These days it takes a spectacular burst of corruption to get the attention of our scandal-weary nation, but President Trump and his administration have managed, once again, to transfix Americans by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund in the Department of Justice that will undoubtedly be used to line the pockets of Mr. Trump’s partisans and foot soldiers — with your tax dollars.
The creation of this fund is a stupefying feat of self-dealing — part of a “settlement agreement” between the Department of the Treasury, which Mr. Trump controls, and the plaintiffs — Mr. Trump, two of his sons and their family business — who sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. It will very likely result in an undeserved windfall to a legion of Jan. 6 rioters who have already unjustly received pardons from Mr. Trump.
Every part of this farce is an affront to the Constitution. It usurps both the exclusive power of Congress to legislate programs and spend money and the power of the courts to decide specific cases and controversies.
It is, quite simply, a scam.
Only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” But Mr. Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seem to think they can conjure this giant slush fund into being without congressional approval.
Further, Article III, Section 1 states that the “judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Yet the settlement took Mr. Trump’s case out of the hands of the courts. And it calls for oversight by a five-member board, appointed by Mr. Blanche and whose members Mr. Trump can dismiss on a whim. Even if this fund were legitimate, that kind of setup wouldn’t be for Mr. Blanche to decide. Congress has never established a court, tribunal or board to hear pleas from people who believe they are victims of government “weaponization,” much less a fund almost certainly meant to reward supporters and allies of the president who feel they were wronged simply because their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were prosecuted.
No matter what you think about the events of Jan. 6, hundreds of rioters indisputably broke the law that day when they stormed the Capitol trying to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and the peaceful transfer of power.
As regrettable as it is that most of the rioters were pardoned, there’s no denying that as president, Mr. Trump has that power. But the same Constitution giving him that power also says 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.” Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection, and pardon or no pardon, no one can legally be compensated for taking part in it.
As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, a cardinal precept of our legal system is that “no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Here, Mr. Trump’s administration “settled” a case that he brought, effectively making him the judge in his own case. He not only concocted the fund, but his Justice Department threw in a sweetener: shielding him and his sons from audits of any tax returns they have already filed.
The $1.776 billion figure is obviously meant to invoke the year of our founding. But go back and read the Declaration of Independence, which includes a long list of accusations directed at George III. Among them is the charge that the British king “has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
And here’s the kicker: The nearly $1.8 billion will come from the Justice Department’s Judgment Fund, a fund created by Congress that the administration has already been abusing. The Judgment Fund was set up to allow the federal government to efficiently and promptly pay for final court judgments and proper legal settlements against the United States — a process that had once been enormously time-consuming and burdensome.
For 70 years, the Judgment Fund has served its original essential purpose of settling valid, good-faith claims: Two years ago, it paid out almost $140 million to dozens of young women and girls to resolve claims that the F.B.I. had failed to protect them from the actions of the serial predator Larry Nassar.
But Mr. Trump has treated this fund as a political piggy bank.
His Justice Department agreed to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle its wrongful death suit against the government. Ms. Babbitt was a Jan. 6 rioter who was fatally shot that day at the Capitol. Her death was certainly a tragedy, but the suit was without merit. Meanwhile, not a single dollar from the fund went to the families of the police officers wounded and injured on Jan. 6, nor to the families of several who died in the wake of the violence.
In March, the department agreed to pay around $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, for a case that had been dismissed.
In April, the department announced another million-dollar settlement, this time with Carter Page, a former adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mr. Page’s lawsuit contended that he had been unlawfully surveilled by the F.B.I. during its investigation of contacts between the campaign and Russia’s government. A federal judge dismissed his lawsuit in 2022 on statute of limitations grounds.
Around 400 Jan. 6 rioters have already filed lawsuits under the Federal Tort Claims Act, with most seeking $1 million to $10 million. Another group of rioters — including Proud Boys convicted of assaulting police officers — filed a class action demanding over $18 million, claiming that officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 caused them injuries. And five Proud Boys convicted of felonies including seditious conspiracy have filed a separate $100 million lawsuit. No one should be surprised if their cases wind up being swiftly “settled” via the president’s new MAGA gravy train.
But the “weaponization” fund is a rip-off on an unimaginably larger scale. This week, I introduced legislation to put a stop to this. It would bar the federal government from paying out monetary settlements to sitting presidents. It would also prohibit settlement payments for claims involving investigations or prosecutions related to Jan. 6 or foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Members of Congress must act to reassert the exclusive power that the Constitution vests in the legislative branch — or else we will have gone a step further toward making Mr. Trump a king.
Source photographs by David Crockett, lawcain and Rus/Getty Images.
Jamie Raskin is the ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary. He was a constitutional law professor at American University.
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