With President Donald Trump establishing a $1.776 billion compensation fund for people who have supposedly faced "weaponization" of federal law enforcement, MAGA allies are lining up and chomping at the bit to get a cut of the pie — but they're not the only ones.
According to NBC News, Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney and now a sworn enemy of the president, is also applying for a payout for the mistreatment and revenge targeting he experienced at the hands of the Trump administration itself.
Cohen helped arrange the hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, that formed the core of Trump's business fraud conviction — the only one of his four criminal cases to reach its conclusion. Cohen himself ended up serving time for lying to Congress, and Trump, enraged by Cohen opening up about the dark secrets of his time working with Trump, allegedly canceled his home confinement and re-jailed him in retaliation for his efforts to write a book.
Trump's "Anti-Weaponization Fund" was created as part of a controversial settlement to drop his $10 billion case against the IRS for allowing his tax information to leak — a situation that Cohen says also happened to him.
"'What Trump complains about happened to him happened to me twice,' Cohen said, referring to his tax returns being unlawfully leaked by an IRS contractor in 2018," said NBC. "John C. Fry pleaded guilty in 2019 to downloading Cohen's personal financial information from the Treasury Department's FINCEN system and leaking it to lawyer Michael Avenetti, who in turn gave it to a reporter." Cohen told reporters, “As I write in my letter, if the weaponization fund truly exists to support individuals destroyed by politically motivated law enforcement tactics, selective prosecution, government leaks, abuses of power, and intentional destruction of reputation, then there is perhaps no clearer example than what happened to me."
This comes as Senate Republicans grow increasingly alarmed and opposed to the entire existence of Trump's anti-weaponization fund, and are discussing legislative avenues to shut it down.
