TRUMP FORMS LEGAL FUND
Administration drops lawsuit against IRS for releasing his info
President Donald Trump delivers remarks about healthcare costs and affordability Monday from an auditorium on the White House campus in Washington.
The Internal Revenue Service building is seen Feb. 1 after U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his family sued the IRS and the U.S. Treasury Department for $10 billion for disclosing their tax returns in Washington.
President Donald Trump walks Friday on the south Lawn of the White House in Washington.
President Donald Trump speaks to the media Friday aboard air Force One Enroute to the U.s. after his official visit with President Xi Jinping in China.
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's administration said Monday it created a $1.76 billion fund for victims of political "weaponization" to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against his own government over the alleged mishandling of his tax records.
The agreement resolves an unprecedented lawsuit filed by Trump, in which he sought $10 billion from the Internal Revenue Service, arguing it should have done more to prevent a former contractor from leaking his tax returns to the media.
Trump will receive an apology but no financial payment. Instead, the Justice Department will set up a pool of money controlled by his allies that can dole out payments to those who claim to have suffered "weaponization or lawfare" by the U.S. government.
Those terms are frequently used by Trump and his allies to describe the criminal cases against them, including those stemming from the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump's lawsuit, and the resulting settlement, has been widely criticized as an attempt to direct taxpayer money to his own purposes.
"This case is nothing but a racket designed to take $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars out of the Treasury and pour it into a huge slush fund," Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.
The Justice Department said there are no no partisan requirements to file a claim with the "Anti-Weaponization Fund."
"It is this Department's intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again," said Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who formerly served as Trump's defense attorney in three criminal cases.
Federal prosecutors who worked on cases against Trump and his political allies repeatedly rejected claims that the cases were politically motivated or an abuse of the legal system.
Blanche will appoint four of the five members of the commission who will decide the merits of the claims. The department released few details about how it will determine who receives payouts.
The commission can authorize payments to those who demonstrate they were targeted for "improper and unlawful political, personal and/or ideological reasons," according to the settlement agreement. As examples, it cites Biden-era moves that conservatives condemned, including prosecutions of activists for obstructing access to abortion clinics.
Trump, at a White House event Monday evening, claimed he wasn't involved in the creation of the fund, though the settlement was signed by his personal lawyers.
"These were people that were weaponized and really treated brutally by a system that was so corrupt," Trump said of those eligible for payments.
Origin of case
Legal experts described the arrangement as highly unusual both because of the nature of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS and because funds of this scale typically are either created by an act of Congress or supervised by a court.
"This is completely unprecedented for a variety of reasons," said Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw a fund for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "For taxpayer money to be given to the executive branch to dole out in a way with such little restriction just lends itself to abuse and corruption."
The fund could trigger a new legal fight over whether it usurps Congress' power to decide how U.S. taxpayer money is spent. The payouts are set to come from a separate fund Congress set aside to settle and pay legal claims against the U.S. government.
Trump, his adult sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS in January, arguing the agency should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing their tax returns to media outlets during the president's first term.
As part of the settlement, Trump will also drop administrative claims against the government over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort for classified documents in 2022 and the investigation into potential ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
The IRS lawsuit arose from former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn's leak of Trump's tax returns to media outlets, including the New York Times and ProPublica, in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
These returns showed that Trump paid little or n o income taxes in many years, the Times reported in 2020.
The litigation against the IRS raised novel legal questions, including conflicts of interest, about whether a president can sue his own government.
Under the U.S. Constitution, federal courts may only hear genuine disputes between litigants with opposing stakes in the outcome.
U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami, who oversees Trump's lawsuit, wrote last month that it was unclear whether the parties to the lawsuit were "truly antagonistic to each other."
