Here we go again. A federal magistrate judge in Virginia just ordered the Trump administration to hand over discovery materials and reveal exactly who set up the so-called “anti-weaponization fund,” the $1.8 billion proposal meant to compensate Americans financially ruined by political prosecutions under the Biden years. And the usual suspects are treating this like some kind of scandal instead of what it actually is: an attempt to make whole the people the government crushed for having the wrong politics.
Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis issued the order as part of a lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that apparently has nothing better to do than sue to keep a fund dead that the attorney general already said is dead. Todd Blanche told Fox News Sunday last month, plain as day: “The fund is dead or whatever word you want to use. It never started.” So the fund doesn’t exist. It never operated. And yet here’s a judge compelling discovery on a ghost, because the left can’t let go of a weapon they never got to use.
The backstory is the part nobody wants to talk about. The fund was created as part of a settlement between Trump and the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. That leak happened. Somebody inside the IRS handed Trump’s private tax information to the press, and the government had to answer for it. The settlement also shielded the president and his family from future tax audits, which sounds to me like the IRS finally admitting it had been targeting him. But does anyone in the media frame it that way? Of course not. They call it a “slush fund.”
In July, US District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was a sham, that there was “never adverseness between the parties,” never a real controversy, and the whole thing 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.” Strong words. But here’s what I notice: a judge appointed by the system is telling you that a president suing a federal agency that leaked his taxes had no real grievance. The IRS leaks your private files to the entire country, and you’re the one acting in bad faith for filing suit. Makes you wonder whose side the robe is on.
Democracy Forward’s senior counsel Aman George called it a “slush fund” and promised to “continue to meet the government in court until our investigation is complete and the slush fund is permanently halted.” Permanently halted. A fund that never started. A fund the AG already killed. They want it permanently halted the way a man keeps stomping a snake after it’s stopped moving, just to be sure.
Mark Youso / PexelsThe plaintiffs in this lawsuit include a fired prosecutor and a college professor who was acquitted of assaulting federal agents at a protest against an immigration raid in California. Acquitted. Found not guilty. And yet somehow the people who want to compensate victims of political prosecution are the bad guys.
Democrats insist the fund was designed to pay off January 6 rioters who were prosecuted and later pardoned. They call them rioters. I call them people who got the book thrown at them while BLM organizers got book deals. The fund drew criticism from two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, which tells you everything about where their loyalties sit. Cornyn and Tillis couldn’t find a backbone if it was handed to them in a donation envelope.
The real question isn’t who set up the fund. The real question is why every time someone tries to help the people the government wronged, a judge materializes to shut it down. The IRS leaked a sitting president’s taxes. The DOJ prosecuted political enemies. And the people asking for accountability are the ones hauled into court.
Funny how that works.