Column: 'Anti-weaponization fund' is corruption

For all the Middle America street cred he once commanded, Vice President JD Vance has turned into a disappointing tool for power.

He and I were reared in the same Ohio steel town, a generation apart, and that once gave me a soft spot for him. But I was appalled last week by the way he dodged a straightforward question about President Donald Trump’s so-called “anti-weaponization fund.”

That’s the $1.776 billion kitty the Justice Department just set up to pay off Trump loyalists who have gotten in trouble with the law, including those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

At a news briefing on Tuesday, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins put a hard question to Vance: “You previously told me that anyone who assaulted a police officer on Jan. 6 should go to prison. So why not rule out giving them taxpayer-funded money?”

“Well, Kaitlan,” Vance replied. “What I said is we’re gonna look at everything case by case.”

“Why not rule it out?”

“Because, Kaitlan, there are people who, I don’t know their individual circumstances, and I don’t rule things out categorically when I know nothing about a person’s individual circumstances,” Vance said.

Alas, moments like this tell me that my fellow product of Middletown has picked up one of the worst traits of the administration he serves: a deceitfulness that becomes more smug the more obvious the truth is being denied.

The Jan. 6 rioters assaulted the Capitol in an attempt to interfere with the constitutional transfer of presidential power. Some brutally attacked the police officers protecting the Capitol and were subsequently arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced — before Trump took power again and pardoned them.

Vance, a Yale Law School grad, certainly knows enough about that day, and of the subsequent prosecutions, to answer truthfully. But he seems to have overlawyered his conscience. He can’t admit a very simple truth because it would undermine an edifice of lies that prop up his boss, his party and his own once-bright future.

Thus does a man who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution slide into the muck of corruption.

I learned how that works in the late years of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s reign as “Da Boss” of Chicago, a place many called a bastion of corruption.

It was the late 1960s, and, like many other young idealists of that turbulent era, I was determined to use my reporting skills in the time-honored tradition of muckraking journalists determined to liberate the city’s hardworking taxpayers from what I perceived to be an oppressive autocratic regime.

But, long story short, I was soon surprised to learn after talking to enough real voters in Chicago’s neighborhoods that, for the most part, most of them actually liked Daley.

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In fact, many would say they loved him — as much as they might love the Sox or the Cubs.

As one ward boss explained to me about corruption: “Take what you must, but don’t rob the church poor box. Some things are truly sacred.”

That adage came back to me as I considered the steady march of Team Trump, trampling over laws, norms and time-honored traditions to grab as much power and taxpayers’ funds as they can get their hands on.

In his second term, Trump has blazed new trails in public corruption. He sued the U.S. Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service for the absurd sum of $10 billion, and then graciously acquiesced to a “settlement” offered by the Department of Justice, which is run by his personal defense lawyer. This deal sets aside nearly $2 billion of taxpayer money to “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

“Weaponization” and “lawfare” are MAGA code words for any investigation or prosecution of anyone under the shelter of MAGA’s good graces.

The purported tort at the heart of Trump’s lawsuit was the leak, by an IRS contractor, of Trump’s tax returns and those of his sons and company in an earlier probe.

The Justice Department also stated that Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization would be shielded from prosecution or even investigation of matters relating to tax filings prior to the agreement.

That’s a pretty sweet deal, even if the Trumps aren’t directly entitled to any of the fund’s baksheesh.

As this affair makes clear, the Oval Office has become a zone of lawlessness, built by the president with the cooperation of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, which has granted him effective immunity from prosecution. Vance is there to lend it all prim legitimacy.

Lately, the trickle of evidence of Trump’s self-dealing has turned into a gusher. For example, the president’s recent filing with the Office of Government Ethics, detailing the stock trades he made this year, exudes the aroma of profiteering, conflicts of interest and cronyism. (More details are provided by former patent attorney Liz Oyer in her popular Substack.)

Police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 are suing to stop the slush fund from paying the thugs involved in that melee. And at least one Republican in Congress has spoken up in outrage. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former FBI agent, decried the “massive discretionary fund with no oversight or approval from Congress.”

That’s encouraging, but the need to quash this fund seems close to existential for the future of good government in America.

Some might be tempted to situate Trump’s corruption in a quaint old tradition stretching from Tammany Hall to the Gilded Age boodlers to the Chicago that “ain’t ready for reform.”

Plenty of people love the president with the devotion that neighborhood regulars once lavished on their machine bosses. But Trump is different. He is an abuser. The weaponization fund is a way to pay off agents of his abuse, or perhaps a down payment for more in the future.

Trump has shown us from the Caribbean to the Straits of Hormuz, from the Capitol to the streets of Minneapolis, that if you let him get away with abuses, more will follow. But if you stand up, he will fold. It’s time to stand up.

Email Clarence Page at [email protected].

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