The Justice Department Wants a Jan. 6 Class Action Thrown Out Because the Rioters Filed More Than Two Years Late

The Justice Department asked a federal judge Monday to dismiss a class action brought by participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, arguing the case fails on a deadline the plaintiffs missed by more than two years.

The suit was filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the statute that lets people sue the United States for injuries caused by federal employees. The plaintiffs allege they were hurt by excessive force from police officers defending the Capitol that day. The department's motion does not engage with those allegations at all. It argues the court never reaches them.

The FTCA gives claimants two years from the date of the injury to present a claim to the relevant agency. The injuries in this case are alleged to have occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, which set the deadline at Jan. 6, 2023. "The earliest claim of the Named Plaintiffs was dated July 29, 2025," the department wrote — roughly two and a half years past the cutoff.

The filing also faults the paperwork itself. The administrative claim forms submitted on the plaintiffs' behalf "were only partially completed," according to the department, and some were missing signatures and the supporting documentation the statute requires. Under the FTCA, exhausting that administrative step properly is a precondition to suing at all, not a formality a court can excuse after the fact.

The department's central argument is that nothing prevented the plaintiffs from filing on time. They "knew that they were injured and knew who injured them, but they instead chose to wait until well past the deadline to file the claims," the motion says — closing off the usual escape hatch, in which a plaintiff argues the clock should not start until they discovered the harm or its cause.

The motion, filed by a department led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, lands two days after Blanche rescinded the $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund that Republican senators had made a condition of his confirmation. That order does not explicitly bar restitution to people convicted in the Capitol attack, leaving this lawsuit as the most visible remaining vehicle through which Jan. 6 defendants might collect federal money.

Whether the case survives now turns on a narrow question of timing rather than on what happened at the Capitol. A judge could still find some basis to toll the deadline for particular plaintiffs, but the department has framed the dispute so that the merits of the excessive-force claims never get argued.