The Slush Fund

This system is being constructed before our eyes.

This week, Donald Trump’s Justice Department settled a lawsuit against plaintiff Donald Trump. The price: 1.776 billion taxpayer dollars, a formal apology, and a memo declaring the IRS can never audit his old tax returns.

The 1776 million is now a fund the Justice Department is calling the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” created by a memo signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who served as Trump’s criminal defense lawyer before joining the administration. The fund received no congressional approval and no judicial review, and the money will be drawn from the Treasury Judgment Fund within sixty days.

Who controls it? The fund will be run by a five-member commission, all five appointed by the Acting Attorney General, and Trump retains the power to remove any commissioner at any time. The commission can spend part of the one point seven seven six billion on its own staff, travel, and facilities, with no disclosed cap on operating costs, and the fund will continue operating through December 2028.

Who will get paid? Blanche told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Tuesday that “anyone in this country is eligible to apply,” and when asked whether January 6th defendants convicted of violence against police officers would be excluded from receiving compensation, he declined to commit either way.

We now have a 1.776 billion dollar pot of taxpayer money, controlled by the President’s former criminal defense lawyer, paid out by commissioners the President can fire at will, to recipients the President’s administration designates, on a timeline that runs through the end of his term.

One wonders what the name is for a system in which the treasury uses taxpayer money to pay the leader’s loyalists at his sole discretion.

This system is being constructed before our eyes.