By admin 
Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.
Read more Three Judges Just Dared SCOTUS to Say What It Really Thinks About Black Voting Rights
Donald Trump’s slush fund for cronies and violent insurrectionists might be too corrupt—or at least politically radioactive—for even Senate Republicans. Elected representatives scurried away from Washington this past long weekend, and away from the “settlement” reached in a case the president would have lost had it proceeded to trial, in which he sued his own government agencies and agreed to the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for victims of “lawfare” financed by American taxpayers. The fund is not just corruption pretending to be compensation; it is designed to reward violence and to incentivize future violence. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by J.P. Cooney, a top attorney in Jack Smith’s special counsel’s office who helped lead the investigations and prosecutions of Trump. He is now a founding member of Gaston & Cooney, a small public-service-oriented law firm. Also joining the show was Andrea Bernstein, a Peabody- and duPont-Columbia-award-winning investigative journalist, author, and professor. She covered five Trump trials for NPR and wrote the bestselling book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: If you put “American politics as usual” in some imaginary halcyon past at 1 and Watergate at 10, where’s this slush fund scandal registering for you?
J.P. Cooney: This is definitely off the scale. And what I think places it off the scale is, it’s happening right in front of us, here. Trump has engaged in and actually practiced skillful corruption and enlisted every arm of government to accomplish it. Think of where he started, with a lawsuit he brought, allegedly in his personal capacity, against the administration he controls. So he’s enlisted the court system into this corruption. He has then enlisted, of course, his own attorney general and IRS into it by leveraging this settlement agreement. And he has done it to enrich both himself and the insurrectionist loyalists who attacked the Capitol to try and keep him in power and to erase history. It is just an incredible rigging of the system, but doing it in the court system, in his own branch, and with his loyalists, it’s just stunning to me.
View Transcript
There is of course one massive query—whether this could have succeeded at trial. Trump’s suit against his own IRS is filed in Florida. I guess they’re hoping to get Judge Aileen Cannon. They actually don’t get Cannon. Out of the blue, we get this settlement, and then when we think we’ve seen it all, we get the addendum. Can you talk about what’s in the addendum?
Cooney: The addendum is what directly enriches Donald Trump. And it is stunning. The first statement that the administration and the Justice Department made about the settlement was that Trump is not even benefiting from it. He’s waiving his claims against the IRS to create this fund for people who have been the victims of a “weaponized DOJ,” as if he has done something for the people and for the “victims.” Then what comes out basically in secret the next day is a gift that could benefit him to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The gift is that the IRS will not conduct an audit or any enforcement proceeding, nor will the DOJ, based on any tax returns that he or his family or his businesses filed up until the date of execution of the agreement, which was May 19.
What is also notable is that it is signed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. If you go back to the lawsuit, no member of the DOJ ever entered an appearance in that case. You know, usually when the government is sued, somebody from the government will enter an appearance and begin to litigate the case. No one ever did. Trump’s personal attorneys conducted it throughout. His personal attorneys filed the notice of dismissal. His personal attorneys filed the settlement agreement, and the settlement agreement was signed by Stanley Woodward (the associate attorney general, who oversees civil matters of the DOJ) and the CEO of the IRS—the subject of the suit. Not Blanche.
Blanche is the signatory of this separate agreement to not conduct any audits or to conduct any enforcement proceedings based on those tax returns. Here’s why: This was practice corruption at its best. After the Watergate scandal, Congress passed a criminal statute that forbids the president, along with basically any member of their Cabinet or administration, from directing, interfering with, or stopping audits conducted by the IRS, because Richard Nixon had weaponized the IRS against his political opponents. But there is one exception to that, and it is the attorney general. And so the AG has, on behalf of the U.S. government—but really on behalf of his former personal client Donald Trump—waived these potential enforcement proceedings against Donald Trump. So this was actually skillful corruption.
Andrea Bernstein: Back in 2024, when Trump v. U.S. was decided, we talked about how it gave Trump a “get out of jail free” card. If ever that were underlined, it is in this settlement. Trump’s company—and I was there when this happened—was found guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud in New York. Trump himself was found guilty of 34 felonies of falsifying business records. He does not want to have his taxes investigated. Now Blanche has given him the ability to avoid that, not just forever, but forever in all caps.
Andrea, one of the other pieces of this that I just want to nail down is that the taxpayers are funding this, a $1.8 billion slush fund. Can you please explain who is going to get paid out?
Bernstein: Right. What it says, and I think this is also capitalized, is “victims of lawfare and weaponization.” Now, who are these people? It’s being described as Trump allies. But who is it? I think we should be very clear-eyed about that. It is people who tased police officers, who caused traumatic brain injury, who squeezed police officers’ heads in doors, who rammed the Capitol with police shields, with flagpoles, with other weapons, who caused injury, who caused death, people who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. These are the people who are being portrayed as the victims here. What is the message that this sends?
