Trump’s anti-weaponization fund puts GOP cowards on trial

Eleven months ago in these pages, I argued that task forces would not cut it. President Trump needed a truth and reconciliation commission.

I noted at the time that the Biden administration oversaw one of the most sweeping campaigns of federal abuse in modern American history. Nearly every major department played a role. A truth and reconciliation commission on political persecution would give Americans what they had long been denied: justice, reconciliation, and a full accounting of the truth.

Trump has created an opportunity to help real victims in a real way. Republicans should not kill it. They should make it work.

In November, Senate Republicans tried the opposite. Rather than compensate everyday victims of federal weaponization, they tried to pay themselves.

The scheme emerged from the Arctic Frost scandal. Senators quietly inserted legislative text into a funding bill to end the government shutdown. The provision would have created a $500,000 cause of action for individual senators for each instance in which investigators seized their data. Some senators could have become millionaires many times over.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) drove the effort and repeatedly went on television to defend it.

I argued then that the surveillance of senators was wrong. It should never have happened. But senators did not face what ordinary Americans endured.

Senators have large campaign accounts to hire top lawyers. They operate from official offices, protected by constitutional safeguards such as the Speech and Debate Clause. They did not lose their homes, jobs, savings, or businesses. But thousands of Americans did. Many still face legal bills, ruined livelihoods, and ongoing cases. They deserve restitution — not the politicians who failed them.

The Oversight Project, my organization, joined the fight. We called out Graham and made the legal, prudential, and political case for compensating the real victims of weaponization. The Senate’s self-dealing provision was eventually pulled, much to Graham’s chagrin.

But the victims remained ignored.

Trump created a better path

That began to change last week. President Trump stepped up in his own unique and unmistakable way.

In January, Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service over a political leak of his tax returns. Those returns, after years of left-wing fixation, revealed nothing especially interesting. Trump sought $10 billion in damages. He recently settled for a far lower amount: $1.776 billion.

RELATED: The anti-weaponization fund is not just for J6. It is for the rest of us too.

JDawnInk/Getty Images

But rather than pocket the money himself, Trump directed it toward the creation of an Anti-Weaponization Fund. The fund would be governed by five members empowered to issue monetary settlements to victims of government weaponization.

That act deserves applause. It also deserves protection.

Trump is redirecting money that could have gone to him toward Americans harmed by the government. Conservatives should encourage that kind of selflessness, especially from a president who suffered more than anyone from the weaponization he now seeks to address.

The fund must work

I instantly recognized the historic opportunity the fund presents. I have spent years defending victims of weaponization, investigating government abuse, and advocating restitution. The fund needs to work, and it needs to work well.

For that reason, I threw my hat in the ring to serve as one of its five members. But this column is not about my campaign for that position. It is about the Anti-Weaponization Fund and the bad-faith attacks now aimed at destroying it.

January 6, 2021, became the fulcrum for the left’s assault on civil rights, legal norms, and basic rule-of-law principles. Prosecutors, courts, media outlets, members of Congress, and left-wing activists turned their power against ideological, political, and religious enemies.

In their minds, January 6 gave them moral and political permission to go all the way. They used it to hurt thousands of Americans, including people who had nothing to do with the Capitol riot. Once they saw what their unleashed machinery could do, they lost all shame and restraint.

These victims were my friends, colleagues, and fellow patriots. Some had to sell their homes. Some lost jobs. Some saw their reputations destroyed. Many incurred crushing legal bills.

The so-called conservative legal movement and legacy conservative institutions were largely absent. Too many viewed the targets as a lower-class problem — or worse, as an opportunity to purge the Republican Party of the deplorable MAGA voters they detested.

Republicans funded the machine

The FBI sent agents to question parents at school board meetings. The government pressured social media companies to censor lawful speech on a massive scale. Senators had their phone records secretly subpoenaed. Churchgoers were surveilled. Americans who did nothing more than hold the wrong political opinion found themselves under the microscope of a weaponized federal government.

Republicans in power did worse than nothing. They confirmed Merrick Garland, an obvious case of a scorned partisan with revenge on his mind, as attorney general. As weaponization accelerated, Republicans funded it without restraint.

They also poured billions into the Department of Homeland Security, helping finance a vast network of left-wing nonprofits that moved illegal immigrants into and around the country while providing them with every service imaginable. USAID and other federal agencies served as Democratic patronage networks, funneling money to left-wing projects and make-work jobs.

House Republicans even launched a so-called Weaponization Committee. It barely scratched the surface of its $20 million budget and achieved little.

What did Republican leaders do well? Fundraise and appear on cable television to denounce the very abuses they kept funding.

RELATED: If Congress can’t oversee the FBI, who can?