Jacob Chansley, the Arizona man widely known as the “QAnon Shaman” for the horned headdress and face paint he wore during the January 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, has filed a sprawling, self-written lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court that seeks $40 trillion in damages and names former President Donald Trump among more than a dozen defendants. In a 26-page complaint presented as a single paragraph, Chansley alleges a vast conspiracy to violate constitutional rights and simultaneously declares himself the “rightful” leader of a reconstituted American government.
The filing lists Trump, the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the state of Israel, Elon Musk’s X Corp., T-Mobile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Warner Bros. Studios as defendants, among others, and asserts that the country should be governed only by the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Local reporters who reviewed the court papers described them as a manifesto rather than a conventional pleading.
The damages demand is broken into three parts, according to that account: $38 trillion to erase U.S. government debt, $1 trillion to rebuild national infrastructure and $1 trillion for Chansley’s alleged personal suffering. In one passage quoted from the filing, Chansley attributes his individual claim to “personal, emotional, mental and spiritual torture and years worth of anguish.” The complaint also asserts that he would order the Federal Reserve to mint a one-ounce gold coin and fix its value at $40 trillion to pay off the country’s debts, an idea he presents as a first act as “the first president of the ‘New Constitutional Republic of the United States.’” The document’s references to exhibits include a handwritten link to an online folder that reporters said could not be accessed.
The Independent reported that Chansley claims in the suit that he is the “true” commander-in-chief and that his constitutional grievances arise from actions by an “elite group” he accuses of orchestrating an unlawful system. The newspaper said the filing “targets Elon Musk, T-Mobile and Warner Bros.” and recapitulates Chansley’s recent public break with Trump, noting that he “withdrew his support for Trump after the president refused to release the Epstein files.” The Independent also reported that Chansley alleges the NSA catfished him online while posing as actress Michelle Rodriguez and that Trump personally emailed him two days after the Capitol riot; those assertions are presented in the article as claims in the complaint, not as verified facts.
Chansley did not immediately respond to questions sent to contacts listed in his filing, reporters said. The Independent wrote that it had sought comment from the White House, the Federal Reserve, the NSA, the IMF, the World Bank, the Israeli government, X Corp., T-Mobile and Warner Bros. Studios. There was no early response from Trump’s political operation referenced in that report, and no docketed appearances by counsel for any of the named defendants were visible in the local coverage. The Phoenix New Times, which first detailed the lawsuit’s contents after obtaining the papers from the court, said the complaint purports to combine federal and state issues and could ultimately be moved to federal court, but it emphasized that the claims are “wildly specious” and arranged in a single, uninterrupted paragraph.
The filing is the latest turn in a volatile public arc for Chansley, who became one of January 6’s most recognizable figures after he entered the Senate chamber bare-chested and carrying a spear with an American flag attached. In November 2021, a federal judge sentenced him to 41 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding, one of the stiffest punishments imposed in early cases tied to the attack. He served part of the sentence in an Arizona facility before being transferred to a halfway house in 2023.
Chansley later sought a return to public life through politics and media. He filed paperwork in November 2023 to run for Congress as a Libertarian in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, but failed to qualify for the ballot the following spring after missing the signature threshold, according to state and local reports. In December 2023 he told Arizona outlets he was rebranding away from the “QAnon” moniker but intended to remain active in public debate; in April 2024, Cronkite News reported that he had missed the cutoff to appear on the ballot.
His posture toward Trump has shifted repeatedly. In January 2025, after Trump returned to office, the former president issued a wave of pardons that included dozens of January 6 offenders; multiple outlets reported that Chansley was among those pardoned. People magazine summarized his record—41 months imposed in 2021, supervised release to follow—and said that after praising the pardon, Chansley turned sharply against Trump over the summer. The New York Post similarly reported in January that Chansley celebrated the clemency with an expletive-laced vow to buy firearms.
By late July, Chansley was publicly denouncing Trump. The Phoenix New Times documented a string of now-deleted posts in which he called the president “a fraud” and, in one message, wrote: “Fuck this stupid piece of shit… What a fraud…,” remarks the paper captured in screenshots and reproduced in full. In a separate exchange with the outlet, he demanded a fee for an interview—“I charge $555 per hour. Minimum of 1 hour.” The New Times linked his outburst to frustration over the administration’s refusal to release additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein, a cause that had gained traction among some of Trump’s own supporters before the president and Justice Department pushed back.
National outlets noted the same break. The New Republic, summarizing the episode in a July brief, wrote that Chansley had referred to Trump as a “piece of s***” and a “fraud” in posts reacting to the former president’s 2023 mugshot and to the White House’s stance on Epstein records. The article reproduced language from messages that were subsequently removed and highlighted Chansley’s further expletive-laden condemnation of Israel. Yahoo’s aggregation of the coverage reached similar conclusions.
