'Quite bad': Ex-prosecutor says Trump's slush fund woes are just beginning

[LetMyPeopleVote]

This will be fun to watch

President Donald Trump's .776 billion "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund is now facing jeopardy on multiple fronts, with one just pausing the fund and another reopening the Trump lawsuit against the IRS that formed the basis for it.

— Raw Story (@rawstory.com) 2026-05-30T06:00:12Z

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-slush-fund-2676975085

President Donald Trump's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund is now facing jeopardy on multiple fronts, with one just pausing the fund and another reopening the Trump lawsuit against the IRS that formed the basis for it. And things could be about to get ugly for the president, former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told MS NOW's Jen Psaki on Friday evening.

"Let's just start with Judge Williams' ruling tonight, which effectively reopens the IRS case that Trump supposedly settled, kind of pulled it out of court, I guess," said Psaki. "Give us your thoughts on how that order came to be and what it means."

The key takeaway, Bharara said, is that "tonight we're seeing the third branch of government as listed in the Constitution really asserting itself, right? You have the judge you just mentioned reopening the case that you've been talking about. You have another judge who's frozen the quote unquote, 'slush fund.' And the first judge undertook the thing that happened at the behest of and at the urging of 35 retired judges."

This is notable, he said because "judges, whether they're in office or out of office and still thinking about the rule of law, have made a very important statement here" — and the sitting judge in the IRS case doesn't want to be complicit in "something that's a little too cute for school," and wants a proper investigation of whether the court system is being abused to help Trump pay his allies.

Ultimately, Bharara said, "I think it might be quite bad for the administration when discovery takes place, when the court examines things."

[pfitz59]

1. Dis-bar Blanche

He signed the travesty of a 'settlement'.

[Prairie Gates]

2. Yes, I'm sure comeuppance is just around the corner, as always

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. MaddowBlog-Trump to abandon $1.776 billion compensation fund amid bipartisan backlash, source says

The president was left with a choice: Keep fighting an uphill battle or back down from a fight he was likely to lose. He apparently went with the latter.

www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

BREAKING NEW

Trump to abandon .776 billion compensation fund amid bipartisan backlash, source says

The president was left with a choice: Keep fighting an uphill battle or back down from a fight he was likely to lose. He apparently went with the latter.

😊

— LunaLuvgood2020 (@lunaluvgood2020.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T19:43:33.262Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-to-drop-anti-weaponization-fund

A few days after the Trump administration unveiled its $1.776 billion compensation fund, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went to Capitol Hill to brief Senate Republicans on the details and answer their questions. He likely expected some modest pushback, since a handful of GOP senators had already gone on record announcing their opposition to what they described as a “slush fund.”

But Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer probably wasn’t prepared for the ferocity of the response from those in attendance. In fact, we don’t even have to speculate based on leaks from unnamed officials: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said on his podcast that his Senate colleagues “screamed” at Blanche, as part of “one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate.”

“Fiery does not begin to cut it,” Cruz added. “My guess is there [were] probably 45 senators in the room; at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were pissed.”....

The president was left with a choice: Keep fighting an uphill battle for a brazenly corrupt scheme or back down from a fight he was likely to lose. He apparently went with the latter.....

By any fair measure, the fund never should’ve existed in the first place, and many legal scholars characterized it as the single most corrupt step ever taken by an American president. The initiative began with an outlandish $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against his own administration over the leak of his tax returns during his first term, which he dropped as part of an agreement to create a $1.776 billion fund that would compensate “victims” of the Biden administration, notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that Republicans have never been able to identify any actual, legitimate victims.

There are some key questions that have not yet been answered. For example, the day after the administration announced the fund, Blanche unveiled an addendum of sorts, which said the Internal Revenue Service would no longer scrutinize past or present alleged tax irregularities surrounding the president, his family, and his controversial businesses. The development, among other things, freed Trump from having to worry about a potential $100 million penalty.

Whether this arrangement remains intact as the White House backs off from the existence of the fund remains unclear.

We had two different courts challenge this "fund" as to whether it was a "fraud on the court." The DOJ was not up to litigating these issues and so trump backed down