Trump’s 2024 campaign discussed an anti-weaponization fund. They didn’t know where to get the money — until now
By Adam Cancryn, Paula Reid, Evan Perez, CNN
(CNN) — As Donald Trump plotted his return to the White House in late 2023, a group of campaign advisers began working on a plan to compensate political allies they believed were unfairly targeted by the federal government, two people familiar with the deliberations told CNN.
The team spent months on the proposal in the lead-up to Trump’s election. But there was a major roadblock: they couldn’t find a viable funding source for the payouts. So, the advisers shelved the plan.
Then Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS started to flounder and the long-dormant campaign idea was suddenly revived. As part of the settlement of that suit, the administration created an unprecedented legal initiative that could funnel nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to Trump friends and supporters.
“The concept was always there, but the question mark was the funding,” said one of the people familiar with the deliberations. “But along comes this case and it’s like, hey wait a minute, there it is.”
The Justice Department’s fund is now poised to dole out hefty sums to those deemed victims of “lawfare and weaponization,” with few apparent limits on who is eligible and for what perceived offenses. It will draw on money from an obscure account that officials located within the Treasury Department originally meant for settling lawsuits filed against the government.
The initiative has already sparked fierce blowback, even from fellow Republicans — a development administration officials had not adequately anticipated, sources familiar with the planning said.
Who’s eligible for the money
The potential for Trump allies to reap significant windfalls has already touched off wrangling within the president’s circle over who should be first in line — or be cut out completely. In private discussions, some advisers have pushed for clear eligibility limits, over fears that rioters in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack who were convicted of assaulting police officers will secure payouts.
But others — including conservative activist Charlie Kirk before his death last year, according to a source familiar with the discussions — have pushed for casting a wide net that includes the January 6 rioters who Trump and some around him view as an essential element of his MAGA base. Now, hundreds of Trump supporters who participated in the Capitol attack have already been advised to apply for compensation, said Peter Ticktin, a lawyer and longtime Trump ally who represents many of those who were prosecuted for their roles in the riot.
Close advisers and aides to Trump may also qualify based on federal scrutiny they received as part of a years-old investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Tuesday, former Trump official Michael Caputo cited that probe in filing the first known claim to the fund, writing that “the machinery of government was clearly politically weaponized against my family.”
“Despite this, we never stopped trusting the President; we knew he would never let this injustice stand,” Caputo added in a letter seeking $2.7 million in restitution.
Trump aides and allies have defended the fund as a long-overdue effort to make amends with people who suffered personally and financially from federal investigations they view as politically motivated. They’ve insisted that anyone can be considered, regardless of their political affiliation. And, some argued, it’s the fulfillment of Trump’s campaign-trail vow to seek “retribution” for “those who have been wronged and betrayed.”
Quick moves prompt major fallout
Still, it’s sparked unease within some corners of the administration, especially as the backlash has grown more severe. Critics view it as the president’s latest and most audacious attempt to use the nation’s legal apparatus to accomplish his political aims, and even Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are calling for guardrails on the payouts.
The IRS believed from the outset that the president’s lawsuit against the agency was weak and could be challenged in court, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. Lawyers in the IRS counsel’s office prepared a defense memorandum outlining significant flaws in the case, including statute of limitations and jurisdictional issues, that person said.
“DOJ didn’t even want to see the memo or the arguments,” the source said. It’s unclear whether DOJ declined to receive the memo or ignored it after Treasury sent it.
The case likely would not have held up in court, that person added: “Basically, it was fixed from the start by DOJ.” The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
The subsequent rush to create the fund as a settlement to that lawsuit has prompted days of intense scrutiny on both sides of the aisle. That’s left some administration officials bracing for political fallout over an initiative that could enrich well-connected Trump allies at the same time voters’ own financial struggles are intensifying.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers alarmed by the widening blowback over the initiative are publicly opposing the fund or pledging to simply kill it before it can get off the ground. The Senate abruptly canceled votes on a major immigration enforcement package and recessed Thursday due to heated disagreements over how to rein in the fund.
“We gotta unpack exactly what it is, what the source of the funding is, in order to stop it and/or reverse it,” GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said Wednesday. He later blasted the fund in a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as “a dangerous backsliding in the transparency of our institutions and our commitment to the American taxpayer.”
The White House referred questions about the fund to the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on “any discussions President Trump may or may not have had about any fund,” pointing instead to a DOJ fact sheet that described the fund as “about seeking accountability for all Americans who were victims of lawfare and weaponization.”
In a CNN interview on Wednesday, Blanche dismissed criticism of the initiative.
