The Trump administration has announced the creation a 1.7 billion US dollars fund to compensate allies of the Republican president who believe they were mistreated by the Biden administration justice department.
The “anti-weaponisation fund” was announced by the US justice department as part of a deal to resolve Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the internal revenue service (IRS) over the leak of his tax returns.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said in announcing the fund in a statement that it was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponisation to be heard and seek redress”.
🚨Justice Department Announces Anti-Weaponization Fund: Part of settlement agreement in President Donald J. Trump v. Internal Revenue Service
Per the settlement, plaintiffs will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages of any kind.
There are no partisan…
— U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) May 18, 2026
Democrats and government watchdogs immediately pledged to fight what they called a “corrupt” and unprecedented resolution, warning that the arrangement would unjustly enrich people close to the president with taxpayer dollars and open the door to meritless claims of political persecution.
Mr Trump’s lawyers disclosed the dismissal of the case in a filing on Monday in federal court in Florida, where the president sued earlier this year.
The fund would represent not only a highly unorthodox resolution but also a further demonstration of the administration’s eagerness to reward allies who before Mr Trump came to power were investigated and in some cases charged and convicted.
Most notably, the president on his first day back in office pardoned or commuted the sentences of supporters who rioted at the US Capitol on January 6 2021.
This case is nothing but a racket designed to take 1.7 billion dollars of taxpayer dollars out of the treasury and pour it into a huge slush fund for Trump at DOJ to hand out to his private militia of insurrectionists, rioters, and white supremacists
Since then, his justice department has approved payouts to supporters entangled in the Trump-Russia investigation and investigated and prosecuted some of his perceived adversaries.
“This case is nothing but a racket designed to take 1.7 billion dollars of taxpayer dollars out of the treasury and pour it into a huge slush fund for Trump at DOJ (the justice department) to hand out to his private militia of insurrectionists, rioters, and white supremacists, including those who brutally beat police officers on January 6 2021, and sycophant accomplices to his election-stealing schemes,” representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the house judiciary committee, said in a statement.
Mr Trump’s lawyers suggested in their court filing seeking to dismiss the case that the resolution would not be reviewable by a judge. But a group of 93 members of congress filed a brief teeing up a challenge.
It was not immediately clear who precisely will stand to benefit from the fund but its creation reflects Mr Trump’s long-running claims that the justice department during the Biden administration was weaponised against him.
He has cited as proof the since-dismissed criminal charges he faced between his first and second terms of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he lost and of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Several aides of his were also prosecuted, as were hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol in an effort to halt the certification of election results in 2021.
Merrick Garland, who served as attorney general during the Biden administration, has repeatedly denied allegations of politicisation and has said his decisions followed facts, the evidence and the law.
His justice department also investigated former president Joe Biden for his handling of classified information and brought separate tax and gun prosecutions against Mr Biden’s son Hunter.
Nonetheless, Mr Trump’s current justice department has actively pursued the president’s retribution campaign and grievances, bringing criminal charges against some of his political opponents and initiating a wide-ranging investigation that aims to establish a years-long conspiracy between law enforcement and intelligence officials to destroy Mr Trump’s political prospects.
No charges have been brought in that investigation and it is not clear that any ever will be.
Mr Trump filed a lawsuit earlier this year in a Florida federal court, alleging that a previous leak of his and the Trump Organisation’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other plaintiffs’ public standing”.
The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, are also named plaintiffs in the suit.
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defence and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Mr Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
