Trump DOJ sets up $1.8B fund for Trump’s allies

Supporters of President Donald Trump enter the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021

(Image credit: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)

What happened

The Justice Department on Monday announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for “victims of lawfare and weaponization,” potentially including those who participated in the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. The fund is part of a settlement President Donald Trump reached with his Justice Department to drop his $10 billion claim over an IRS leak of his tax records. The money will be doled out by five people appointed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, though Trump can fire them. Shortly after the announcement, Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey resigned, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Justice Department said Trump and his family will receive apologies but no payments from the fund. But the “highly unusual” settlement forges a “pipeline to funnel taxpayer money” to Trump’s allies, The New York Times said, and is an “apparent effort to skirt oversight by a judge” who “expressed concern” that Trump’s lawsuit “represented self-dealing between the president and a department run by his former defense lawyer.”

“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement. “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American,” Blanche said in a statement. This “slush fund” is “nothing but a racket” for Trump to hand taxpayer money “to his private militia of insurrectionists, rioters and white supremacists,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.