Democrats are furious that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice created a strategy for targeted Americans to more easily access the Judgment Fund — established by Congress in 1956 to settle cases of abuses of power and politically weaponized investigations.
A left-wing judge struck down the DOJ’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” last month, and the Trump administration is complying. But the opposition to the fund says more about Trump haters than the policy itself.
“The truth is now abundantly clear: it’s not just the DOJ and the usual cast of weaponized Feds.”
Dozens of federal government agencies are infected with the same political weaponization.
Americans are starting to recognize broader political weaponization of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden years. And it must all be cleaned up.
Michael Caputo, a longtime advisor to President Trump and former senior official in the first Trump administration, applied for restitution after being illegally investigated in the weaponized Democrat Russia and Ukraine hoaxes of the last decade.
Many of the same Democrats now denouncing the effort as corruption and a “slush fund” spent years demanding the DOJ aggressively target people and industries they politically disagreed with.
The Biden DOJ prosecuted an American for posting memes online. It sent grandmothers who prayed at protests to prison. And it pursued unprecedented prosecutions against President Trump.
Hunter Biden initially received a sweetheart plea deal many legal analysts described as extraordinarily favorable.
Biden Era political weaponization wasn’t limited to DOJ and FBI investigations. The same mentality infected regulatory agencies. Antitrust enforcement increasingly became less about protecting consumers and more about punishing politically unpopular industries for ideological reasons.
Rather than focusing on whether consumers benefited from lower prices and stronger competition, Biden-era antitrust regulators at the DOJ and FTC often pursued headline-driven cases built around “big business” political narratives.
The Biden DOJ successfully blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger while progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren cheered.
What happened as a result? Last month, Spirit Airlines, one of the nation’s lowest-cost carriers, closed operations and laid off an estimated 17,000 Americans. Now other airlines, faced with less competition, are raising their fares.
In cases against Pepsi and wine wholesaler Southern Glazer’s, the Biden FTC targeted bulk discounts and volume-based pricing practices that businesses and consumers rely on every day to save money.
Regulators treated ordinary discounting behavior as suspicious simply because large companies benefited from scale.
Biden’s DOJ, FBI and regulatory team are exactly why so many Americans lost trust in federal enforcement institutions. Whether in criminal law, regulation or antitrust, people saw agencies exercising enormous discretion in ways that were often politically selective and detached from common sense.
Democrats defended nearly all of it.
Now many of those same voices are suddenly alarmed by efforts to address government abuse and compensate victims of political weaponization.
The people who killed the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” are effectively arguing for the continuation of a two-tiered system: one set of rules for the politically connected and another for everybody else.
But the battle for restitution and accountability for political weaponization has just begun. Americans are demanding a federal government that applies the law equally regardless of ideology, party affiliation, or political connections.
Restoring equal application of the law is essential if Americans will ever regain trust in federal institutions. Compensating victims via the Judgment Fund, as it was intended 70 years ago, is a good start — but the larger weaponization crisis calls for Trump-style reform across Washington.
