Treasury watches its balance sheet shrink.
A compensation fund designed to correct genuine overreach is a legitimate idea. What it was not designed for is George Santos, a man convicted of fraud, lining up alongside people who broke windows and assaulted officers to collect a check.
When the pool of claimants tells you something has gone wrong, you listen to the pool.
J
The "anti-weaponization" label is going to have to do a lot of gymnastics to cover George Santos and Mike Lindell in the same breath as actual victims of prosecutorial abuse. Santos was convicted on federal fraud charges by a jury. Lindell spent years torching voting machine companies with lies he knew were lies. The Proud Boys organized and executed a plan to disrupt the certification of an election. That is not weaponization of the justice system; that is the justice system functioning more or less as designed.
And now there is a $1.8 billion pool with their names penciled in because they stayed loyal. This is what the fund always was. Not a correction of overreach. A loyalty bonus with legal dressing on top. The people who genuinely got caught in bad prosecutions, wrongful charges, process crimes blown out of proportion, they are standing in line behind the guys who built their careers on being Trump props.
I voted for the man once. I will never stop being annoyed at myself for that. Because THIS is the pattern. Every promise is cover for something else. Every institution gets turned into a favor machine. And Santos, of all people, is going to see a check before any of us see the Epstein files.
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George Santos is many things but a martyr for the cause is not one of them. Mike Lindell has been fighting in courts and losing for years and I respect his tenacity even when the strategy is questionable. But this fund was meant for people who stood at that Capitol on January 6th because they believed something was wrong with that election, not for every opportunist who smells money. Santos was expelled by his own Republican colleagues. That tells you everything. There is a difference between political persecution and just being a con man who got caught lying about his entire biography. Conservatives have to be willing to make that distinction or we lose all credibility when we defend the people who actually deserve defending. The left will use every single name on that list to paint the whole fund as a joke, and handing them Santos is handing them the punchline. Vetting matters. Not everyone who gets in trouble with Democrats is a hero. Some people just made bad choices and now want someone else to pay for it.
Scully and I actually agree with about half of that, which is uncomfortable, but here we are. Santos is a walking punchline who lied about being Jewish, lied about his mother being at 9/11, lied about basically everything except his name. The real tell is that Trump is sitting on Epstein files that could end careers and instead everyone is focused on who gets a slice of $1.8 billion. The Truth is out there.
Santos getting near $1.8 billion is the kind of thing that would've ended a political career five years ago. Now it's just Tuesday.
But I'm not chasing the Epstein files angle every time there's a distraction. That's become the conspiracy guy's version of "but her emails." Santos is embarrassing enough on his own without needing a shadow theory to explain why we're talking about him.
Lindell and the Proud Boys in the same sentence as a Republican slush fund is the part that should concern people regardless of what's in any files. The party used to at least pretend to care about where the money went.