A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to reveal who set up the structure of a controversial $1.8bn “anti-weaponization fund” to recompense victims of so-called political lawfare that was reportedly dropped by the justice department last month.
Ivan Davis, the US magistrate judge for the eastern district of Virginia, issued the order compelling discovery materials from the government as part of a lawsuit brought by the Democracy Forward non-profit on behalf of plaintiffs including a fired prosecutor and a college professor acquitted of assaulting federal agents at a protest against an immigration raid in California.
“Today’s order granting discovery is a significant step in getting to the bottom of the slush fund,” said Aman George, senior counsel at the non-profit. “We will continue to meet the government in court until our investigation is complete and the slush fund is permanently halted.”
Last month, Todd Blanche said the fund he proposed before he was confirmed “is dead”. The US attorney general told Fox News Sunday: “The fund is dead or whatever word you want to use. It never started. So, it’s not as if the fund is coming back.”
Democrats maintain that the proposed fund would have been used to compensate prosecuted and since-pardoned January 6 rioters, among others. Blanche said that Trump “believes the justice department was weaponized against a lot of Americans” under the Biden administration, adding: “It really hurt them financially.”
The proposed compensation scheme was set up as part of the settlement Trump reached with the IRS regarding a lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns. The agreement shielded the president and his family from future tax audits.
In July, another federal judge found that the parties had never truly been in conflict and Trump’s $10bn lawsuit against the IRS had only ever been a pretense for setting up the fund.
“There was never adverseness between the parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” the US district judge Kathleen Williams said in a ruling, adding that the lawsuit had been brought “for an improper purpose – to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact”.
The proposed fund drew bipartisan criticism in Washington, including opposition from two Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and it put Blanche’s confirmation for attorney general at risk.
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Critics of the program have noted that the document demanded by lawmakers did not include signatories to the initial agreement, suggesting that it could be revived. Blanche has said that “there were never commissioners” in charge of the “payout pot”. But Senate Democrat Cory Booker said the agreement guaranteed “nothing … no guarantees whatsoever that this slush fund still can’t go forward”.
Trump has rued the abandonment of the fund and has not ruled out another avenue to compensation. “It is dead, but you know, I wish it weren’t,” he said of the fund at a cabinet meeting in July. “To be honest with you, I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused.”
