The Trump administration announced Monday that it is establishing a highly unusual $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who claim they were improperly targeted under the Biden administration. The move drew swift condemnation from Democrats and good government groups, who warned that it would essentially serve as a taxpayer-funded slush fund that the president could use to direct money to his allies, including people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-partisan government watchdog. Sherman added that it is “the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency.”
The new fund, announced by the Justice Department, is part of a settlement agreement in President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The president, his sons and the Trump Organization agreed to drop the lawsuit and two other claims against the government, one related to an investigation into his 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russia and the other stemming from the search of his Mar-a-Lago home in a classified documents case. In exchange, the plaintiffs receive an apology and the creation of the compensation fund. They do not get any payment or other damages from the settlement.
“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who formerly served as Trump’s personal lawyer. “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”
Blanche’s memo did not mention the numerous cases in which the Trump Justice Department has investigated or prosecuted the president’s political foes, sometimes under Trump’s explicit direction to do so — cases that have invited criticism that the DOJ is engaging in precisely that same “weaponization” that it claims to be correcting.
“The use of government power to target individuals or entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, or ideological reasons should not be tolerated by any Administration,” Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in a statement.
Evading judicial oversight: By dropping the lawsuit against the IRS, Trump and the other plaintiffs may remove the case and the settlement from the oversight of a federal district court judge in Florida, who reportedly had been considering dismissing the suit because Trump controls the legal teams on both sides.
Nearly 100 House Democrats signed onto a brief filed with the court that seeks to block the settlement and have the lawsuit thrown out.
“This is pure fraud and highway robbery. No one can be both plaintiff and defendant in the same case,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “This case is nothing but a racket designed to take $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars out of the Treasury and pour it into a huge slush fund for Trump at DOJ to hand out to his private militia of insurrectionists, rioters, and white supremacists, including those who brutally beat police officers on January 6, 2021, and sycophant accomplices to his election stealing schemes.”
A news release and a two-page memo issued by the attorney general’s office provided relatively few specifics about how the new fund will operate or how the department will define “weaponization,” though the Justice Department did say that there are “no partisan requirements to file a claim.”
Blanche’s memo said that the size of the fund, with the type of symbolism that Trump has embraced before, “does not represent the value of any claim by plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims.”
The nearly $1.8 billion in the fund will come from a Treasury Department judgment fund created by Congress to pay court judgments and settlements of lawsuits against the government. The money will be controlled by a five-member panel appointed by the attorney general, with one member chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. Trump can remove any member if he chooses, though the replacement would be chosen through the same process.
The Justice Department said that the new fund is required to submit a quarterly report to the attorney general “outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.” The fund must stop processing claims by December 1, 2028, and any money left over will go back to the U.S. government.
What’s next: Blanche is sure to be grilled about the new fund when he testifies before a Senate subcommittee at a hearing Tuesday on the president’s fiscal year 2027 budget request for the Justice Department.