“There’s nothing to be outraged about,” he said. “The outrage is [over] us doing something that is completely legal, allowed under our laws, and has been done before.”
Widespread confusion
Still, the fund’s origins remained a mystery on Thursday even to staffers within the Justice Department, most of whom were cut out of the process and only learned about the scheme when it was publicly reported, sources familiar with the matter said.
The disagreement over the eligibility of certain January 6 rioters isn’t the only unsettled issue. Others have questioned who will staff the five-member commission in charge of the fund and how independently they’ll be allowed to run it, a source familiar with the matter said. The terms of the Justice Department’s deal allow Trump to fire commission members at any time.
And other unusual details and potential conflicts of interest surrounding the fund have also raised eyebrows across Washington’s legal defense community this week. Documents creating the fund were signed by associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who previously represented both several former January 6 riot defendants and White House adviser Peter Navarro, who was convicted of obstruction of Congress and served time in prison.
Some attorneys who had represented defendants who might be eligible for the fund said they didn’t understand how it could pass legal muster. But they also questioned whether federal lawsuits seeking to dismantle the fund could be viable given how DOJ structured it — it falls solely under the jurisdiction of the executive branch and the commission’s decisions have no avenue for additional review.
Some are mounting challenges anyway: Two law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 sued over the fund on Wednesday. They asked the federal court in Washington to block the Justice Department from establishing the fund, prevent the Treasury Department from allowing federal money to be used for it and prohibit any payments. The lawsuit is in its earliest stage.
The hasty decision to create the fund in exchange for Trump dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS has also raised internal alarms; the judge in the case had already questioned the suit’s validity and signaled she planned to rule against the president. And Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, reportedly resigned the day the fund was announced, though he has not publicly commented on his reasoning.
Blanche on Wednesday insisted that claims would be closely scrutinized — and specified that the conduct of Jan. 6 rioters seeking compensation would be taken into consideration.
“This is not a ‘you’re going to get rich’ process,” he said.
The Capitol attack problem
Trump officials have nevertheless declined to discourage even violent participants in the Capitol attack from applying. The president himself defended the fund this week even as he claimed to know little about it, reiterating complaints about the Biden administration that have driven his wide-ranging retribution campaign.
Several actions Trump has taken in the last year were developed by campaign advisers alongside their proposal for a compensation fund as they built out an “anti-weaponization” agenda. Among them: Trump’s pardoning of thousands of Jan. 6 rioters and investigations into a range of political foes related to past probes into Russian election interference and Trump’s own attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Through it all, though, the push for payouts continued to percolate among Trump’s allies as a top objective. Ticktin and other lawyers representing January 6 supporters had frequently raised the idea with officials over the last year, Ticktin said. Ed Martin, the current US pardon attorney, also played a central role in discussions on the fund during the campaign. He continued pushing for it once installed within the Justice Department.
In one episode at Mar-a-Lago just days before inauguration, a group of allies led by Kirk, the assassinated conservative activist, brought the pitch directly to Trump. The supporters who heeded his call to come to Washington on Jan. 6 had had been mistreated and had their rights abused — and now they deserved “reparations,” as Kirk put it, according to a person familiar with their discussion.
Others at the table also expressed support for the idea. Trump didn’t immediately indicate how he felt, but by that time allies had ruminated on the specifics of such a fund for months. Some conservative lawyers even identified an Obama-era precedent they believed could legitimize the idea and give it legal standing, two people familiar with the matter said.
Nearly a year-and-a-half later, top Justice Department officials cited the same precedent, known as the Keepseagle settlement, as they drew up details of the $1.8 billion fund. Critics have said the two funds are completely different, noting that the Keepseagle fund for tribal organizations sprung out of a more traditional settlement for a class action suit that fell under a judge’s oversight.
Still, Trump administration officials thought this effort had improved on Keepseagle because the terms stated any extra money would be sent back to the taxpayers, according to a source familiar with the discussions. The settlement in the Keepseagle case — which concerned allegations of government discrimination against Native American farmers — had no such terms. Instead, a fund was created for third-party organizations when $380 million of the original $680 million settlement went unclaimed by the class of farmers that brought the suit.
Trump administration officials were largely caught off guard by the blowback to the anti-weaponization fund, sources said. Blanche insisted Wednesday that the idea of payouts to people who were “victims” of “weaponization” — who might have lost a job or had to pay exorbitant legal fees — should be broadly popular with taxpayers.
“I don’t think the American people have an issue with that,” he said. “To the contrary, I think they do want their tax dollars spent on things like that.”
CNN’s Rene Marsh, Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
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