Here is how power works when it thinks nobody is watching. You file a $10 billion lawsuit against your own government over a leak that embarrassed you. You settle that lawsuit with yourself. And tucked inside the settlement, like a clause nobody was supposed to read, you create a $1.8 billion payout pot to reward people you call victims of “lawfare.” Oh, and the same agreement shields you and your family from future tax audits. One transaction, two heists.
US Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis has now ordered the Trump administration to hand over discovery materials revealing exactly who built this structure. The lawsuit was brought by Democracy Forward on behalf of real people harmed by the administration’s weaponization of justice: a fired prosecutor, a college professor acquitted of assaulting federal agents at a protest against an immigration raid in California. These are the plaintiffs. These are the people who actually faced the machinery of the state. And the fund that was supposedly created to help “victims of lawfare” was never designed for them.
Attorney General Todd Blanche wants everyone to move on. “The fund is dead or whatever word you want to use,” he told Fox News Sunday. “It never started.” Whatever word you want to use. That is the voice of a man who knows the word matters and hopes you pick the wrong one. The fund is not dead in any legally binding sense. The document demanded by lawmakers contained no signatories. Blanche says there were “never commissioners.” Senator Cory Booker put it plainly: the agreement guarantees “nothing. No guarantees whatsoever that this slush fund still can’t go forward.”
And Trump himself? At a cabinet meeting in July, he said: “It is dead, but you know, I wish it weren’t. To be honest with you, I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused.” The president of the United States, openly mourning the loss of a fund that would have compensated prosecuted and pardoned January 6 rioters. He is not hiding the intent. He is broadcasting it.
US District Judge Kathleen Williams already dismantled the legal fiction underpinning this whole scheme. In July she found that Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit was never a real case. “There was never adverseness between the parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” she wrote. The lawsuit was brought “for an improper purpose, to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.” Read that sentence again. A federal judge said the president used the courts as a prop to launder a corrupt deal into something that looked legitimate.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsEven two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, opposed this fund. It threatened Blanche’s confirmation. And yet Republicans refused to pass legislation forbidding it. Outrage on television, silence on the floor. That is not opposition. That is theater.
The discovery order from Judge Davis is a significant step. Aman George, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, called it what it is: getting to the bottom of the slush fund. The organization has pledged to keep meeting the government in court until the investigation is complete and the fund is permanently halted. That is the standard. Not “dead or whatever word you want to use.” Permanently halted. Legally foreclosed. Structurally dismantled.
What must happen now is sustained. The courts have exposed the mechanism. Congress must legislate the prohibition it refused to pass. And every public official who touched this settlement, from the IRS to the Justice Department, must be named in the discovery record and held accountable for their role in converting the federal judiciary into a rubber stamp for self-dealing. The harm here is not abstract. A fired prosecutor and an acquitted professor are the plaintiffs because they lived the real version of what this administration pretends to care about. They deserve a justice system that cannot be repurposed into a payout machine for the people who stormed the Capitol and the man who sent them home with pardons.