This is a step above “I have a pardon” or “I want a pardon for violating money laundering laws” or “I want a pardon for this other corruption crime I did.” What it is saying to people is, not only if you violently defend Trump’s interests will you face no legal consequences; if you violently defend Trump’s interests, you will be rewarded. That is extraordinary. It means that at some potential future date, someone would not be foolish for concluding: I could do this for the president, and I will not only have no sticks—I will have a carrot at the end of it.
Read more Todd Blanche’s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family “Forever Immunity” Hides a Greater Danger
Cooney: I agree. We should not be paying money to people who attacked police officers and violently assaulted them, and to child molesters, of course. But even that conversation appears to legitimize the entire fund, as if within these “victims,” there’s a class of people that should not be compensated, but within the greater class, there are people who should? I agree with Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s legislative fix on this, except that it’s an illustration of how Trump is so effectively normalizing fraud and corruption because we are actually having negotiations or discussions within the framework that he has established to corrupt our entire judicial and legislative processes.
What does it mean to reward people with taxpayer money, no less, for things they have admitted were wrong, in some cases violent, and in all cases illegal? Am I being naive to note that it’s hard to understand how any notion of a legal system or the rule of law survives if folks say, “I did it, nobody’s forcing me to take this plea, I’m totally sorry, it was an abhorrent thing to do—oh, and now my hands are out for the check”?
Cooney: I don’t think it is over the top to say that it is functionally an overthrow of our criminal justice system and the rule of law. It is actually a hostile takeover of our government in that respect.
It’s also such a perfect construction of a kind of “The law is me” regime. This is beyond the pardon power. This is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. This is literally systematizing the power to say that nothing that ever happens to you in a court of law is final because there’s going to be a black box that’s a hall of mirrors, entirely ideological and political, in which all that goes away. One of the very first lawsuits filed against this settlement comes from two of the police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges. And in their suit, they describe the daily risk of vigilante violence they have faced since they came forward. What does all this do to the good people who want to stand up and now feel that to go on the record in any investigation—in any prosecution ever—is to put themselves in the crosshairs?
Cooney: Trump’s abuse of prosecutorial authority has, in fact, had its intended effect: It is deterring opposition. Certainly, Capitol Police officers like Dunn who stand up now to continue to oppose the administration, as well as other advocates for justice, are not deterred. It does not deter those who are already in the public sphere. But for people who have not entered the public sphere, seeing the reaction when people do stand up to the president—from not just him and his tweets, but from his supporters making violent threats against them, against their families, against their children—when others see that, people who are not necessarily in the public arena, who don’t necessarily come from public service, I think it does chill them from standing up. And I think that, as a result, it is beginning to actually tear at the fabric of who we are as Americans. I think that there are people who in past eras might have contributed to a political campaign or posted something on social media to support a cause they believe in, but who are not doing those things. And it’s not always necessarily because they’re scared that they’re directly going to be threatened, but they’re worried about the consequences for somebody they love or know who works at the FBI or at Health and Human Services, whom they don’t want to see punished for this.
That is part of what I mean, that we slip further and further to a place where it is so much more difficult to come back from. Dunn’s always going to speak up for what’s right. He’s always going to stand in that arena, but the legions of people behind him might have a more difficult time doing it, and that is what I think is so threatening and corrosive.
Bernstein: Ten thousand percent agree. I mean, it is definitely happening. I can hear it as a reporter. People are just afraid or they don’t want the hassle, and it is pervasive.
J.P., for you personally, having prosecuted the events of Jan. 6, working so hard to tell the story of what really happened that day, what does it mean that this is being flipped on its head and your work is being unraveled?
Cooney: It is troubling, but it’s not troubling on a personal level, because it’s not about the effort we put into it, to have it undone. What troubles me is to see the rule of law be unraveled so readily and so easily by this administration. I have frustration with the fact that the institutions of government writ large across the spectrum—not just the presidential administration, but the legislative branch, the public, the media—all appear collectively ill-equipped to do anything about it. This is continuing to happen—and yes, we’re fighting back, and yes, I do believe that ultimately truth will prevail and we will restore our democracy and restore decency at the DOJ. I do believe that these things will occur. But to watch how far they are eroding in real time, that is what I find so troubling.
Bernstein: I’d like to say that I do feel bad for all of the work that was done by everyone involved here, by the prosecutorial teams, by the judges. Let’s remember that this happened during a pandemic, that all of these judges were, while running their courtrooms virtually in Washington, hearing these cases, and that their dockets were full of so many cases that went through the system. So I think it’s OK to regret all of that work. Although I agree with J.P. that I’ve started thinking fundamentally that it’s about not any individual prosecutor, judge, or lawyer who worked on this but about what it means that something that is so carefully, thoughtfully arrived at can just be tossed out with a settlement fund such as this.
Read more Trump’s Attacks on the Lawyer Who Argued Birthright Citizenship Give the Game Away