What Editorials Are Saying About New DOJ Fund

The Justice Department is creating a $1.8 billion fund—a symbolic $1,776 billion, to be exact—that will be doled out to people deemed to have been improperly targeted by the Biden-era DOJ. "The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department's intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again," acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a public statement. The White House thus calls it an "anti-weaponization fund," but critics are sounding a much different theme:

• The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal describes the precedent as "astounding" and warns it might backfire on Republicans. Assuming it comes to pass, the fund is "sure to become a highlight reel of Trump Administration payments to Mr. Trump's friends and allies," reads the editorial. "Imagine the fun Democrats will have documenting it all between now and 2028 as the worst kind of Washington political payoff."
• A Washington Post editorial also cites the precedent, warning that if "this stands, it will become a template for all future American presidents to shower financial benefits on friends and allies without accountability." Trump, they write, "is stretching executive authority to a breaking point," and Democratic lawmakers should take note. "The $1.776 billion to be deposited in the settlement fund is meant to evoke the year Americans declared independence. It's a reminder that spending taxpayer funds without the consent of their representatives is liable to generate revolutionary sentiments."
• On the right, however, the site Twitchy ridicules the idea that taxpayer money is being abused. Yes, it is taxpayer money involved. "And the IRS will be using it to compensate its victims, who are taxpayers. All government money is taxpayer money."

• Paul Krugman, a frequent critic of Trump from the left, writes that the fund reaches a new level of corruption in his view. "Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in US history," he writes via Substack, under the headline, "The looting of America." Now, however, "Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today's world."
• At the Intercept, Natasha Lennard similarly calls it a "staggeringly corrupt and unprecedented move," while Andrew Egger at the Bulwark worries about the lack of outside accountability for the fund's five-person commission and sees it as "utterly un-American" and "emperor stuff."