Testifying before Congress, Acting Attorney General and full-time Trump toady, told representatives “we are not moving forward with the weaponization fund.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the Trump administration is scrapping plans to create a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate allies of the Republican president after widespread political backlash and setbacks in the courts.
“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche said.
But if you watch the actual video, it’s not quite so concrete:
BLANCHE: We are not moving forward with the weaponization fund. Period. MENG: Could we get that in writing?BLANCHE: I'm telling you it's not progressingMENG: We hope to see this in writingBLANCHE: I think there will be a transcript of what I say here
As Rep. Grace Meng asks for Blanche to put it into writing that the fund is not moving forward, Blanche declines to do so. Furthermore, he refuses to say if the equally corrupt, illegal, and problematic deal to not have the IRS audit the president and his family is also going away (meaning that it’s not going away). Of course, he also lies and claims that the settlement is between “the IRS” and Trump, which is simply incorrect. The IRS never signed the agreement. It was done by Blanche and the DOJ. He also tries to (falsely) claim that the audit immunity is “not blanket immunity,” which is just false:
DeLAURO: So the blanket immunity for the Trumps is not something you're going move back on?BLANCHE: It's not blanket immunity. That's not trueD: It is!B: No it's notD: ….. B: Nothing has changed with thatD: Friends, listen to what is being said here. This is really pretty extraordinary
As Rep. DeLauro reads, Blanche’s order (again, not an official “settlement with the IRS despite Blanche’s false claims) gives very clear blanket immunity to Donald Trump, his family, and his businesses:
The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney’s fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown, that as of the Effective Date of the Settlement Agreement-have been or could have been asserted by Defendants against any of the Plaintiffs or related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries, by reason of, with respect to, in connection with, or which arise out of (1) any matters that were raised or could have been raised in the Case or the Pending Agency Claims; (2) Lawfare and/or Weaponization; or (3) any matters currently pending or that could be pending (including tax returns filed before the Effective Date) before Defendants or other agencies or departments.
That is blanket immunity. Full stop.
But here’s the tell: if Blanche’s “we are not moving forward, period” were actually true, you’d expect the people who stood to benefit to be disappointed. They’re not. January 6th insurrectionists, including Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio — convicted of seditious conspiracy and later pardoned by Trump — still seem to think they’re going to cash in. Tarrio has been saying he deserves tens of millions of dollars, and rather than expressing any disappointment at Blanche’s testimony, he’s explaining why this is actually good news for him, because it means he can get more money from the US government with less oversight.
Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio says the quiet part out loud:Even if Trump scraps the Anti-Weaponization Fund, the DOJ could still settle separate lawsuits brought by Jan. 6 Capitol attackers —potentially handing out millions in taxpayer dollars to people who participated in the attack.
If you can’t see that, it’s Tarrio texting reporter Liz Landers:
This isn’t an abandonment. They simply state they’re going to wait two weeks… I believe even if this fund is killed in courts or at a congressional level, the President will find a way… They can just settle the tort claims and lawsuits. That has no judicial review or congressional oversight. And it would mean a lot more money in compensation.
Tarrio’s theory — and likely shared by other J6ers — is that they sue the US government, Trump and Blanche agree to “settle,” and millions of taxpayer dollars flow out through the existing Judgment Fund (the same pot the anti-weaponization fund was drawing from) with zero oversight and zero congressional approval.
And he might not be wrong.
It’s also why a competent Congress would step in and shut all of this down. If we had a competent Congress. Which we don’t.
At some point there needs to be a real reckoning with how broken the system already is — that Trump and Blanche got this far is itself an indictment of how bad things are.
Most legal experts seemed pretty skeptical about the tactic of 35 former federal judges asking federal judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the case where Trump sued his own IRS demanding $10 billion. Turns out they were wrong — on Friday, Judge Williams reopened the case, not going so far as to investigate whether fraud had been committed upon the court (yet), but ordering the plaintiffs (Donald Trump) to file a response to those claims:
Accordingly, it is ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that Plaintiffs shall file a response to the Motion (DE 63) on or before June 12, 2026, detailing their position on the matters set forth in the Motion, including (1) the charges of collusion and whether the Parties are truly adverse; (2) the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties; and (3) the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the “victim of a fraud.”
