Summary
- Trump’s $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund is facing skepticism on Capitol Hill, with few willing to defend it.
- People who are vouching for it are defending the concept of a settlement, rather that the terms of this one.
- And even the rare Republicans offering defenses are doing so with caveats.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
President Donald Trump’s settlement with his own government to create a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund appears to be going over like a lead balloon on Capitol Hill.
Many Republican senators have offered skeptical or even outright critical comments about the fund, which could be used to pay convicted criminals, including those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The administration has even left open the possibility of compensating people who assaulted police that day, as long as they are viewed as having been mistreated by the Biden administration.
“Stupid on stilts,” said retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis on Thursday, shortly before the situation derailed the Senate’s consideration of a major immigration enforcement package and lawmakers left town.
The Senate has even flirted with placing limits on the fund in what would be a remarkable rebuke of Trump.
But what’s as telling as the rebukes is how limited and strained the defenses have been. Relatively few have stepped forward to vouch for the fund, and nearly all of them have been from the administration rather than Congress. And even those who have ventured defenses have struggled to produce cogent ones.
Mostly, they appear to be defending the concept of a settlement, rather than the terms and process of this settlement.
To recap, the fund would give Trump’s Justice Department great latitude to dole out the $1.776 billion, with little in the way of accountability. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is Trump’s former defense lawyer, gets to appoint the five members of the commission who will run the fund, with congressional leaders getting to weigh in on one appointee. Those members would be answerable to Trump personally in that he could remove them without cause. The fund’s reports would also be confidential.
All of this is the result not of litigation involving these people, but of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS for the illegal leaking of his tax returns. (Trump withdrew that $10 billion lawsuit and reached the settlement, despite effectively being on both sides of the negotiations.)
We also learned Tuesday that, in a late addition to the settlement, the DOJ was also giving Trump, his sons and his business effective immunity for past tax issues, up to the date of the settlement this week — a move that could greatly benefit a president who has previously been found liable for fraud.
Put plainly, it’s difficult to explain why all of this is an appropriate response to the unauthorized leaking of Trump’s tax returns.
But some have stepped forward to try.
On Thursday morning, US Attorney Jay Clayton, who runs the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York, cast the settlement as a legitimate resolution to a situation in which government officials “intentionally leak your tax returns to embarrass you in the public.”
“They tried to name and shame him. They tried to destroy him,” Clayton said on CNBC. “Okay, we resolved that.”
But there is no evidence that a government official “intentionally” leaked Trump’s tax returns to hurt him. Instead, it was a government contractor who worked for a consulting firm and had access to the returns of Trump and others.
Even if Clayton’s summary of the situation were accurate, it’s not clear why this arrangement would involve compensating third parties who had nothing to do with the leaked tax returns.
While defending the fund on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance spotlighted Tina Peters as an example of someone who would be an appropriate recipient of the money. Peters is the former Colorado elections clerk who recently got clemency from Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.
“This is a woman who, at worst, if you believe everything that the prosecutor said about her, committed misdemeanor trespassing,” Vance said. “And somebody threw the book at her.”
But Peters wasn’t convicted of trespassing; she was convicted of conspiring with Trump’s allies to breach voting systems in her county to try to validate Trump’s false claims of mass 2020 voter fraud.
What’s more, she isn’t even the kind of person the fund has been advertised for, given she was prosecuted by local authorities, not the Biden administration. (The Trump administration has said the fund is for victims of the “weaponization” of past administrations, but Peters was prosecuted in part by a Republican local district attorney.)
The most frequent defender of the fund has been Blanche, who testified about it on Tuesday. And he continued to make the case in an interview with CNN’s Paula Reid on Wednesday.
The acting attorney general said that “the outrage is (over) us doing something that is completely legal, allowed under our laws, and has been done before.”
The administration and its allies have compared the “anti-weaponization” fund to previous funds to compensate victims of the government. Most-cited has been the Keepseagle v. Vilsack case, in which the federal government created a fund to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers over discrimination by the Agriculture Department.
But there are key and hugely important differences. The biggest one was that the settlement in that earlier case was approved by a court as part of litigation that actually involved the parties that would benefit.
The settlement that resulted in Trump’s fund, however, was reached by his side negotiating with the government he leads. The case never involved the parties that will now benefit, and a judge wasn’t involved in approving the settlement or the parameters of the fund.
“That really is the critical issue,” Joseph Sellers, a lawyer who represented the Native Americans in the Keepseagle case, told CNN. “You have to serve the same community whose interests were at stake in the litigation that was brought.”
What’s more, despite Blanche’s assurances that the settlement is legal, just because it might be legal for Trump to reach a settlement with the government he leads, that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. There are many things that are legal but are immoral or unethical.
And finally, even one of the rare Republican lawmakers to vouch for this settlement did so while hedging a bit.
“I think that there’s a unanimous understanding that the federal government shouldn’t be … used for political weaponization against your political enemies, whether they’re Republican or Democrat,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said when talking about the fund, according to the Iowa Gazette.
The Iowa Republican also noted that former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page benefitted from settlements with the government over the leaking of their text messages in 2024.
“I didn’t see Democrats complaining about that clearly illegitimate payout,” he said.
But again, Strzok and Page were involved in the litigation, and their settlement was approved by a judge.
What makes Trump’s gambit so extraordinary is that this fund is being created to benefit people who haven’t bothered to file lawsuits seeking money from the government. Trump is effectively trying to make it a lot easier to pay them — largely only subject to the approval of people he controls.
Given this is a president who 16 months ago decided to blanket pardon nearly all January 6 rioters, including those who assaulted police, that would seem a recipe for some potentially problematic payouts.
Which might be why even Grassley is also invoking his oversight.
“First of all, don’t forget that this is subject to congressional oversight,” he said.
“My judiciary committee has the attorney general in frequently for oversight hearings. I’m sure this is going to be a big subject of discussion with them.”
