Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Earlier this year, President Trump and his sons and their family corporation filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the federal government he runs, alleging that the Internal Revenue Service mishandled his tax returns and allowed a federal contractor to leak them back in 2019. This was, essentially, a multibillion-dollar personal lawsuit brought by a multibillionaire president against himself. And for a time, there was quite reasonable concern that he would effectively award himself those damages, since the Justice Department has become Trump’s personal legal department for dispensing punitive justice, which is now being led by his former personal lawyer, acting attorney general Todd Blanche.
It turns out that those concerns were misplaced. Trump’s DOJ isn’t giving him an enormous taxpayer-funded payoff, it’s giving it to Trump’s most committed and beleaguered supporters — like the ones who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump already bulk-pardoned his loyal insurrectionists, and now they may get paid for their trouble, too.
According to a court document filed by Blanche on Monday, the Trump family’s feud with the Trump-controlled federal government is officially over. The president has dropped his $10 billion IRS lawsuit, as well as two civil claims demanding $230 million in compensation over the special-counsel-led investigations into his mishandling of classified documents after his first term and the whole Russia saga of his 2016 presidential campaign before that. In exchange, the DOJ is creating up a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” settlement fund to “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” In other words, it looks like a massive slush fund for people who allege the justice system was weaponized against them, and it just so happens that a lot of those people are allies of President Trump who claim they were targeted over their conservative views.
The New York Times notes in its report on the settlement and fund that “It remains unclear if the announcement represents a serious effort to disburse cash or a provocative distraction intended to provide the president with political cover as he retreats from a dubious lawsuit he was about to lose, or some combination of both.”
The Times also reports that “it was an apparent effort to skirt oversight by the judge in the case who had expressed concern that the suit represented self-dealing”:
The tandem [Trump and DOJ] moves amounted to an end-run that stripped Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the I.R.S. case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter.
As the Washington Post notes, Williams, who was appointed by President Obama, had pointed out that the plaintiff, Trump, “is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” Last week, attorneys advising the judge raised concerns about the “fidelity” of the DOJ, and ABC News reported that the DOJ was working on the settlement fund and a “Truth and Justice Commission” as an alternative way of ending its fight with the president who tells it what to do.
Per ABC, the fund will be pulled from existing funding allocated to the DOJ for settlements; it will be managed by five people appointed by the attorney general and subject to the approval of Trump, and the fund will shut down a little more than month before Trump leaves office.
Trump and his family can’t claim any of the funds. Who else submits claims, and how transparent Trump’s DOJ is about who is deemed eligible to receive them, remains to be seen (though Blanche says the fund can be audited). House Democrats are already vowing to fight it. It’s just another day in Donald Trump’s America.
