Role at the time: Mike Collins U.S. Senate campaign, through spokesperson Meyer Siegfried
"“Mike Collins fully supports holding the government accountable when federal agencies abuse their power and believes Americans who’ve been wronged by their government ought to have a path to seek justice. He does not support a blank-check fund or automatic taxpayer-funded payouts to anyone simply because they were prosecuted for January 6.”"
A Collins campaign spokesperson rejected the claim that Collins had committed to pay January 6 defendants, while maintaining support for a process through which people wronged by the government could seek relief.
- First noted
- August 12, 2026
- Published here
- September 10, 2026
- People and groups discussed
- Jon Ossoff
Why we used this label
The campaign expressly disputes Ossoff’s characterization of Collins’s answer as support for taxpayer-funded payouts to January 6 defendants.
Context
Before the quotation
The statement responded to public criticism of Collins’s August 11 exchange with Dominic Box, who asked about compensation connected to alleged federal-government weaponization.
After the quotation
The response leaves a disagreement over what relief process Collins would support and how January 6 defendants could be treated within it.
Sources
Reports the August 11 Savannah exchange in which a pardoned January 6 defendant asked Collins about compensation for people harmed by a weaponized political system, as well as the Collins campaign’s August 12 clarification that he did not support a blank-check fund or automatic payouts for January 6 prosecutions.