Congress is best chance to stop Trump ‘lawfare’ fund, attorneys say

Congress will have the best chance in the courts to block a controversial $1.8 billion “lawfare” compensation fund set up by the Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against the Internal Revenue Service, former federal prosecutors told CNBC on Wednesday.

Those attorneys, both now in private practice, said members of Congress have good legal grounds to challenge the use of taxpayer money for the fund, which purportedly will pay people who were unfairly targeted by the DOJ under the Biden administration.

Two days after Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the fund’s creation, skeptics from across the political spectrum emerged to figure out next steps to challenge its legality. Challenges could wind their way through the court system for the duration of Trump’s presidency or longer and could wind up before the Supreme Court.

Opponents have have various avenues for lawsuits that could delay the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from making payouts to claimants, or even potentially kill off the fund altogether, the lawyers said.

On Wednesday, two police officers who had defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from a mob of Trump supporters, sued Trump in federal court in Washington, seeking to block the fund from going into effect.

It remains to be seen if the officers will be found to have legal standing to challenge the fund or if their theory of why it is illegal will prevail in court.

“This is among the most corrupt acts we’ve seen,” said Chris Mattei, a trial attorney in Connecticut who was previously chief of the financial fraud and public corruption unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the state.

“Essentially, what you have is a president who used a frivolous lawsuit to create pretexts within a thoroughly corrupted Department of Justice to agree to create a fund to pay off the president’s supporters and would immunize the president from any tax consequences,” Mattei, who practices at Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder, said.

He was referring to the settlement barring the IRS from audits or enforcement actions against Trump and his family members for tax filings prior to the settlement.

Trump on Wednesday told reporters he was not involved in the settlement that created the fund, but defended its purpose, saying that “people were destroyed” by the weaponization of law against the Jan. 6 Capitol defendants and other people.

“They went to jail, their families were ruined, they committed suicide,” Trump said. “You know, all the Biden administration and the Obama administration, both of them, I mean, the Obama administration started it.”

“The Biden administration was horrible in terms of…