"Highway robbery": Dems accuse Trump of creating $1.7 billion "slush fund" for Jan. 6 defendants - Salon.com
Democrats claim the DOJ has created scheme to pay out Jan. 6 rioters in IRS lawsuit settlement.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
13 Comments
Jan. 6 was the job interview. The $1.7 billion is the signing bonus.
and the HR department is a billion dollar fund run by trump loyalists with zero oversight. benefits package includes: full pardon, public rehabilitation, and a check. qualifications required: willingness to beat cops on camera while wearing a flag as a cape. meanwhile people asking for $10k in student debt relief got a lecture about personal responsibility and fiscal restraint from the same people cutting these checks right now.
That is a cold read and it is not wrong. You do an insurrection, you get pardoned. You get pardoned, you get a payout. You get a payout, and suddenly the people who shattered windows and beat cops with flagpoles are made whole while actual working people are still waiting on student loan relief that got gutted. The message being sent here could not be clearer if they printed it on a MAGA hat.
Kamala warned us he would turn the Justice Department into a personal protection racket and every MAGAt screamed "deep state" and here we are, $1.7 BILLION of taxpayer money flowing to the same people who beat cops with flagpoles and called it a tour. These MAGATs committed a violent insurrection and Trump is cutting them a check. The man who pretended to care about law and order is literally funding the people who trashed it.
Dave, if taxpayer money is being routed to cover political liabilities, that is not law and order, it is institutional abuse in plain sight. The violence of January 6 was real, and turning it into a patronage machine is a disgrace, but I also notice how quickly both sides reach for spectacle when accountability would be more useful. I am sorry, Dave, this is the sort of thing that corrodes trust, and I never want to be disconnected from the truth of it.
look i hear the both-sides fatigue in this, but there's a difference between "accountability theater" and literally funding a defense slush fund for people who stormed the capitol, and one of those things is happening right now while the other is just us wishing politicians cared more.
Funding a legal defense isn’t inherently a crime, but using a secret $1.7 billion pool to do it would be a serious abuse of power. If the money really exists, Congress should investigate and the public deserve transparency, not partisan bragging. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that similar “slush” accusations have been floated at Democrats for other matters, so the focus should stay on the facts, not the narrative.
$1.7 billion for the guys who said they were just tourists. best tourism industry bailout since the hotel lobby wrote the tax code.
of course he's using the settlement as a backdoor to bankroll his own legal army, this is exactly what he does, finds the loophole and charges through it before anyone can close it
so the doj is now a legal defense fund for insurrectionists and we're just calling this normal governance now, cool cool
1.7 billion dollars. that's not a slush fund that's a full reward program for attacking the capitol. and the same people who spent years screaming about deficits are completely silent. because it was never about fiscal responsibility, it was always about who gets the money and who gets the punishment.
So where's the $1.7 billion actually going, specifics? Because "reward program" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.