President Donald Trump’s ill-fated $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund suffered yet another major blow on Monday, with a federal judge delivering a brutal review of the process that led to it.
It’s part of a growing trend of judges saying rather bluntly that Trump and his Justice Department aren’t operating in good faith — and even that they’re misusing the legal process for Trump’s personal and political benefit.
The most recent is US District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama nominee whose 56-page opinion is routinely brutal toward Trump and his DOJ’s conduct in the case that produced the now-defunct settlement.
Williams said the settlement — which included the fund that could have given money to violent January 6 defendants and also purported to give Trump amnesty from past tax issues — resulted from a lawsuit that was essentially a pretext.
She said Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the illegal leaking of his tax returns was merely meant to “provide some legitimacy” to what the administration already wanted to do with the settlement.
