Trump’s new $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization fund’
Allies of the president who believe they’ve been wrongly investigated and prosecuted soon could have access to the fund, the Justice Department announced on Monday in a move slammed by Democrats as unconstitutional and corrupt, The Associated Press reports.
The fund was announced as part of a settlement to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.
The fund is in line with Trump’s long-standing claims that the Justice Department during the Biden administration was weaponized against him, even though then-President Joe Biden himself was scrutinized during that time, AP notes.
The Justice Department says the fund will receive the $1.776 billion from the federal judgment fund, which Congress created to pay out court judgments and compromise settlements of lawsuits against the government, and will operate through Dec. 15, 2028.
It will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, with one member chosen in consultation with the congressional leadership. Trump can remove any member, according to the Justice Department.
Asked on Monday if people who committed violence on Jan. 6, 2021, should receive compensation from the fund, Trump said, “It’ll all be dependent on a committee.” He added: “I didn’t do this deal. It was told to me yesterday.”
Mark McCloskey, a lawyer best known for brandishing an AR-15-style rifle during a racial justice protest outside his home six years ago, had tried for nearly a year to get compensation from the government for about 430 Jan. 6 defendants but repeatedly ran into opposition from Blanche and others in the Justice Department.
McCloskey is hailing the announcement of the fund, saying he’ll seek money from it for his current clients and that he expects more Jan. 6 rioters to come forward asking for payouts, The New York Times reports.
“This is completely unprecedented for a variety of reasons,” says Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw a fund for victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks. “For taxpayer money to be given to the executive branch to dole out in a way with such little restriction just lends itself to abuse and corruption.”
Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog, says Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit was “absurd” and the settlement is “the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency.”
A group of nearly 100 members of Congress had filed a brief teeing up a legal challenge to the case.
“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,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, says in a statement.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., calls the fund “corruption on steroids.”
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