The Department of Justice is launching an unprecedented effort to reward those friends and supporters of President Donald Trump who were prosecuted or investigated for crimes under previous Democratic administrations by doling out as much as $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds in a new “anti-weaponization fund” administered by the Justice Department.
The new initiative was announced by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal defense counsel in the multiple criminal cases that were brought against the then-former president for allegedly unlawfully retaining classified documents after the end of his first term and attempting to illegally overturn the 2020 election results to avoid leaving office after losing that election to Joe Biden.
Blanche said the new compensation fund is being established to settle a $10 billion lawsuit which Trump, his children and his eponymous real estate and hotel company had filed against the IRS after a contractor for the agency leaked his tax returns to the New York Times during his first term.
“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 Blanche, who added that the fund would establish a “lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”
According to the Justice Department, the fund will be administered by a five-member commission appointed by Blanche, with one member chosen in consultation with Congress.
The commission will be empowered to “issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants” using money from the department’s judgment fund, which is a permanent appropriation that allows the department to pay taxpayer dollars to settle litigation and pay judgments. It will not require any sign-off from Congress to do so. The fund will also cease operations “no later than December 15, 2028” — just over a month from the end of Trump’s second term.
The Justice Department claimed the unprecedented effort to pay allies of the president who have faced investigations and prosecutions dating back as far as 2009 is justified because the Obama administration once established a $760 million compensation fund as part of a settlement to end a decades-long class-action lawsuit brought against the Department of Agriculture by Native American farmers and ranchers who’d been systematically discriminated against by USDA farm loan programs over an 18-year period during the Reagan, George HW Bush, and Clinton administrations.
Approximately $300 million that had been allocated as part of the settlement in the class-action case, Keepseagle v. Vilsack, was not distributed directly to claimants but was instead used to bootstrap the Native American Agriculture Fund.
The president’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit comes just days after ABC News first reported plans for the slush fund to compensate the president’s friends and allies were being finalized as a way to avoid what might have been a thorny court battle over whether the president can sue the government he leads and recover money from taxpayers as part of that lawsuit.
The Florida federal judge who’d been hearing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, had ordered both Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department to submit filings to justify their position that there was no conflict of interest preventing the lawsuit from moving forward. She had also asked a group of outside lawyers to submit their own filings on the same topic.
The outside advocates later opined that the case’s “circumstances raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may instead be operating at the President’s direction.”
“Additionally, since taking office, President Trump has significantly expanded the President’s oversight and control over the Attorney General and DOJ, including in ways that blur the line between fidelity to the President’s policy priorities and fidelity to the President himself,” the filing said.
Source: independent.co.uk