Dozens of former federal judges have joined the push to thwart Donald Trump’s creation of a $1.776bn “anti-weaponization fund” that would funnel taxpayer dollars to the president’s political allies.
The bipartisan group of 35 judges filed a lawsuit in the southern district of Florida on Wednesday seeking to reopen Trump’s legal case against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leaking of his tax information by a whistleblower who was later sentenced to five years in prison.
Trump, who had been seeking $10bn in damages, settled that case earlier this month in exchange for a financial agreement with the IRS allowing him to set up what critics have called a “slush fund” for his allies. This could include those convicted of violence during the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot he incited when trying in vain to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump pardoned those convicted after returning to the White House last year.
The former judges said the settlement fund was “a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court”, and urged the Miami-based federal judge Kathleen Williams, appointed by Barack Obama, to reconsider her 18 May decision to approve it.
Reopening the case would, the lawsuit said: “Allow the Court to commence an inquiry into whether the Court was deceived, including with respect to the existence of an underlying case or controversy and any purported arms-length negotiations undertaken to resolve.”
Democrats, and other critics, believe Williams was undercut by the deal days before she was set to rule on whether Trump’s IRS lawsuit had merit. The judges argue that she may have been hoodwinked by the settlement, which was not yet a matter of public record, and had the authority to reopen the case because it was a product of fraud.
“The parties here dismissed this case before the Court could complete its inquiry into whether there was an actual case or controversy, and then cited their ‘settlement’ of this case as the legal justification for looting the federal treasury of $1.776bn,” the filing said.
The jurists behind the lawsuit include former appellate judge J Michael Luttig, a conservative longtime Trump critic, and former district court judges Nancy Gertner and Shira Scheindlin, CBS News reported.
The move follows a week of growing opposition to the settlement, and at least one other lawsuit seeking to block it.
Harry Dunn, a retired US Capitol police officer, and Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan police department officer, who were both on duty and injured by rioters during the 6 January insurrection, sued Trump in US district court in Washington DC last week.
“In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J Trump has created a $1.776bn taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name,” their lawsuit said.
“By its very existence, the fund encourages those who enacted violence in the president’s name to continue to do so. Dunn and Hodges already face credible threats of death and violence on [a] regular basis; the fund substantially increases the danger.”
Opposition has also come from within Trump’s own Republican party. Senior figures in the US Senate have expressed “concern” that money could be diverted to convicted felons, and the chamber last week held up a $72bn Trump-backed immigration enforcement funding bill.
An Economist/YouGov poll this week found that 52% of Republicans, and 45% of those who consider themselves supporters of Trump’s hardline Maga (make America great again) agenda, were against the fund.
The justice department, and acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, have defended it. “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American,” Blanche said last week, claiming that applications for a payout would be open to anybody who felt they had been subject to politically motivated prosecution.
On his Truth Social platform, however, Trump said the payouts were intended for those “so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden administration”.
Among the first to express interest was Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the far-right Proud Boys group, pardoned by Trump last year after being sentenced to a 22-year prison term for plotting to overturn Biden’s victory.
Tarrio has told PBS News that he believed he was entitled to “somewhere in the mid-tens of millions” of dollars from the fund.
Last year, Tarrio sued the government for allegedly violating his civil rights, and the justice department announced last month it was seeking to overturn the seditious conspiracy convictions of leaders of the Proud Boys and another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, stemming from the Capitol attack.
