Patty Murray

WASHINGTON – Sen. Patty Murray expressed outrage Tuesday after President Donald Trump sued the government he runs, then settled the lawsuit with his own Justice Department and created a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who say they were mistreated by the federal government.

The Washington Democrat questioned acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a hearing Tuesday morning, a day after the agency he leads announced the settlement and the creation of an “anti-weaponization fund” filled with $1.776 billion taxpayer dollars, a reference to the year the United States declared independence. In a subcommittee hearing to review the Justice Department’s budget request, Murray accused the nation’s top law enforcement official of helping Trump commit an “absurd” act of corruption.

“What we are talking about is nothing short of the sitting president of the United States looting from the Treasury for his own gain,” she said. “Do you seriously think this arrangement is appropriate? The president telling the federal government to settle a case and let him pay billions to the people that he chooses?”

Blanche countered by denying that the settlement created a “slush fund” and arguing that such a compensation fund has precedent, pointing to the Obama administration’s 2011 legal settlement that created a $680 million fund to compensate Native American farmers who claimed in the 1980s and ’90s that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had illegally discriminated against them through a farm loan program and other USDA services. In response, Murray pointed out that a judge approved the 2011 settlement, whereas Trump settled with his own administration when a judge began asking tough questions about the lawsuit.

The settlement was announced two days before a deadline set by federal Judge Kathleen Williams, who was considering dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS because the president controls both the personal lawyers who filed it and the government lawyers who were supposedly on the opposing side.

The two Republicans in Washington’s congressional delegation, Reps. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane and Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, both said they support the fund but hope it won’t be used to compensate people who committed violent crimes during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has expressed support for doing exactly that, including in a March 2025 interview with Newsmax in which the president called the convicted rioters “patriots” who “were treated so unfairly” by federal prosecutors.

“The DOJ pays out funds all the time to folks who have been wronged by the U.S. government, and I hope and expect that this will be a nonpartisan, nonpolitical board that will make these decisions fairly and with careful stewardship of American taxpayer dollars,” Baumgartner said in an interview Tuesday. “If it’s a grandmother that wandered into the Capitol on Jan. 6, and then was targeted for partisan reasons to make a political point, I mean, I think that kind of person could be found to be deserving. I certainly hope no payments go to anyone that committed acts of violence on Jan. 6.”

On the day he returned to office, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people involved in the riot, from minor trespassing charges to felony convictions for smashing windows and beating police officers. After some of the pardoned rioters retraced their steps on the fifth anniversary in January, Trump went a step further in April and erased records of those convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning and leading the riot.

Newhouse, who is retiring from Congress at the end of the year and was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, said in a statement that while he is waiting for more details about how the fund will be used, “I understand compensating those who were victims of the previous Administration’s lawfare.”

“Farmers and ranchers, including some here in Central Washington, were wrongly sued at the urging of extreme environmental organizations, resulting in millions of dollars in litigation fees that put some operations out of business,” Newhouse said. “At the same time, I firmly believe these funds should not be allowed to go to any individual who participated in and was convicted of criminal activity, including those involved in the attacks on January 6th.”

Since Trump granted clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants, at least a dozen of them have been charged with other serious crimes, including assault, burglary and sex crimes against children, according to a review by the New York Times. In March, a 45-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing a boy and a girl, both 12 years old at the time, whom he tried to silence by promising to give them millions of dollars from a payment be claimed he would receive for being unjustly imprisoned for crimes committed during the Capitol riot.

Newhouse, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said Congress should use its oversight role “to ensure this fund is used in an appropriate manner.” Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, pledged to use her position on that panel to try to block funding for what she calls Trump’s “slush fund.”

The four Republicans who represent Idaho in Congress – Sen. Mike Crapo, Sen. Jim Risch, Rep. Russ Fulcher and Rep. Mike Simpson – did not respond to questions about the compensation fund on Tuesday.

When Trump ran for office in 2016, he broke with decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax returns. After the election, an Internal Revenue Service contractor leaked some of the president’s past tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica, revealing that Trump had paid zero income tax in 10 of the 15 years before he became president. The former IRS contractor was sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison for making public the tax returns of Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans.

Trump – along with his two eldest sons and their family business, the Trump Organization – sued the IRS in January for $10 billion in damages, claiming that the IRS and the Treasury Department didn’t properly safeguard their tax records. On Tuesday, the Justice Department added a page to the settlement that gives Trump, his family and their businesses permanent immunity from IRS audits on pending matters, including any tax returns already filed.

Under the terms of the settlement, Trump won’t receive the taxpayer money directly but can personally remove members of a five-person panel that will decide who gets a payout. The panel’s members are to be chosen by Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer who has been running the Justice Department since Trump fired former Attorney General Pam Bondi in April.

The Justice Department’s announcement didn’t make clear exactly who is eligible to receive a payout from the fund, but Blanche told senators Tuesday there would be “full transparency.” Baumgartner said Americans should be confident that “our system of checks and balances” will ensure that transparency.

“Somebody’s got to appoint the board, and I’m sure there will be a lot of scrutiny and oversight over the announcements and how they’re made,” he said. ”I hope and expect it will be nonpartisan and we can have confidence in it, and ultimately there will be a ton of scrutiny and transparency, and I’m sure it will come up in questions of oversight. So, I think we can have confidence in it.”