Trump Just Went Further Than Ever Before to Encourage Another Jan. 6 |
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Donald Trump’s slush fund for cronies and violent insurrectionists might be too corrupt—or at least politically radioactive—for even Senate Republicans. Elected representatives scurried away from Washington this past long weekend, and away from the “settlement” reached in a case the president would have lost had it proceeded to trial, in which he sued his own government agencies and agreed to the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for victims of “lawfare” financed by American taxpayers. The fund is not just corruption pretending to be compensation; it is designed to reward violence and to incentivize future violence. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by J.P. Cooney, a top attorney in Jack Smith’s special counsel’s office who helped lead the investigations and prosecutions of Trump. He is now a founding member of Gaston & Cooney, a small public-service-oriented law firm. Also joining the show was Andrea Bernstein, a Peabody- and duPont-Columbia-award-winning investigative journalist, author, and professor. She covered five Trump trials for NPR and wrote the bestselling book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: If you put “American politics as usual” in some imaginary halcyon past at 1 and Watergate at 10, where’s this slush fund scandal registering for you?
J.P. Cooney: This is definitely off the scale. And what I think places it off the scale is, it’s happening right in front of us, here. Trump has engaged in and actually practiced skillful corruption and enlisted every arm of government to accomplish it. Think of where he started, with a lawsuit he brought, allegedly in his personal capacity, against the administration he controls. So he’s enlisted the court system into this corruption. He has then enlisted, of course, his own attorney general and IRS into it by leveraging this settlement agreement. And he has done it to enrich both himself and the insurrectionist loyalists who attacked the Capitol to try and keep him in power and to erase history. It is just an incredible rigging of the system, but doing it in the court system, in his own branch, and with his loyalists, it’s just stunning to me.
There is of course one massive query—whether this could have succeeded at trial. Trump’s suit against his own IRS is filed in Florida. I guess they’re hoping to get Judge Aileen Cannon. They actually don’t get Cannon. Out of the blue, we get this settlement, and then when we think we’ve seen it all, we get the addendum. Can you talk about what’s in the addendum?
Cooney: The addendum is what directly enriches Donald Trump. And it is stunning. The first statement that the administration and the Justice Department made about the settlement was that Trump is not even benefiting from it. He’s waiving his claims against the IRS to create this fund for people who have been the victims of a “weaponized DOJ,” as if he has done something for the people and for the “victims.” Then what comes out basically in secret the next day is a........