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Apparently, President Donald Trump’s “full, complete and unconditional” pardon for the roughly 1,500 rioters who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol building and Washington police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who pleaded guilty to felony charges and others who were serving prison time, did not go far enough. This week, a new class action lawsuit was filed by a group of participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection, claiming that the federal government owes them $18 million for injuries they allegedly suffered. It might be laughable if there wasn’t a real chance they could collect.

Alan E. Fischer, a member of the Proud Boys who was caught on video pushing against law-enforcement officers who were protecting an entryway to the Capitol, and throwing chairs, a traffic cone, and a pole at the police, is leading the suit. Fischer was faced with felony charges and was awaiting trial when the president pardoned him last year. At the time, he immediately tried and failed to file a class action suit in D.C. that blamed Washington law enforcement for violating his constitutional rights. Now he’s trying his luck elsewhere, filing a fresh class action suit in the Middle District of Florida, with U.S. District Judge Paul Byron—an Obama appointee—assigned to the case.

Fischer, alongside husband and wife Patrick and Marie Sullivan, who also participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection but did not face criminal charges, alleges that on that fateful day five years ago, “the crowd was composed of protesters who were overwhelmingly peaceful before the shooting by police started.”

Peaceful is an interesting choice of words. Slate’s own Aymann Ismail witnessed people smashing the windows of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, destroying furniture, and using barricades to break through doors. “They were trashing the place,” he wrote at the time. There is footage of rioters physically scaling the walls of the Capitol, seemingly on the hunt for then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, where they eventually started banging on the windows. There’s also widely available footage of rioters assaulting police officers with weapons, something Fischer himself was alleged to have done. The day was so not peaceful that the violence resulted in numerous deaths, including those of officers and Trump’s own supporters. The Justice Department arrested over 725 people, of whom nearly 230 were charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.

Nevertheless, Fischer’s suit attempts to pin the blame for his and other rioters’ injuries on the United States Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. It asserts that the officers didn’t give protesters fair warning before engaging in force, pointing to a D.C. law. This argument won’t hold up, as a court is likely to find that the officers working the crowd on Jan. 6 were engaged in discretionary actions. “There’s some discretion of what’s the best way to do crowd control, right? There’s a whole bunch of people launching themselves at the Capitol—what is the best way to protect the Capitol? There’s no playbook,” Dennis Fan, a former DOJ prosecutor and a professor at Columbia Law School, told me.

The lawsuit also claims that the very same members of law enforcement whom Fischer was charged with attacking breached........

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