The Victim Fund for People Who Beat Up the Victims

How $1.776 billion in taxpayer money became a reward system for insurrectionists and two cops are the only ones saying so in federal court

Sometimes audacity stops being audacious and starts being architectural. It doesn’t announce itself. It just builds, beam by beam, until one day you look up and realize the whole structure has been engineered to reward the arsonists with homeowner’s insurance.

That’s where we are this week, as two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6th filed suit to block the Trump administration from disbursing nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to, among others, quite possibly, depending on who you ask and whether you ask Todd Blanche, the people who beat them with flagpoles.

The fund in question is called the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which is a name that deserves a moment of silent appreciation. “Weaponization,” in the language Trump and his allies have spent years perfecting, means the use of law enforcement and prosecution against political allies. The remedy for weaponization, it turns out, is $1.776 billion, a figure that is either a coincidence or a taunt, depending on your tolerance for this administration’s aesthetics.

The fund was created to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS after a former contractor leaked his tax returns to media outlets. IRS attorneys reportedly believed they had a strong legal case to fight the suit, and settled anyway. That last part is doing significant work. The United States government, which is to say you, surrendered $1.776 billion on a case its own lawyers thought they could win, in order to create a discretionary pool of money that the acting attorney general will distribute to people he determines were treated unfairly by the justice system. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before joining the Department of Justice. The suit names him as a defendant, along with Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose presence on the defendant list is its own argument, since the Constitution assigns the power of the purse to Congress, not to a trio of Trump loyalists with a claims process. You could not design a cleaner conflict of interest with a drafting table and three weeks.

When asked Monday whether January 6th rioters would be eligible for payouts, Trump said the fund is “reimbursing people that were horribly treated.” Blanche, for his part, declined to rule it out. These are the answers of men who have already decided and prefer not to say so in writing.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday makes them say it in writing, anyway.

The plaintiffs are Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, two men whose January 6th testimony before Congress was, for anyone who watched it, not easy to forget. More than 150 officers were injured that day. Some were struck in the head with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. One lost consciousness after rioters drove a metal barrier into her as they advanced on the building. Video captured a rioter ripping the mask off Hodges as he was pinned against a door during a fight for control of a tunnel entrance. Dunn, for his part, has not retreated from any of this; he is currently running for Congress in Maryland. These are not men in hiding. They are men who keep showing up, which is, when you think about it, consistent with their job description on January 6th.

Their 29-page complaint calls the fund “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” a phrase that appears in a legal filing, not an op-ed, which means attorneys signed their names to it and will argue it before a federal judge. The complaint alleges no statute authorized the fund’s creation, the underlying settlement is a corrupt sham, and the whole arrangement violates the Constitution and federal law. It also invokes the 14th Amendment, the one ratified after the Civil War specifically to prevent the government from paying debts incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States. The suit argues the January 6th rioters engaged in precisely such an insurrection “by attacking the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the lawful certification of a presidential election.” The 14th Amendment is 157 years old and was written for a different century’s catastrophe. It turns out the drafters had a type.

The arc of accountability, or rather, its deliberate unraveling, is worth stating plainly. Nearly 1,600 people were charged with crimes related to the Capitol attack. Trump, upon returning to office, pardoned almost all of them and commuted 14 more sentences. Now the same administration that erased their criminal records may write them a check. Charged, pardoned, compensated. A protection racket with paperwork.

The officers claim the fund “encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so,” and that it “substantially increases the danger” they already face. This is not rhetorical flourish; Dunn and Hodges already face credible threats of death and violence on a regular basis. The fund, in their telling, is not just an insult. It is a financing mechanism.

One of the attorneys representing them is Brendan Ballou, who spent years as a DOJ prosecutor handling January 6th cases, and resigned from the Justice Department after Trump pardoned Capitol rioters last year. He then founded the Public Integrity Project and is now, apparently, not finished. The legal team pursuing this case is itself a rebuke: the prosecutor who quit rather than watch the pardons go through has reconstituted himself as a plaintiff’s attorney and filed a federal complaint calling the whole arrangement a sham. Some people leave the building, and some people come back with a brief.

It’s worth noting, too, that opposition to the fund has not been limited to Democrats. It has drawn criticism from some Republicans, a detail the administration would prefer to keep quiet, and one that slightly complicates the “weaponization” narrative when members of your own party are using the word “slush fund” in polite company.

The kakistocracy, at its most refined, doesn’t just reward incompetence and corruption, it engineers a system in which the corrupt are compensated by the very institutions their corruption damaged, administered by the very officials whose loyalty runs to the corruptor, funded by the taxpayers who were never asked. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not an aberration in that system. It is the system, labeled and incorporated, with a five-member commission and a claims process.

What Hodges and Dunn have done, by filing this suit, is force the logic into the open where it has to be defended out loud. A federal judge will now have to consider whether $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds, settled out of a lawsuit the government’s own lawyers thought they could win, administered by the president’s former personal attorney, potentially payable to the men who assaulted the plaintiffs, constitutes a lawful exercise of executive authority.