(AFP) – A US judge ordered the Trump administration Friday to confirm it has abandoned plans to create a $1.8 billion compensation program denounced by critics as a “slush fund” for the president’s political allies. Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general, told lawmakers at a congressional hearing last week that the contentious “anti-weaponization” fund is “not moving forward,” but he declined to put this in writing.
District Judge Leonie Brinkema, at a court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday demanded confirmation from Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the fund has been abandoned. Brinkema is presiding over a lawsuit challenging the creation of the fund and has already blocked the program designed to compensate people who claimed to have been treated unfairly by the US government. The judge said she would declare the case moot if Blanche and Bessent presented a sworn declaration within a week under penalty of perjury that the fund has been abandoned.
The planned fund had drawn criticism from Democrats, legal experts, and even some members of the president’s own Republican Party. The Trump administration said the fund was intended to compensate people who suffered from government “weaponization” and “lawfare”—Trump’s terms for what he says was politically motivated targeting of conservatives and his supporters. But opponents said the fund had no clear legal basis, little public oversight, and could be used to reward loyalists, including defendants convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.
Trump, on his first day back in office last year, granted clemency to more than 1,500 people convicted over the Capitol assault, when his supporters attacked Congress in an effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
– Trump tax case settlement –
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, which represented plaintiffs in the case, welcomed Brinkema’s ruling as a “significant victory for the Constitution, the rule of law, and people in America.” “The court recognized the serious legal concerns raised by the Trump-Vance administration’s attempt to create a secretive, taxpayer-funded compensation program operating outside the constitutional safeguards that govern public spending,” Perryman said in a statement.
The fund was created by the Justice Department as part of an extraordinary settlement of Trump’s civil lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leak of his tax returns by a former government contractor. An addendum to the settlement bars the IRS from pursuing Trump, his family, or companies for back tax claims, and Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—has said that remains in place. Under the terms of the settlement, the IRS is “forever barred” from pursuing any tax claims against Trump, his family, or his businesses that were pending as of the May 18 settlement date.
Trump is the first US president in recent times to decline to publicly release his tax returns. He has claimed repeatedly that they are being audited by the IRS.
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