JD Vance has offered a coy justification for Donald Trump’s new $1.8 billion slush fund for MAGA allies who claim they were unjustly prosecuted by the Biden administration.
“Look, I understand the resistance,” the vice president told NBC News Tuesday of the Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” fund. “Any time you spend people’s money—and that’s what we do in the government, we spend other people’s money—you’ve got to be careful about it and deliberate about it.”
“We have long recognized in this country that people who are wronged by the legal system deserve some sort of compensation,” Vance went on. “I think in some ways the discussion around the fund distracted from that underlying principle, which is very important.”
Discussion around the fund has largely focused on concerns that the money could be used to compensate violent criminals convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers and who later received a full pardon for those actions from the president.
It remains unclear how exactly those individuals may have been “wronged” by the previous administration.
The Justice Department is putting the fund together to address an unprecedented legal dilemma. Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion earlier in January over a leak of his tax returns during his first term, creating a conundrum for an administration effectively tasked with defending itself from itself.
The “anti-weaponization” fund is designed to put the dispute to bed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, will appoint a committee to review and approve payouts from the $1.776 billion pot.
Democrats have slammed the move as a blatant grift. Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “fraud and highway robbery,” with Sen. Elizabeth Warren framing it as an “insane level of corruption—even for Trump.”
Many have now raised concerns that payments could be made under the scheme to participants in the Jan. 6 riots. Trump last year issued a sweeping clemency action covering all of the roughly 1,500 charged in connection with storming the Capitol in D.C. at the tail end of his first term.
That action did not distinguish between violent felony convictions and non-violent misdemeanors. It therefore covered more than 600 people charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement in the course of the riot.
Almost 200 of those convictions involved the use of a deadly or dangerous weapon, with almost 170 of them obtained through guilty pleas.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
