Mock Paper Scissors

Slush Funds

Claw-back the Slush Fund

About Hair Füror’s newest (and outrageous) slush fund, Dan Pfeiffer gives us the thumbnail sketch of what the issue is:

“This is a lawsuit where Donald Trump sued Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is now going to settle with Donald Trump to give Donald Trump money.”

The New Republic tells us:

To recap: In January, Trump sued the IRS over an unauthorized leak of his tax returns when he was president the first time, demanding $10 billion in damages. This lawsuit is absurd on the merits, as my colleague Timothy Noah demonstrates, functionally inviting Trump’s own government to settle a lawsuit massively in his favor, a ground-breaking innovation in self-dealing.

Indeed, in recent days, we learned that the White House has entered into talks with the Justice Department—which is theoretically supposed to defend the government against the lawsuit—to settle Trump’s claim. Trump controls the DOJ, so functionally he’s been “negotiating” a “settlement” with an entity he controls, in which that entity would direct taxpayer money to Trump or his associates or pet causes.

Enter this ABC report. [Ed. Note: I added the link for context. —TG] The new MAGA slush fund would be drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund. That’s something the federal government uses to pay settlements and court judgments, but in this case, Trump would wield quasi-direct control over that money.

OK, so this requires a quick jump to the Treasury Department’s Judgement Fund:

Prior to 1956, most judgments against the United States could not be paid from existing appropriations but required specific congressional appropriations for payment. In 1956, Congress enacted a permanent, indefinite appropriation (“the Judgment Fund”) for the payment of final judgments which were “not otherwise provided for” by another source of funds.

This fund was intended to eliminate the procedural burdens involved in getting an appropriation from Congress to pay a particular judgment. It was also intended to result in prompter payments, reducing the amount of interest (where allowed by law) that accrued against the United States between the issuance and payment of an award.

In 1961, Congress modified the law to allow the Judgment Fund to be used to pay compromise settlements of actual or imminent litigation entered into by the Attorney General. The law creating the Judgment Fund has been codified at 31 U.S.C. § 1304.

Back to TNR:

That’s because ABC also reports that under the settlement, Trump can remove commission members overseeing the new fund without cause. And it wouldn’t be required to disclose its decision-making involving who gets awarded compensation:

Trump’s proposed commission is expected to be composed of five members who would issue monetary awards based on a majority vote, and the process for awarding money and the identities of the recipient could be kept private, according to sources.

In short, Trump’s own DOJ is reaching a “settlement” with him that sets up a new MAGA slush fund of over $1 billion in taxpayer money. It’s overseen by people who can hand out the loot with no transparency, people whom Trump can fire for any reason—say, for not giving money to whoever Trump wants them to give it to. Including his army of insurrectionists…

…But with the new fund, it’s not clear the payments will look anything like this. It appears to transfer control over its payments to Trump alone, Raskin’s staff says, and decouples them entirely from all those agency processes.

“The Judgment Fund exists to settle valid judgments against the United States government,” Raskin told me. Trump and his allies, Raskin said, are “trying to take money from the Judgment Fund while eliminating any controls and oversight” and putting it under Trump’s “direct unilateral control.”

On top of that, Raskin added, this circumvents Congress in another way, since Congress never voted to create a fund structured this way. Which potentially renders it unconstitutional, too.

We’ve seen time and again that our corrupt and illegitimate SCOTUS believes in the god-king power of the presidency and so I am not encouraged by arguments about whether or not something is constitutional or not. SCOTUS seems to realize that at this moment they are playing Hearts (or is it Spades?) and they are Shooting The Moon. It’s all or nothing, and they are going for it all.

“Congress never would have passed a $1.7 billion slush fund for his friends—this is completely outside of our constitutional framework,” Raskin said, called this “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse.”

There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

If Democrats take back one or both chambers of Congress, Raskin said, they will move to shut down this new fund. And they will seek to compel it to release all the details on any payments it makes between now and 2027.

The mechanism for revealing those details already exists, and we can all see them: the Bi-weekly Treasury Report:

Under Public Law 116-9, passed in March 2019, the Department of the Treasury is required to make Judgment Fund payment information available to the public on a website no later than 30 days after a payment is made. To comply with the law, data is posted every 2 weeks here on the Judgment Fund website and includes the following information:

• The name of the specific agency or entity whose actions gave rise to the claim or judgment,
• The name of the plaintiff or claimant,
• The name of counsel for the plaintiff or claimant,
• The amount paid, representing principal liability, and any amounts paid representing any ancillary liability, including attorney fees, costs, and interest,
• A brief description of the facts that gave rise to the claim,
• The name of the agency that submitted the claim.

Keep an eye on this website.

What is really needed is going to be a mechanism to claw all the Ameros back from Hair Füror’s private militias, if any money is actually ever dispersed to the Proud Boys et al.

Add this to the 2027 Agenda.

November Cometh.