Conservative says Trump has destroyed an important pillar of American life

President Donald Trump has weaponized the Justice Department so egregiously, he has literally destroyed an important pillar of American life, at least according to one conservative commentator.

“President Trump's $1.776 billion weaponization fund to compensate January 6th rioters for their troubles is now (probably—perhaps mostly) dead,” The Bulwark’s Elliot Williams wrote on Sunday. “But that doesn’t mean that you should stop paying attention to it.”

Williams pointed out that, despite Trump saying he is no longer going to dispense money from the fund, the president has already indicated that it could be revived. Even his fellow Republican senators have not foreclosed the possibility, as they pointedly refused to ban the fund as part of the recently-passed reconciliation bill. Similarly, they have not taken a strong stand against the provision of the agreement that gives Trump’s family from IRS audits of any of their past tax returns.

“Those are important dimensions of this story, of course,” Williams wrote. “But the thing that remains most troubling is what’s going on with the underlying case—Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—and the way it attests to an alarming trend in the U.S. justice system.”

He added, “A federal judge in Miami who is involved in the case recently took the step of reopening it because she feared that the Department of Justice might have lied to her. Technically, what the judge said was that she wants to investigate ‘grievous allegations’ that the deal to resolve the suit was ‘premised on deception.’ (That’s federal judge-speak for ‘The United States Department of Justice might have lied to me to get this done.’)”

Williams emphasized that this is not normal behavior in a functioning democracy, and that it indeed imperils the rule of law in the United States.

“But in the age of Trump, it isn’t the first documented instance of the administration upending the abstruse but foundational legal principle that government officials are assumed to have acted honestly and in good faith,” Williams wrote. “It is called the ‘presumption of regularity,’ a centuries-old concept conceived in England and baked into American law. The Trump administration has acted with almost total disregard for it hundreds of times. And its de facto loss has huge ramifications that are being felt throughout our legal system.”

Speaking for MS NOW earlier this month Norm Eisen, co-founder and board member of Democracy Defenders Action and former special counsel for the impeachment and trial of Trump during his first term, expressed doubt that Trump has sincerely abandoned the $1.8 billion slush fund.

“You only need to look at Donald Trump's long history of lies… to disbelieve the notion that the settlement fund and everything associated with it is going to vanish,” Eisen explained. “We are fighting to erase the slush fund. It's a disgrace.” Eisen went on to point to settlement agreements that forbid the IRS from investigating Trump or his family, calling it “the worst example of corruption in the history of the American presidency.”

He added, “If you pull the rug out from under that case, then everything falls down. There's no legal basis to be giving away the store, as they've done with these settlements. The whole thing is illegal.”