‘Outright theft’: legal experts decry $1.8bn Trump anti-weaponization fund

A legal and political firestorm is growing over the $1.776bn “anti-weaponization” fund Donald Trump ’s justice department has launched to pay alleged victims of “lawfare”, but that ex-DoJ officials and legal experts call “corrupt” and a “slush fund” for Maga allies that benefits the president. Congressional critics from both parties and legal scholars have attacked the fund as an opaque scheme that will improperly help January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom said they intend to apply for grants, while echoing Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden’s administration was “weaponized” against them. Moreover, since the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, unveiled the fund on 18 May to settle a $10bn lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS over a leak of his tax returns in 2019, critics have blasted a fund “addendum” that blocks IRS action on any pending tax probes of Trump, his sons and their businesses. Legal challenges to the fund and its addendum have been growing. A bipartisan group of 35 ex-federal judges on 27 May filed a motion appealing to a federal judge in Miami who oversaw Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to reopen the case, and launch an inquiry to determine if Trump and DoJ’s unorthodox deal to settle the lawsuit involved fraud. The jurists’ charge that the settlement fund’s creation was a “fraud on the court”. …