So it’s not yet a full reopening, but clearly signals that the judge felt compelled by what those other judges had submitted. We already knew she was skeptical about whether the parties were truly adverse — she had flagged it explicitly, which is part of what pushed Trump to have his IRS settle with himself before she could dig any deeper.
While Trump has been ordered to respond by June 12th, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see his lawyers (I almost said the DOJ, but, you know, same thing these days) try to rush to either an appeals court or straight to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket — Donald Trump is not exactly known for accepting courts telling him he broke the rules.
There are some other interesting tidbits in the ruling from the judge, including this footnote:
The Court is aware of reporting that the IRS prepared a memorandum outlining ways to challenge Plaintiffs’ claims. Andrew Duehren, The I.R.S. Thought It Could Fight Trump’s Lawsuit, but It Struck a Deal Anyway, N.Y. Times (May 19, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/admin/irs-trump-lawsuit-deal.html. These defenses are consistent with the positions taken by the IRS and the Department of Justice in other litigation.
That’s a pointed eyebrow raise from the judge — essentially noting for the record that the IRS knew the lawsuit was bullshit and the DOJ “settled” anyway.
Just before that, there’s another footnote putting a spotlight on Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and now Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for his unusually hands-on involvement:
This addendum, as the non-party movants point out, may be in conflict with internal Department of Justice policies that require the Department to only enter into compromises that are “specifically limited to the immediate subject matter of the claim which was in fact compromised.” (DE 63 at 8). The addendum was signed only by the Acting Attorney General.
While it’s still early days, the judge is essentially putting it on the record that basically everything here looks sketchy, and she wants Donald Trump’s lawyers to explain themselves before she turns the heat up.
It’s been less than two weeks since the Justice Department created the obviously illegal and unconstitutional $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off MAGA loyalists and January 6th insurrectionists. There are a variety of lawsuits looking to put a stop to it, and we just wrote about dozens of former federal judges asking the original judge in Trump’s bizarre “have my IRS give me $10 billion” case to reopen the case to stop the corrupt fund.
The case was filed by a semi-random collection of people and organizations, including a former AUSA who headed up the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists (and who Trump fired) named Andrew Floyd, but also a California professor who was arrested for protesting ICE nonsense, the city of New Haven in Connecticut, the National Abortion Federation, and Common Cause. Each has credible reasons to try to stop this slush fund from coming into existence.
The complaint details the MAGA obsession with the mostly false claims that Democrats weaponized the government against MAGA:
The creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund follows directly from President Trump and his allies’ longstanding and frequent accusations that Democrats used the government and the legal system as political weapons.
For example, in June 2023, after DOJ charged then-former President Trump with mishandling classified documents, Trump posted a video on social media exclaiming, “This is warfare for the law . . . . Our country is going to hell, and they come after Donald Trump, weaponizing the Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI.”
Republican lawmakers quickly adopted the same language. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “the weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” and then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pledged on Twitter that House Republicans would “hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
Even before his election to a second term, members of President Trump’s campaign spent months developing a scheme to compensate those of Trump’s political allies who were purportedly the victims of “weaponization.”
It further notes that while MAGA keeps whining about weaponization, it appears to be doing far more weaponization of the government than anything Democrats have ever even been accused of doing. And, they point out that the Trump administration (while weaponizing the government) only seems to point to faux claims of weaponization by Democrats, refusing to even suggest their own side has ever done anything wrong and abused the levers of power:
Notably, none of the administration’s efforts to combat “weaponization” include any mention or review of abuses of government authority by Republican officials.
But Trump himself has used “the levers of government power” in unprecedented ways “to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.” See Ex. A ¶ II.C.
During his first term, Trump broke historical norms by being the first president to reject the post-Watergate firewall that separated the White House’s political decisions from independent DOJ criminal investigations.
