In a deeply corrupt move, the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay out taxpayer money to his political allies. The Democrats do this sort of thing, too — as we chronicled in the past — but this may be even more extreme and indefensible. (Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law fleeced taxpayers to give billions to left-wing groups and lawyers during the Obama administration).
The Justice Department on Monday announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration.
It’s an unprecedented move that would allow the president’s administration to pay his supporters from a government agency he controls with taxpayer money.
There appears to be few constraints on who can submit a claim to the fund. The president has broadly stated that his allies were politically targeted by the justice system, from the years-old Russian collusion investigation to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection to the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riot.
Its creation comes as Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit alleging that the Internal Revenue Service failed to protect Trump and the Trump Organization from an unauthorized leak of their tax returns.
The so-called “anti-weaponization” fund, with its symbolic 1776 figure, is likely to face immediate challenges in court from Democrats and watchdog organizations who say the effort amounts to corruption by allowing the president to enrich allies over what critics they say are unfounded claims of political prosecutions by the Biden administration….
A commission, made up by five members who have not yet been announced, will run the fund, the department said. Trump will have the power to fire any of the members.
The Justice Department claims there are “no partisan requirements to file a claim.” It will process claims through December 15, 2028.
The lack of safeguards in the settlement means it could be used to compensate the January 6 rioters who were duly prosecuted and incarcerated (including those convicted and sentenced by conservative judges). Some lawyers have argued that giving the rioters taxpayer money would violate a constitutional provision, saying that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.”
This January, “Trump, along with his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, sued the IRS and Treasury Department for at least $10 billion. The lawsuit accuses the IRS of an unauthorized leak of their tax returns from his first presidency. Trump’s lawsuit alleges that the IRS failed to protect confidential tax information and the tax information of the Trump Organization. Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking Trump’s tax records, along with the records of thousands of others. Trump sued the IRS in his capacity as a citizen, not as the president.”
Democrats who previously turned a blind eye to corrupt slush funds created by members of their own party were enraged by this corrupt act by the Trump administration. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared that the creation of this fund was “depraved.” “Trump is shaking hands with himself in order to fund his insurrectionist army to the tune of billions,” said Schumer on X. “Of all the corrupt things he has done, this is one of the most depraved.”
“Donald Trump and his compromised Department of Justice have created a slush fund to make pay outs to Trump supporters and cronies,” said Lisa Gilbert and Robert Wessman of Public Citizen. “This scheme amounts to the creation of a January 6 payment fund.”
As CNN notes,
Soon after Trump brought the lawsuit earlier this year, the federal judge presiding over the case in Florida, district Judge Kathleen Williams, expressed skepticism that it was the kind of legitimate legal dispute that belonged in her courthouse.
She asked a group of outside lawyers to brief her on the question. They too raised concerns about the propriety of a president seeking monetary damages for personal reasons against a government agency within his executive branch.
Minutes after Trump’s legal team notified the court he’s dropping the case on Monday, nearly 100 House Democrats submitted a “friend-of-the-court” brief accusing Trump of “blatant self-dealing.”
They wrote that, if Trump sought to voluntarily submit the case to facilitate such a settlement, the court should scrutinize that maneuver under a legal rule that would allow the court to sanction the lawyers involved.
The Obama and Biden administrations also created political slush funds, although perhaps none this brazen. “Kamala’s brother-in-law fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers,” notes attorney Ed Whelan, who was deputy assistant attorney general during the Bush administration.
The New York Post reported on this depressing reality about Kamala’s brother-in-law, Tony West, who would have held a high-ranking position in the Harris administration had she been elected. “He invented a new form” of “graft” while in the Obama administration, as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, it notes. Prior to 1977, Congress had to approve any settlement of over $100,000 in lawsuits against the U.S. government. That ensured compliance with the Constitutional requirement that Congress control the government’s purse. That cap would have prevented Trump’s $1.776 trillion slush fund, which disturbs even some Republican lawmakers.
But in 1977, seeking relief from the ever-growing number of settlements to review, a Democratic Congress removed the $100,000 cap on settlements in lawsuits against the U.S. government,
handing the Justice Department a permanent blank check to pay settlements unilaterally, in any amount, out of an account known as the Judgment Fund.” Run by the Treasury Department, the Judgment Fund’s secrecy is so complete that our often-penetrated CIA might study it for lessons. The limited data released omits recipients, the facts underlying the case, and often the lawyers involved. By statute, attorneys’ fees awarded need not be disclosed. A Government Accountability Office study concluded that “no one knows the number of claims processed by the federal government each year.”
Still, for three decades, the integrity of Justice’s officials sufficed to prevent abuse. Then, in 2009, Tony West took over the department’s Civil Division, the division that litigates and settles lawsuits. Once West arrived, his deputy emailed colleagues asking “can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money toward an organization of our choosing?” Settlements became the vehicle for paying off political allies.
For example, in late 2010, after a Supreme Court victory, DOJ lawyers were on the cusp of winning a decade-long fight against discrimination claims by 91 Hispanic and female farmers. That’s when West intervened and, as The New York Times put it, “engineered a stunning turnabout.” DOJ agreed to a $1.33 billion settlement which included thousands of farmers who had never claimed bias. The deal was made over the “vehement objections” of the department’s career lawyers. The Times’s investigative report described West’s settlement as a “runaway train, driven by racial politics . . . and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.” The projected settlement size ballooned to over $4.4 billion as additional plaintiffs were added, including Native American farmers. The government’s statistical expert was appalled: “‘If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed . . . It was just a joke. . . . I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans.’” This dirty deal also inflated the number of claimants, creating a $60 million windfall for the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, a member of the Obama/Biden transition team.
But West did not just bilk taxpayers. He shook down corporations, too. In a series of bank settlements, his team added increasingly aggressive provisions requiring the institutions to make nearly a billion dollars in mandatory donations to Democrat-supporting activist groups. Donations were given double credit against required targets, incentivizing these payments over direct relief to victims of the housing crises.
West’s team specifically structured the terms to ensure that they would benefit only their political allies while leaving conservative groups ineligible. An internal email shows West deputies rewording a settlement’s donation provisions to ensure the bank could not select a “conservative” property rights organization as a recipient….The largesse delighted liberal groups. An email circulated saying they ought to build a “statue” to West and “bow down to this statue each day after we receive our $200,000+.” In this legal shakedown, California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, was an active participant, cosigning the agreements for her state.
To a lesser extent, the Biden-Harris Administration also employed West’s corrupt strategy to reward its political allies using taxpayer money. For example, the Biden Justice Department paid $2 million to FBI Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for producing their anti-Trump texts to Congressional investigators. Strzok and Page claimed their rights under the Privacy Act had been violated, but their text messages were sent on government-provided cell phones that feature explicit banner warnings that users lack any reasonable expectation of privacy. As the New York Post notes, “DOJ had ample basis” to defeat this lawsuit in court rather than settling it. (Federal appeals courts have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in such devices, in cases such as United States v. Simons (2000)).
