The Trump DOJ’s Latest Stunt Is Using Your Tax Dollars to Make January 6 Rioters Rich

The following paragraph includes a lot of scare quotes, but I promise that you will soon understand why: On Monday, the Trump Justice Department announced that it had “settled” a “lawsuit” brought by President Donald Trump “against” the Internal Revenue Service, which he’d accused of failing to prevent a contractor from leaking his tax returns in 2020. In exchange for Trump’s willingness to drop his claims—such a magnanimous gesture!—the Justice Department agreed to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who have been victimized by “lawfare and weaponization” at the hands of the federal government. 

The announcement does not specify who counts as one of these lucky “victims,” but based on its structure, the term appears to be a catch-all for anyone who Trump likes, and who has at some point faced some sort of legal consequences for their actions. It almost certainly includes the more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists whom Trump pardoned on his first day in office, an act he framed as necessary to “correct” for the Biden administration’s “weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Monday’s agreement dedicates $1.776 billion—yes, like the year the Declaration of Independence was signed—in public resources for the fund, an amount that is roughly equivalent to the annual budget of Omaha, Nebraska; the endowment of the University of Miami; and the gross domestic product of Turks and Caicos. 

By “settling” the case in this manner, Trump is attempting to leverage the federal court system to create a secret slush fund that includes zero accountability mechanisms. If his efforts to insulate it from judicial review and congressional oversight are successful, the next time the people who stormed the Capitol in order to murder Vice President Mike Pence decide that they don’t like the results of a presidential election, they will be able to buy their costumes at taxpayer expense.

Every detail of this story sounds like it was fabricated by a constitutional law professor trying to write an issue-spotter exam in the middle of a mushroom trip. According to the DOJ’s press release, the fund will be administered by five people appointed by the attorney general, who is, for now, former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche. (Congressional leadership gets to “consult” with Blanche on one appointment.) But the press release also states that the president can remove any member at any time, provided that the attorney general then selects a replacement using the same method. This arrangement allows Trump, in consultation with his hand-picked attorney general, to just cycle through anyone whom he deems insufficiently generous to his friends until he finds someone he likes better.

The other “accountability” provisions—sorry, I am back to scare quotes for a second—are similarly circular. The Justice Department’s press release states that the fund “may be audited,” but only at the direction of the attorney general, which is sort of like saying that the fox is authorized to test the structural integrity of the henhouse walls anytime he pleases. The press release also promises quarterly reports about who receives relief from the fund, and in “what form,” but not on how much money anyone gets. It also notes that the fund will uphold its obligation to “protect private information,” which sounds to me like a euphemism for any information that the White House would really prefer you not find out about.

Perhaps most egregiously, a memo from Blanche asserts that once the Justice Department receives the $1.776 billion from the Treasury Department, the federal government will bear “no liability whatsoever” for any alleged “fraud or misuse of the funds” that may be perpetrated by those who receive payouts. The fund’s deadline for processing claims is December 1, 2028, which ensures that once the end of Trump’s presidency is within sight, none of the money he is funneling to his most loyal foot soldiers will accidentally go to anyone else.

If you find yourself wondering how anything I have described above can possibly be legal, the short answer is that none of it is supposed to be. Even setting aside the substance of the agreement, a basic rule of litigation is that in order for a federal court to hear a case, parties must be “adverse” to one another—that is, they must have opposing interests that require the services of a judge to resolve. You do not need to be a lawyer to clock the howlingly obvious potential for collusion in a “legal dispute” between Donald Trump, who is the president, and the Internal Revenue Service, which is an agency under the president’s control.

None of this was lost on the presiding judge, Florida District Court Judge Kathleen Williams, who in April ordered additional briefing on whether Trump and the IRS are “truly antagonistic” to one another. To get around this hurdle, the Trump administration is attempting to make clever use of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: In a filing in Williams’s courtroom on Monday, Trump did not mention the settlement at all, but only announced that he is voluntarily dismissing his case against the IRS “with prejudice.” 

Plaintiffs often try to avoid this designation when voluntarily dismissing their cases, since it prevents them from bringing their claims again in the future. But it can also foreclose further judicial involvement in the resolution of a case—which, as relevant here, might include Williams’s (or any federal judge’s) authority to decide whether the DOJ can “settle” Trump’s legal claims against the IRS by setting aside a cool $1.8 billion for a gaggle of MAGA dead-enders who once attempted to overthrow the government.

As is usually the case in the Trump administration, there is more than a little sloppy lawyering going on here. Given that federal judges generally do not take kindly to attempted end-runs around their authority, I would expect Williams to try and hold on to the case, and for an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit (and possibly the Supreme Court) to follow. There are also a number of potential constitutional and statutory problems with the fund’s design, some of which Maryland Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin raised in an interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent last week. My guess is that several new lawsuits challenging the fund’s existence will have been filed in federal courtrooms by the time you read this sentence.

Whatever the fund’s eventual fate, though, the fact that Trump is even attempting a stunt like this demonstrates just how much contempt he has for the work of governing; how completely he has repurposed the Justice Department to serve as his personal law firm; and how unencumbered he feels by the rules that apply to everyone else. The goal of his lawsuit was never to hold the IRS accountable for leaking his tax returns six years ago. It was to use the vehicle of a litigation settlement to do something Trump could not otherwise accomplish—and to try and prevent anyone else in a position of power from doing anything about it.