DOJ Tracker: May Update Our monthly update to track the attacks on the rule of law and the Justice Department. Here’s what you need to know from May.

Welcome back to our Substack series to help you stay informed and engaged in protecting the Justice Department. Each month, we pull highlights from Justice Connection’s DOJ Tracker to offer a more digestible way to keep up with the latest attacks.

Here’s what happened in May.

“Anti-Weaponization Fund”

On May 18, DOJ announced that it would create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as part of the settlement in a frivolous lawsuit brought by President Trump against the IRS. The settlement also prohibits the IRS from conducting any tax audit on Trump, his family’s or his company’s past tax returns, immunizing them from future prosecution. (Former federal prosecutor Perry Carbone, who spent over 30 years at the Justice Department working on white collar cases, explains in Justice Connection’s Substack how the self-dealing lawsuit and the subsequent settlement fail the sniff test.)

The Anti-Weaponization Fund was probably the most overtly corrupt action this administration has taken so far. It set aside nearly $1.8 billion of taxpayer money from the DOJ’s Judgment Fund to issue “formal apologies” and compensate individuals who were allegedly targets of “weaponization and lawfare.” It will be governed by commissioners that President Trump can remove at will, and will end disbursement of funds by December 2028. This means that the fund’s recipients will likely all be allies of Trump and not, say, individuals prosecuted by the current administration for political reasons.

Among the recipients who are widely expected to be paid are January 6 defendants. In fact, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, during a congressional hearing, refused to rule out compensating individuals convicted of assaulting police on Jan. 6. Already, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his crimes on Jan. 6, and Mike Lindell, who helped organize the Jan. 6 rally, have expressed interest in the fund.

Justice Connection issued the following statement, which numerous outlets included in their coverage:

We also illuminated the DOJ headquarters building in protest with a quote from John Adams that said, “A Government of Laws, Not of Men.”

As we told NBC News, “the administration has shifted the country away from a system of laws and toward an era of lawlessness.”

DOJ tried to create a veneer of legitimacy around the fund. In his May 18 memo describing it, Blanche made multiple comparisons to Keepseagle v. Vilsack, an Obama-era settlement fund that reimbursed Native American farmers for systemic credit discrimination. Josh Gardner, the lead counsel for the government in Keepseagle, explained how widely the case differed from Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund in a Substack piece written for Justice Connection.

The fund’s future appears over. Police officers who were attacked on Jan. 6 — represented by a former DOJ attorney who prosecuted Jan. 6 cases — sued to block the fund, alleging that it will “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in [Trump’s] name.” Other lawsuits followed. Congress also exerted pressure, with Senate Republicans reportedly “furious” over the fund. They postponed a vote on an immigration enforcement bill before Memorial Day weekend as they balked at the notion of rewarding violent offenders.

On May 29, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked the fund. The Florida federal judge who oversaw Trump v. IRS also announced she would be seeking an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the settlement after 35 retired judges asked the court to reopen the case. On June 2, Blanche testified that the Trump administration was abandoning the fund, but that tax immunity for Trump, his family, and his company would remain active. However, he refused to commit to putting the cancellation of the fund in writing.

Meanwhile, DOJ removed all press releases about the prosecutions of Jan. 6 defendants from its website, calling the information “partisan propaganda.” The department’s normal practice is to add a note to its press releases if an individual is found not guilty or pardoned. Instead, this administration is choosing to erase public records of Jan. 6 crimes and recast those perpetrators as victims who deserve compensation. Lawfare collected those deleted press releases, which can be viewed here.

Here are a few other things you might’ve missed:

• News broke that FBI Director Kash Patel took a “VIP snorkel” around the Pearl Harbor Memorial while on official business in Hawaii last year. Justice Connection told the Associated Press, which first reported this, that “It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe.” That seeming indifference to public safety was clear when he fired a senior intelligence analyst for apparently political reasons. The analyst, Deputy Assistant Director Emily Morales, once contributed to a 2017 FBI assessment that angered Republicans because it did not label a shooting at a House Republican baseball practice as “domestic terrorism.”
• Federal judges in Rhode Island appointed a special counsel to investigate potential misconduct by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Bolan, who leads the office’s civil division. In a case regarding an undocumented defendant detained by ICE after being arrested for assault, Bolan withheld crucial information about the defendant from federal District Court Judge Melissa DuBose on directions from DHS. Judge DuBose then released the defendant on bail, without knowing that he was wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic. DHS later issued a press release attacking Judge DuBose as an “activist Biden judge” and suggesting she knowingly released someone accused of murder, despite the fact that DHS told Bolan not to disclose the information to Judge DuBose. Once she learned of the facts, Judge DuBose ordered the defendant to be detained again but federal law enforcement have not been able to find him. Though Bolan apologized, the Chief Judge for the District of Rhode Island appointed a special counsel to investigate the issue and make a recommendation on whether formal disciplinary proceedings should be pursued. Meanwhile, the DHS press release remains live, putting Judge DuBose’s safety at risk.
• DOJ continues its unprecedented escalation of denaturalization litigation, with reports that hundreds are being prepared and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services lawyers have been detailed to U.S. Attorney’s Offices to file them.
  • In a new Substack piece we broke down how this will burden already overwhelmed USAOs, fail to secure the border or send criminals to prison, and terrify millions of naturalized Americans. Read here. We also told NPR that “the recent plans for escalation are unprecedented and will require an immense amount of time and work by lawyers who are already stretched thin.”
• The Office of Personnel Management issued a draft notice proposing that all federal employees sign non-disclosure agreements in order to prevent leaks.
• Presumably in response to the staffing crisis that DOJ leadership created, the Civil Division began offering $25,000 signing bonuses to recruit new attorneys, as well as retention bonuses for attorneys. In the District of D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is giving out $5,000 to $7,000 retention bonuses to select prosecutors in her office.