The $1.8 billion fund ostensibly created to compensate people who claim mistreatment by the “weaponized” Department of Justice under President Joe Biden may face legal obstacles — ironically created by Donald Trump’s own former attorney general Pam Bondi.
According to the New York Times, after Bondi was sworn in as attorney general in February 2025, she immediately placed guardrails around settlements “that largely prohibited payments to groups not involved in an underlying lawsuit.” Now those same restrictions are threatening to derail the Trump administration’s controversial compensation scheme.
On her first day as attorney general, Bondi signed a directive titled “Reinstating the Prohibitions on Improper Third Party Settlements” that revived a Justice Department policy adopted in 2017 and was later canceled by the Biden administration.
According to the Times’ Devlin Barrett, the memo explicitly stated that, except in “limited circumstances,” the department should not use settlements “to require payments to nongovernmental, third-party organizations that were neither victims nor parties to the lawsuits.”
Yet the new $1.8 billion fund appears structured precisely to circumvent that restriction — designed to steer large sums to third-party claimants, most of whom have not filed suits and may never file suits now that a compensation fund exists.
Former Department of Justice officials immediately expressed alarm at the apparent end-run around Bondi’s own ethics directive.
“I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity. That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president,” Jennifer Ricketts, a former branch director in the department’s civil division, told the Times.
Ricketts added: “I’ve just never seen litigation risk outside the four corners of the complaint being used as justification for something in a totally unrelated lawsuit.”
Normally, settlement figures are calculated based on actual legal claims filed against the government and risk assessments by Justice Department lawyers regarding potential jury awards, the Times is reporting. For Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” it remains unclear what set of cases or claims formed the basis for the $1.776 billion figure.
The paperwork establishing the fund says it can be used to pay “entities” — language that appears to directly violate the purpose of Bondi’s ethics memo, which was specifically designed to prevent the kinds of funding arrangements sometimes made during the Obama administration, which has created a cloud over the current proposal.
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