On Monday, June 1, Axios’ Marc Caputo reported that the Trump administration “plans to drop its controversial” $1.7 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” and a White House source told Axios, “It’s dead for now.” Countless Democrats have condemned the fund, but criticism is coming from the right as well. In a blistering editorial, the conservative National Review applauds the fund’s apparent demise and hopes there are no efforts to revive it.
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The Donald Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said the fund was being created to help people it claims were unfairly targeted for criminal charges by the Biden administration and former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the fund’s critics on both the left and the right denounced it as a “slush fund” that would force taxpayers to give money to rioters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
In the editorial — headlined “The Anti-Weaponization Fund Is Dead. Long Live Its Death” — the National Review editorial board argues, “Well, that didn’t take very long. Two weeks after we editorialized against the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization fund,’ Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee hearing that the administration is not going forward with the fund. That’s good news. It’s a sign that Senate Republicans in particular have remembered that they run an independent branch of the federal government, with its own responsibility to voters and its own duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws it writes.”
The Review board adds, “They should go two steps further: bar Trump from reviving the idea, and ensure that future presidents are no longer empowered to engage in similar mischief.”
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The conservative board notes that Republicans on Capitol Hill, especially GOP senators, “had concerns from the start about the fund.”
“Its huge and transparently symbolic price tag was obviously not calibrated to any realistic assessment of the government’s actual liability for legal wrongs allegedly committed by the Biden administration,” the National Review board writes. “Its December 1, 2028 end date was obviously designed to ensure that it served the politics of this administration and not its successors. There were real worries that it would be used not only as a corrupt slush fund to reward political allies, but specifically to pay off January 6 rioters in ways that would be both morally wrong and politically embarrassing to Republicans.”
The board continues, “To the extent that there’s an argument for creating new rights of compensation for government misconduct beyond those already on the books, that’s the job of Congress…. It is also heartening to see that the power of the purse still works…. The fund was publicly indefensible, and election years have a way of putting a stop to indefensible things.”
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