The Justice Department is stealing $1.776 billion from the United States Treasury to reward insurrectionists. It is doing it through a collusive lawsuit its own lawyers never defended, a settlement that grants the President blanket immunity from all pending IRS investigations, and a fund that will pay January 6 defendants, Proud Boys, and whoever else the political leadership decides deserves a check. The theft is not hidden. The documents are public. The court orders are accumulating. The only thing standing between the money and the President’s allies is a handful of federal judges who have not yet been told to look the other way.
The administration calls it the “anti-weaponization” fund, created on May 18 when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former criminal-defense lawyer—settled a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS. The settlement draws on the Judgment Fund, a permanent Treasury appropriation meant for ordinary court judgments and settlements, not for executive slush pools. The department says anyone can apply and there are “no partisan requirements.” That is the steel-man, and it barely deserves the name. The government headed by the plaintiff’s client never filed an answer, raised no defense, and agreed to pay nearly two billion dollars—plus what the addendum to the settlement quietly calls “the cessation and permanent closure of all pending audits, examinations, and criminal referrals” involving Donald J. Trump, his sons, and their business entities. That addendum does not resolve a tax dispute; it kills every tax investigation of the President and his family. It is a blank-check immunity purchased with public money, and every lawyer who drafted it knows it would not survive a single hour of adversarial scrutiny. There was no adversary. That is the point.
The fund’s architecture is a loyalty filter disguised as a neutral compensation program. The department will decide, in unreviewable discretion, who qualifies as a “victim.” The standard is whatever the political leadership wants it to be. Multiple January 6 defendants have already indicated they will apply, and the fund’s sponsors have not disclaimed their eligibility. A Justice Department that has already moved to dismiss charges against Capitol rioters and fired the prosecutors who secured those convictions is now positioned to write checks to the very people whose cases it dismissed. That is not compensation; that is a criminal enterprise laundering itself through the federal fisc.
The bipartisan blowback is damning precisely because it crosses the normal partisan lines. Senator Thom Tillis called it “a payout pot for punks” and said it should not benefit people who assaulted police officers. Former Vice President Mike Pence called it “deeply offensive” and urged the administration to drop it entirely. Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick and Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi are drafting legislation to block the fund—a rare joint effort that reflects how far beyond the normal corruption this scheme lies. The political opposition is not the usual partisan reaction; it is a warning from members of Trump’s own party that theft is not a partisan issue.
The courts have begun to notice, though they are moving slowly. On May 29, a federal judge in Virginia entered a temporary restraining order blocking the fund and any disbursements, a suit brought by a former January 6 prosecutor and others targeted by the administration. The department says it will abide by the order, but it has not withdrawn the settlement. On the same day, in Miami, Judge Aileen Cannon—who initially handled Trump’s IRS lawsuit—granted a motion by 35 former federal judges, Republicans and Democrats, who allege the settlement was a “fraud on the court.” Fraud on the court is a narrow, demanding standard; it requires a showing that a party has concealed material facts, presented perjured testimony, or otherwise corrupted the judicial process so that the court cannot perform its task. That 35 former judges are willing to put their reputations behind that charge, and that even Judge Cannon sees grounds to investigate, is a reminder that the federal bench occasionally remembers its institutional interests.
In an ironic twist, several of the administration’s own foils—fired former Capitol riot prosecutors and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—are weighing whether to file claims with the fund. The fund is so broad, and so sloppily written, that it may end up compensating the very “weaponizers” the administration rails against. The incompetence of the looting is almost as striking as the looting itself.
Nothing in this $1.776 billion transfer was appropriated by Congress. The Appropriations Clause, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, requires that every expenditure of public money be authorized by law. The Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. § 1341, backs that command with criminal sanctions. A settlement that creates an unbudgeted discretionary payout program draws on appropriated funds for a purpose Congress never authorized, converting the settlement mechanism into an end-run around the power of the purse. The addendum goes further, using a private litigation settlement to extinguish the IRS’s independent statutory authority over pending audits. That is not a settlement; it is a targeted regulatory carve-out, an executive immunity directive dressed in the robes of a civil suit.
What the administration has done is not a settlement in any recognizable legal sense. It is a transfer—a conveyance of public money to the President’s personal political apparatus, laundered through the form of a lawsuit that was never adversarial, blessed by a department whose leadership is the President’s former defense counsel, and shielded from congressional oversight by the claim that it is an ordinary exercise of settlement authority. The administration is consolidating the power of the purse, the power of the tax administrator, and the power of the pardon-all in a single instrument. That is not an abuse of process; it is the destruction of process—the use of the courts not to resolve disputes, but to validate a theft. The restraining order holds it back for now. The theft is already on the record.