Democrats are furious that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) created a strategy for targeted Americans to more easily access the Judgment Fund, established by Congress in 1956 to settle cases of abuses of power and politically weaponized investigations.
Never mind that the DOJ’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” announced last month has been struck down by a left-wing judge and the Trump administration is complying. Never mind that it was hardly the “slush fund” of its critics’ worst imaginings but an attempt to redress real wrongs.
The bi-partisan faux outrage machine is fired up again and their opposition says more about Trump haters than it does about the policy itself.
The truth is now abundantly clear: it’s not just the DOJ and the usual cast of weaponized Feds. Dozens of vital federal government agencies are infected with the same political weaponization.
In fact, Americans are starting to recognize broader political weaponization of other agencies like the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden years. And it must all be cleaned up.
Full disclosure: As one of many Americans illegally investigated in the weaponized Democrat Russia and Ukraine hoaxes of the last decade, I immediately appliedfor restitution and reimbursement for the bogus investigations. And I angered all the right people.
Ironically, many of the same Democrats now denouncing the effort as corruption and a “slush fund” spent years demanding the DOJ aggressively target people and industries they politically disagreed with. Now that Trump is trying to clean up the damage and compensate victims of government abuse, those same people suddenly claim to be deeply concerned about “norms” and impartial justice.
Let’s not forget that the Biden DOJ prosecuted an American for posting memes online. It sent grandmothers who prayed at protests to prison. And, of course, it pursued unprecedented prosecutions against President Trump. And don’t get me started on Hunter Biden, who the DOJ initially gave a sweetheart plea deal many legal analysts described as extraordinarily favorable.
Biden Era political weaponization wasn’t limited to DOJ and FBI investigations and prosecutions. The same mentality infected regulatory agencies, too. Antitrust enforcement increasingly became less about protecting consumers and more about ppunishing politically unpopular industries and large companies for ideological reasons.
Rather than focusing on whether consumers benefited from lower prices and stronger competition, Biden-era antitrust regulators at the DOJ and FTC often pursued headline-driven cases built around “big business” political narratives. Companies were targeted not because consumers were being harmed, but because Democrat regulators had the itch to break up big businesses for socialistic egalitarian reasons.
Of course this was political weaponization, too.
Americans saw this politicized mindset extend far beyond criminal prosecutions — including into transportation, pricing, and antitrust enforcement.
The Biden DOJ successfully blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger while progressive Senators like Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren cheered.
What happened as a result? Well, last month, Spirit Airlines, one of the nation’s lowest-cost carriers, closed operations and laid off an estimated 17,000 Americans. Now other airlines, faced with less competition, are raising their fares.
At the same time, in cases against Pepsi and wine wholesaler Southern Glazer’s, the Biden FTC targeted bulk discounts and volume-based pricing practices that businesses and consumers looking to save a few bucks rely on every day. Regulators treated ordinary discounting behavior as suspicious simply because large companies benefited from scale (as did their customers, who saw lower prices).
Biden’s DOJ. FBI and regulatory team writ large are exactly why so many Americans lost trust in federal enforcement institutions. Whether in criminal law, regulation or antitrust, people saw agencies exercising enormous discretion in ways that were often politically selective and detached from common sense.
And Democrats defended nearly all of it.
Now many of those same voices are suddenly alarmed by efforts to address government abuse and compensate victims of political weaponization.
The people who killed the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and other reforms are effectively arguing for the continuation of a two-tiered system: one set of rules for the politically connected and another for everybody else.
But the battle for restitution and accountability for political weaponization has just begun. Americans are demanding a federal government that applies the law equally regardless of ideology, party affiliation, or political connections – and President Trump will deliver.
Restoring equal application of the law is essential if Americans will ever regain trust in federal institutions. Compensating victims via the Judgment Fund, as it was intended 70 years ago, is a good start at bringing it back — but the larger weaponization crisis calls for Trump-style reform across Washington.
Michael Caputo is a longtime advisor to President Donald J. Trump and a former senior official in the first Trump administration. His family was targeted for almost a decade by two politically weaponized FBI investigations – from Russiagate starting in 2016 to a Biden corruption coverup 2021 through 2025.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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