In his second term, Trump has been arrogating and using power in increasingly unprecedented and abusive ways to carry out his personal political agenda.
For example, DOJ has sought indictments against Trump’s political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic members of Congress. 23 It has also launched investigations into Trump’s critics like California Senator Adam Schiff, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former Special Counsel Jack Smith. 24 Trump revoked the security clearances of 50 people he accused of aiding former President Biden’s presidential campaign, including former top intelligence officials. Exec. Order No. 14152, Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information, 90 Fed. Reg. 8343 (Jan. 20, 2025).
The complaint shows how this is nothing more than a slush fund for often law-breaking Trump allies:
Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy over the January 6 insurrection, said he planned to apply to the Fund. He said that he assumed he could get between $2 and $5 million.
Jenny Cudd, another January 6 defendant, told reporters that “all J6ers will apply for restitution,” noting that news of the Anti-Weaponization Fund was widely circulating among January 6 defendants on social media and “group chats.”
Caroline Engelbrecht, a prominent election denier and founder of True the Vote, a group that amplified conspiracies that the 2020 election was stolen, stated: “I would put myself and True the Vote … squarely in that camp who have been targeted, and we have the receipts to show just how deep that targeting ran. And hopefully, we will see some level of compensation.”
Several attorneys aligned with Trump’s allies have confirmed that they, too, have already received many requests about submitting claims to the Fund.
For example, Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, which defends and advocates on behalf of abortion opponents prosecuted under the FACE Act, said his group is “actively exploring available avenues to seek compensation for clients who were unfairly targeted by politically motivated government overreach.”
The judge declined to formally grant a temporary restraining order, but functionally accomplished the same thing by ordering that the DOJ cannot do anything regarding the fund until after there’s been more briefing on the details here.
Because full briefing of the issue will enhance the ability of the Court to make a sound decision. plaintiffs’ Expedited Motion, [Dkt. No. 30], is DENIED and defendants’ request for additional time is GRANTED; however, to ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the AntiWeaponization Fund (hereinafter, “Fund”) while plaintiffs’ Motion is pending, it is hereby ORDERED that defendants be and are ENJOINED from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund;
The judge set an aggressive briefing schedule: the government must file its opposition by next Friday, plaintiffs reply by the following Wednesday, with a hearing shortly after.
This is a temporary hold, not a permanent win. The government gets to file its opposition, there will be briefing, there will be a hearing. The fund could still come into existence. But for now, at least one federal judge decided that maybe — maybe — the DOJ shouldn’t be disbursing $1.776 billion to Proud Boys leaders and election deniers before anyone’s had a chance to argue why that’s an extraordinarily bad idea.
Thirty-five (thirty-five!) former federal judges are asking a current federal judge to reopen the case where Donald Trump sued his own IRS, and then “settled” the case on terms extremely favorable to himself, his family, and his MAGA loyalists.
Law schools are famous for coming up with “hypotheticals” to try to test students’ knowledge of the law. Sometimes the hypos are fun. Sometimes they’re just bizarre. But the reality of the Trump world now throws out things crazier than law school hypos every few days. As you’ll recall, earlier this year, sitting President Donald Trump sued his own IRS because during his own first administration, a contractor had leaked hundreds of thousands of tax returns, including Trump’s. As we keep pointing out, every single President since Nixon has regularly released their tax returns as a sign of transparency to the American public… except Trump. Who has promised to release his tax returns for a decade now and then not done so, often claiming he couldn’t because he was being audited (leaving aside that when Nixon started this practice, he was being audited).
Of course, the real reason that Trump probably didn’t release his tax returns was because (as we found out thanks to the leak) his actual tax returns showed evidence of pretty significant tax fraud to the tune of $100 million.
Either way, the Biden administration (not Trump) prosecuted the guy who leaked the tax returns and that guy, Charles Littlejohn, is sitting in prison as part of his sentence. But Trump still sued his own IRS and demanded an astounding $10 billion, which would be significantly more than Trump is worth all combined, even with his net worth going up by by over $2 billion since becoming president this time around.
Last month, the judge in the case suddenly called for a timeout, noting that she was unsure that she could actually hear the case, given the fact that it appeared both sides were one and the same, meaning there could be no cause or controversy. She had asked the “parties” (again, effectively one and the same) to brief the court on whether or not the case could even continue. Desperate to end the case before such filings were due, the parties (Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s DOJ) “settled” the case, setting up an unlawful and unconstitutional $1.776 billion fund for MAGA loyalists who claimed Biden wronged them, as well as ending and forever preventing IRS audits of the entire Trump family and family businesses for any transactions up until now.
This is a massive windfall for the president (and I’ve seen some people suggest that perhaps he should face a tax bill for both, since they are positioned as part of a settlement on his behalf) that shouldn’t be allowed without serious judicial scrutiny to make sure that the president is not engaged in the sort of self-dealing he is pretty obviously engaged in.
But the judge in the case did close the case, noting that the voluntary dismissal gave her little choice:
Because the dismissal with prejudice extinguishes the claims regarding the unlawful disclosure of Plaintiffs’ tax returns, the Court cancels all deadlines, including the date that the Parties were required to submit briefing as to whether an actual case or controversy existed in this matter.
The judge does note that the court has no way of knowing whether or not the “settlement” is reasonable given the circumstances:
Because the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the “public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources” and the “fair administration of justice,” 28 C.F.R. §§ 50.9, 50.23—neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring hat settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.
Perhaps I’m cynical, but there’s a detectable whiff of snark in that order.
Either way, dozens of former federal judges are now asking Judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the case. They argue the fake “settlement” and dismissal prevented us from ever finding out if the original case could have been heard in the first place. Furthermore, they point out that because the DOJ and Trump have publicly discussed the “settlement” the court should have some jurisdiction over whether or not it was legitimate, even if it wasn’t filed with the court:
On May 18, 2026, this Court dismissed this action with prejudice (ECF No. 62) in response to Plaintiffs’Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice (the “Notice,” ECF No. 52), filed earlier that day. The Court expressly noted in its Order dismissing the case that “the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement,” and thus “there is no settlement of record.” The Court further noted that Defendants “neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.
The Court was deceived. Despite Plaintiffs not having mentioned any settlement in their Notice, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) publicly announced a “settlement” of this action shortly after Plaintiffs filed their dismissal. That “settlement” commandeers the contrived sum of $1.776 billion from the United States Treasury, to be handed out to recipients chosen by a commission effectively controlled by the President. 3 The DOJ is calling this the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The day after the “settlement” containing the Anti-Weaponization Fund was announced, the DOJ announced that it had subsequently agreed to release “any and all claims . . . whether presently known or unknown, that—as of the Effective Date of the Settlement Agreement—have been or could have been asserted by [the United States] against any of the Plaintiffs or related or affiliated individuals . . . or parties . . . by reason of, with respect to, in connection with, or which arise out of . . . any matters currently pending or that could be pending . . . before Defendants or other agencies or departments.”4 The plain language of this extremely broad provision sweeps in Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) audits of Plaintiffs’ tax returns and all other claims the United States might have against Plaintiffs—extraordinary benefits for which no consideration was provided to the government.
They further note just how blatant the Trump DOJ has been in tying these “settlements” to the present case, despite not telling the court about any such settlement agreement:
The parties to this case are using this lawsuit as the legal justification for these actions. This is not speculation; the parties themselves have proclaimed it, repeatedly. For starters, the DOJ implemented all of the actions described above via a document expressly titled “Settlement Agreement,” captioned with this case’s caption, plus a three-paragraph addendum that references that “Settlement Agreement” in its first paragraph and in its third paragraph purports to “forever bar[] and preclude[]” the United States from pursuing claims that could have been asserted “by Defendants against any of the Plaintiffs” in this case. The “Settlement Agreement” was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward the same day Plaintiffs filed their Notice; in fact, Plaintiffs’ filing of the Notice was expressly required by the “Settlement Agreement.” The addendum granting the extraordinarily broad releases to the President and his family and businesses was signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche the next day, May 19. Yet none of the parties filed either of these documents with the Court. In addition, shortly after announcing the “settlement,” the Acting Attorney General issued an order creating the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” That order—which references the “Settlement Agreement” in this case—explicitly identifies the Judgment Fund statute, 31 U.S.C. § 1304, under which Congress has authorized appropriations for payments of settlements against the United States, and 28 U.S.C. § 2414, which authorizes payments of “final” judgments against the United States including compromise settlements and “imminent” claims, as the statutory bases for the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Payments purportedly made pursuant to these statutes in the absence of a genuine case or controversy are not authorized.
That last bit is particularly interesting. The entire trick that the Trump administration is trying to pull here to route this around congressional “power of the purse” approval is by taking it from the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay off any judicial monetary awards against the US government. But here, there is no judicial award. The Trump/Blanche DOJ is trying to pull a fast one on everyone by announcing a settlement, but avoiding telling the court about it, other than to say that the case is dismissed. And then just announcing a separate settlement, while pretending that this out of court (and not reviewed or approved of by any court) satisfies the rules for access to the Judgment Fund.
That’s just stealing from the American taxpayer.
And thus, these former federal judges argue, the court should be asked to review the settlement.
Movants submit that this “settlement” is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court. But the Court need not decide that ultimate issue now. At this juncture, Movants request only that the Court exercise its powers under Rule 60 to set aside its order ending the case based upon Plaintiffs’ voluntary dismissal. That will allow the Court to commence an inquiry into whether the Court was deceived, including with respect to the existence of an underlying case or controversy and any purported arms-length negotiations undertaken to resolve it. As set forth below, this Court has the power under Rule 60 to determine whether there has been a “corruption of the judicial process itself,” 11 Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 2870 (3d ed.), and may set aside a judgment and reopen a case under Rule 60(d)(3), as well as other subsections of Rule 60, whether by this motion or sua sponte. Doing so will allow judicial review of the extraordinary—and historically unprecedented—circumstances presented by this litigation and by the collusive “settlement” that invokes this litigation as the legal justification for its terms.
The rest of the filing makes a fairly compelling (these are former federal judges, after all) argument for (1) why the court has jurisdiction to review the settlement, and (2) why these judges as non-parties to the case can move to have the case re-opened to allow the judge to review the terms of the settlement, especially when there’s evidence that a fraud has been perpetrated on the court.
Even if the Court declines to entertain a non-party motion under Rule 60, it has the authority to issue sua sponte relief where, as here, the parties have effectuated a fraud upon the Court. Rule 60(d) specifically states that it does not “limit a court’s power to . . . set aside a judgment for fraud on the court,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(d)(3), and the Supreme Court has long recognized that courts have certain inherent powers that cannot be displaced by statute or the Rules of Civil Procedure. See, e.g., Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32, 43 (1991). These inherent powers flow from “the nature of [the] institution” and “cannot be dispensed with . . . because they are necessary to the exercise of all others[.]” United States v. Hudson, 7 Cranch 32, 34 (1812). The court’s inherent powers include, as relevant here, the power to vacate a judgment upon proof that it was procured by fraud, Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v. Hartford-Empire Co., 322 U.S. 238, 245 (1944), or conduct an investigation to determine whether a fraud upon the court has been committed, Universal Oil Products Co. v. Root Refining Co., 328 U.S. 575, 580 (1946) (“The inherent power of a federal court to investigate whether a judgment was obtained by fraud, is beyond question.”). Thus, the Court has the authority to sua sponte invalidate the voluntary dismissal.
They also point out that simply by reopening the case, the court could stall the ridiculous and corrupt anti-weaponization fund, since the Judgment Fund is only available for final settlements. And if the case is still open the settlement is no longer final.
