Raw America: “The Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” may be dead, but the effort to pay Trump’s allies with taxpayer dollars is very much alive. After Republican lawmakers threatened to sink an ICE funding bill if the slush fund moved forward, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the Justice Department wouldn’t proceed with it. Trump, however, refused to admit the fund was finished, and said he still loved the idea. So they found a loophole. DOJ officials are now making clear they have both the authority and the resources to settle lawsuits against the federal government however they see fit. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward posted on social media, “We’re on it,” in response to a suggestion from Senator Lindsey Graham that the government should use existing law to compensate people who claim they were politically targeted. Woodward later deleted the post. The legal mechanism they’re eyeing is the Federal Tort Claims Act, an 80-year-old law that allows people to sue the federal government for wrongful actions or negligence. Last Friday, nine pardoned January 6th defendants filed a lawsuit under that law, arguing their prosecutions amounted to selective enforcement driven by their support for Trump and orchestrated by senior officials at the DOJ and FBI. The Trump regime has already gone down this road. In March, the DOJ paid Michael Flynn $1.25 million to settle claims he was the victim of a politicized prosecution. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, later sought to withdraw the plea, and was pardoned by Trump. A similar settlement was reached with Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser who was placed under court-ordered surveillance. One January 6th plaintiff, Treniss Evans, said he thinks some defendants might have taken smaller payouts through the scrapped fund. Now he’s expecting something bigger. And there’s already a backlog building. Lawyer Mark McCloskey says he delivered boxes containing administrative claims for nearly 400 January 6th defendants to the Justice Department in December. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, those claims can move to federal court if the government doesn’t act within six months. That deadline is approaching. Legal experts are alarmed. Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, put it plainly: the Justice Department, like any competent defense firm, should be making plaintiffs fight for every inch. Instead, he says, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are pushing on an open door. Keep in mind, this is taxpayer money flowing to people who stormed the Capitol, through a legal loophole. While the administration calls it justice.

The founders wrote the power of the purse into Article One for one reason, to keep any president from reaching into the public treasury to reward the people loyal to him, and Madison called that power the most complete and effectual weapon the people’s representatives could ever hold. Watching it get picked apart by a loophole that pays the very people who stormed the Capitol is exactly the corruption the framers built that wall to stop.

See also Lawfare – “At least 97 of the more than 1,500 individuals granted clemency by President Trump for their roles in the January 6 Capitol attack have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from Jan. 6 since their participation in the Jan. 6 riot. A Lawfare study reveals that almost one in 16 insurrectionists subject to the president’s clemency order has been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions…”