The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been accurately described as one of the most nakedly corrupt actions in American history. It would give a tacit endorsement from every American taxpayer to the notion that the Capitol Riot’s only transgression, for example, came from those who tried to punish its perpetrators for attempting to halt the outcome of an election.
News of the fund has triggered massive political backlash and at least temporarily derailed a party-line reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement operations for the next three years. Senate Republicans didn’t want to go on the record siding with Donald Trump’s crony slush fund, and left Washington rather than being confronted with such a question in a reconciliation “vote-a-rama.” What they will take up in June is currently unknown.
There are efforts within Congress to kill the slush fund, but those will inevitably run up against Republican politics in the wake of Trump demonstrating full control of the party base in recent primaries. Congress has the power of the purse, but it delegated the authority for the Justice Department to pay out settlements unilaterally when it established something called the Judgment Fund in 1956. Any attempt to change that legislatively will almost certainly meet the...
The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionist...