Today I heard James Comey, the former director of the FBI, say that when he first learned of the $1.776 billion settlement agreement reached between Trump and the Justice Department, he thought it was a satirical piece from The Onion. Which, it wasn’t.
Pleasingly, today The Onion does have such a piece — though, sadly, the settlement agreement is utterly real. First, the satire.
WASHINGTON—Declaring the financial allocation a matter of utmost urgency, President Donald Trump on Monday requested $1.2 trillion to have. “I’m calling upon Congress today to immediately provide me with $1.2 trillion in funding that I currently do not possess but which I will possess once it is given to me,” said Trump, acknowledging that he had previously asked for just $900 billion but was now requesting more so that he would have more. “Even as we speak, I do not have this money, and the only way for me to get it is through swift budgetary action. I’ve gone too long without $1.2 trillion that I’d very much like to have so I can spend it on things I want. It is also possible I’ll want to have more money at a later date, and I will request it then.” At press time, the Senate passed the $1.2 trillion spending measure mostly along party lines, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) joining all Republicans in support.
Now, the reality, as described in a New York Times story: “Justice Department Sets Up $1.8 Billion Fund That Could Funnel Money to Trump Allies.”
The Trump administration announced on Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and Democrats, forging a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies.
The highly unusual “anti-weaponization” fund was denounced by critics as a slush fund and as a brazen misuse of a once-independent Justice Department to carry out the president’s personal and political agendas.
The announcement provided few details of how the disbursement would work or who would be eligible. But the arrangement raised the possibility that American taxpayers might end up writing checks to those prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, and others the president has cast as victims of Biden administration actions.
“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group that has been critical of the administration.
The fund was announced shortly after Mr. Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service demanding at least $10 billion in damages for the unauthorized disclosure of his tax information.
This is an astoundingly unethical use of taxpayer funds to allow Trump to funnel money to those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, seriously injuring many police officers, destroying government property, and interfering with the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
A judge was poised to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit against the Justice Department because, obviously, Trump is both the person filing the lawsuit and the person in charge of the Justice Department that ordinarily would be fighting the lawsuit. That deeply concerned the judge, because our legal system is founded on an adversarial relationship.
Meaning, there has to be a disagreement between two parties, such as Trump and the Justice Department. That didn’t happen in this case. The Justice Department didn’t even contest Trump’s initial suit for a $10 billion payment to him for the wrongful release of his tax return by a IRS contractor. So there was never any case to settle, given that the case was almost certainly going to be thrown out by the judge.
So this is purely and simply a $1.776 billion slush fund to be used by a handpicked committee of Trump supporters to reward people who supposedly were victimized by a “weaponized” Biden Justice Department. Problem is, there’s no evidence of any weaponization, no illegal arrests or convictions by the Biden administration. At least, not anything that would warrant the slush fund.
Hopefully Democrats will use this travesty in attack ads for the midterm elections, an illustration of the corruption that marks the Trump administration.
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