Trump himself publicly rebuked supporters who pressed him on the Epstein matter. “I don’t want their support anymore!” USA Today quoted him as saying in mid-July as he argued that activists were promoting a “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.” That pushback marked a hard line against a segment of the coalition that had accepted conspiracy theories as part of the former president’s political catechism, a line that Chansley’s lawsuit now places in a more confrontational context by naming Trump as a co-conspirator.
The Independent’s account says the new complaint also repeats long-standing assertions by Trump that federal agents were present in the crowd on January 6, a claim the Department of Justice has addressed by explaining that agents were responding to bomb threats and other emergencies that day. In the same article, The Independent recapped the 2020 election results and Trump’s exhortations to “fight” on January 6, before returning to the text of Chansley’s filing and its references to entertainment properties. The paper said the lawsuit alleges that plot elements from Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” and James Cameron’s “Avatar” were plagiarized from Chansley’s own writing, an allegation the article presents as part of the complaint’s constellation of claims.
Esquire, reviewing the filing and linking to the Phoenix New Times’ report, characterized the complaint as an attempt to “challenge the validity” of the current U.S. government while accusing a shadowy group of constitutional violations. It noted that the suit sweeps in private companies, federal agencies, international financial institutions and a foreign government in a single narrative that is unlikely to withstand basic jurisdictional and pleading standards, though the article did not include legal analysis from the court because the case had only just been filed. The magazine’s write-up underscored the inclusion of X Corp. and Musk alongside Trump in the defendants’ list.
Chansley’s conduct on January 6 has been well documented in criminal filings and press accounts. The Justice Department said he entered the building early in the riot and reached the Senate chamber while carrying a flag-tied spear; in court, he told the judge in 2021, “Men of honor admit when they’re wrong… I was wrong for entering the Capitol.” The PBS NewsHour reported his 41-month sentence and three years of supervised release, and local Arizona coverage has detailed his release to a re-entry facility in 2023. In the months since, he has oscillated between efforts to re-enter public life and renewed involvement in conspiracy-focused online communities.
The new lawsuit’s rhetoric reprises themes that surfaced in his July social-media posts and in public comments over the past five years: denunciations of “globalists,” allegations of covert state surveillance and appeals to a reimagined constitutional order grounded in absolute readings of the Bill of Rights. The Phoenix New Times article catalogued several of the more unusual claims, including the assertion that “all radio stations and most of their DJ’s are a part of the intelligence community,” that the NSA monitored him while he drafted a “2nd Declaration of Independence,” and that the government stole more than $100,000 in cryptocurrency from him. The same report says he provided a non-working link to more than 1,000 supposed exhibits.
How the case proceeds will depend on whether the defendants are served and whether any court, state or federal, takes jurisdiction over claims that span multiple sovereigns and subjects. The local report that first described the complaint’s contents said that, because Chansley purports to bring federal constitutional claims alongside state-law allegations, the matter could be removable to federal court, though the pleading as drafted may draw early motions to dismiss. The Independent said it had contacted the various entities for comment and summarized the filing’s core claim that Chansley is the “true” leader of the country, but it reported no immediate responses. For now, the public record consists of the complaint as filed, the outlets that have obtained it and the recent statements by the plaintiff himself.
Chansley’s relationship to Trump—once the lodestar of his political identity—now figures in two directions: a clemency the former president’s supporters hailed as a correction for overzealous prosecution, and a rupture that followed when Trump declined to act as Chansley and others demanded on unrelated matters. The Phoenix New Times article quoted a January post in which Chansley celebrated his pardon—“I GOT A PARDON BABY!”—and a follow-up—“THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!! NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”—before documenting his July reversal. People likewise framed the summer’s profane posts as a pivot from gratitude to anger. The lawsuit filed this week, naming Trump and seeking a sum equal to roughly the entire federal debt, formalizes that break in a forum where the claims will be tested against the law rather than against an online audience.
What the suit makes clear, in its own text and in the coverage that has followed, is that Chansley is attempting to shift his story from subject of a criminal case to plaintiff in a civil action that recasts his grievances as a constitutional crusade. His complaint states that a cabal has “systematically violated the American people’s constitutional rights” and that he has “legal authority” to institute a new order, while seeking damages on a scale no American court has ever awarded. Whether the case survives its first procedural hurdles is uncertain. As of publication, the defendants had not filed responses and reporters said early efforts to reach them for comment had not been successful. For a figure whose image once symbolized a moment of national crisis, the lawsuit marks a new and improbable phase—part political declaration, part legal test—that again connects his name to Trump’s, this time on opposite sides of a docket.