Should the Court exercise its authority to reopen the case and hold additional proceedings, it would effectively preserve the status quo. Importantly, the Judgment Fund is only available for “final” settlements. 31 C.F.R. § 256.1(a)(1). A settlement premised on a dismissal that has been voided is not “final.” Similarly, voiding the Notice and reopening the case would allow the Court to continue its jurisdictional inquiry. And, if the Court ultimately concludes that it did not have jurisdiction and dismissed the case on those grounds, such a dismissal would deprive the parties of their claimed justification for the settlement.
The former judges don’t mince words about how ridiculous this whole damn thing is:
To be clear, the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified. That is because the Acting Attorney General’s Order creating the Anti-Weaponization Fund identified the Judgment Fund, 31 U.S.C. § 1304, and the Attorney General’s authority to enter “compromise settlements” under 28 U.S.C. § 2414, as the basis for the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Both of those authorities require the existence of a legitimate litigation and not, as here, one that is collusive, feigned, or fraudulent.
The DOJ is only allowed to enter “compromise settlements of claims”—such as this one— “for defense of imminent litigation or suits against the United States, or against its agencies or officials upon obligations or liabilities of the United States.” 28 U.S.C. § 2414. And a feigned or collusive suit is not active or “imminent” litigation against the United States pursuant to which the DOJ is authorized to access the Judgment Fund and § 2414. See U.S. Gov’t Accountability Off., GAO-08-978SP, 3 Principles of Federal Appropriations Law 14-35 (3d ed. 2008) (requiring that “[t]he agency must be confronted with a genuine disagreement or impasse” and “[t]here must be a legitimate dispute over either liability or amount”); 31 C.F.R. § 256.1(b) (“Fiscal Service requires that requests for payment identify the statute that forms the basis of the underlying claim. The award or settlement must comply with the statutory and regulatory requirements that authorize the award or settlement.”).
None of this means Judge Williams will reopen the case. But she was already suspicious, she was already asking questions the parties clearly didn’t want answered, and she’s now been handed a formal legal basis to pick this apart. The former judges aren’t asking her to do something radical — they’re asking her to finish what she already started before the parties ran away from her courtroom.
Whether she does it or not, the filing itself is useful: 35 former federal judges have now put on the record, in plain language, that a sitting president sued himself, settled with himself, hid the settlement from the court, erased his own tax liability, and raided the Treasury for $1.776 billion in the process.
There have been plenty of absolutely batshit crazy legal filings from Trump and his crew over the last few years, but a filing last night takes the crazy to new levels. This is in the case filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the National Park Service over the ballroom Donald Trump is trying to build (and for which he already tore down the East Wing of the White House despite earlier promises that it wouldn’t even touch the existing building). It absolutely reads like a typical Donald Trump Truth Social post more than any legal filing you’ll ever see:
“The National Trust for Historic Preservation” is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words “in the United States” to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not. In fact, the United States refused to continue funding it in 2005 because they strongly disagreed with their mission and objectives. They are very bad for our Country. They stop many projects that are worthy, and hurt many others. In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members. They were asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built. They were shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified, and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service. But this did not deter them because they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly referred to as TDS, as noted by Democrat Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, and are represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig. The lower section of the building does not work without the upper section and, likewise, the upper section of the building does not work without the lower. It is all one highly integrated unit! As an example, one venting system, one electrical system, one plumbing system, one security system, one air conditioning and heating system, one elevator connector and, very importantly, one structural steel and enforced concrete system — and more. Even the bullet proof windows and glass, and the heavy steel, drone proof roof, protect what is below. With such a facility, it would have been impossible for an attack like that which took place last Saturday evening in D.C. when an attempted assassin, armed with a shotgun, pistol, and knives, charged through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton in an attempt to assassinate President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and members of the President’s Cabinet and senior staff, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Secret Service fortunately neutralized the assassin before he could reach the ballroom. However, Saturday’s narrow miss—which marks the third assassination attempt on President Trump since 2024—confirms what should have already been obvious: Presidents need a secure space for large events, that currently does not exist in Washington, D.C., and this Court’s injunction stalling this Project cannot defensibly continue, for the sake of the safety of President Trump, future Presidents, and their families, Cabinets, and staff. Defendants thus request that this Court issue an indicative ruling under Rule 62.1 that it will dissolve its injunction. Three assassination attempts—including the attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassin’s bullet hit the President’s ear—is enough. There is absolutely no argument that a woman walking her dog in the vicinity of the White House has STANDING to stop such a desperately needed structure for the people of the United States of America, as it will provide Presidents, current and future, a secure space to do their jobs.
