Legal expert throws cold water on Trump DOJ's 'unsettling' attempt to revive slush fund
January 6ers who attacked cops won't have much luck with a new workaround to Trump's frozen slush fund, according to a legal expert.
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman wrote in his Substack about a loophole meant to compensate January 6ers despite the freeze of Trump's $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund. Litman noted that the slush fund "collapsed under bipartisan political pressure last month."
Litman was responding to an article by The Guardian that reported that January 6ers are trying to get paid anyway by filing a claim through the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows compensation for people wronged by the government.
According to The Guardian, a Florida attorney and longtime friend of Trump named Peter Ticktin has helped January 6ers file about 400 FTCA claims, but Litman warned that their claims won't work.
"The FTCA route is not a workaround," Litman wrote. "It is a recapitulation of precisely the same legal problems that doomed the slush fund."
According to Litman, the Trump administration "has already tried to use the FTCA as a vehicle for self-dealing, and that attempt has been declared constitutionally suspect by a federal judge."
He added that the FTCA "is not a general compensation scheme for grievances against the government." It's narrower than that and is meant to compensate "claims arising from the negligent acts of government employees," Litman wrote.
The FTCA claims are also bound to fail because the Trump administration controls both sides of the settlement that created the fund, and the FTCA only pays bona fide settlements of legitimate "actual or imminent litigation," he added.
"The unsettling part of the Guardian report is that the political mechanism that stopped the slush fund—Republican senators confronted with a floor vote, forced to answer on the record whether they supported paying people who beat police officers—may not exist here," Litman wrote. "These are individual cases, filed quietly across multiple dockets, without a single vote to cast or press conference to hold."
"Courts need to be prepared to jump in and call out this latest maneuver for the bogus self-dealing that it is," Litman added. "Whether the president settles with himself through a $10 billion IRS lawsuit, a $1.776 billion slush fund, or 400 individual FTCA claims filed by a friend of his in Florida, the answer is the same: the government cannot be its own adverse party."