I kid you not: that is the entire first paragraph of the legal filing. At the very least it raises the question of who actually wrote this. In tone and style, it reads as identical to a typical Donald Trump social media post.
And also, as explained below, it seems to admit to a potential sharing of a top secret military plans with an organization that (in the same paragraph!) the DOJ claims is “fake.”
Beyond the craziness of the filing, there are so many other problems with this. First off, the case is already on appeal at the DC Circuit, meaning that filing this in the District Court is meaningless, given that it’s out of that court’s hands for now. The judge in the lower court, Judge Richard Leon (who is not known for suffering fools gladly), literally has no ability to step in and take back control over the case and change his earlier ruling. That’s not how any of this works.
You would hope the DOJ understands such basic concepts regarding civil procedure. But apparently not!
Separately, as Law Dork’s Chris Geidner points out, the lawyers who filed this (including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche) aren’t even the lawyers who are on the caption on the appeal:
The Monday night filing was not submitted by any of the 11 lawyers who filed the notice of appeal in the case on April 16. Instead, shortly before the filing, Woodward entered an appearance in the case.
It is very rare for the associate attorney general — No. 3 at DOJ — to enter an appearance in a case, let alone personally file a brief.
Also, if you actually read the filing, the DOJ bizarrely admits that it shared the supposed details of an apparently top secret military structure with an organization it simultaneously deems “fake.” It’s worth breaking down, because it demonstrates, yet again, the hallucinating ChatGPT nature of this President — just keep generating plausible-sounding answers, consequences be damned.
The piece starts out by (falsely) saying that the plaintiffs in the suit, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, is a “fake” organization:
“The National Trust for Historic Preservation” is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words “in the United States” to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not.
I mean, no, it doesn’t make it sound like a Government Agency. It makes it sound like a non-profit. And there are many non-governmental organizations that one could argue sound like a government agency: the US Chamber of Commerce, for example. But most people can deal with that.
Next, the filing admits that the details of the ballroom are “top secret” and a national security issue:
In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members. They were asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built
And then immediately admits that the US government supposedly showed the plans of this top secret military installation of great national security importance to an organization they themselves are claiming is fake:
They were shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified, and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service.
So even taking the filing at its word, the DOJ is admitting to what might very well be an Espionage Act violation — revealing the “detailed plans and specifications” of a “top secret” military facility to a “fake” group.
And that’s their opening argument here!
One can reasonably call into question the underlying lawsuit, or even Judge Leon’s earlier ruling. But this filing is beyond crazy not just in what it says, but how it’s written. In normal times, this filing would be cause for a court to order sanctions against the lawyers filing it. That it’s filed by the Acting Attorney General of the United States should be cause for serious concern. Instead, it’s just another Tuesday.
The DOJ continues to be the Trump Administration’s preferred avenue of vengeance. Since his return to office, multiple prosecutions targeting the president’s critics and political opponents have been mounted. To date, not a single one has succeeded. (And more than a few have been stalled completely by Trump’s refusal to engage in the legally required appointment process.)
Now, it’s going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming (incredibly) that paying informants to infiltrate hate groups is exactly the same thing as funding hate groups. It’s some truly insane spin, which is being delivered by some of the federal government’s top hucksters.
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”
There’s a lot of stupid stuff being said here, but clearly the stupidest thing is Blanche’s opening sentence. “Manufacturing racism?” This assertion deserves all the derision it will earn, but I’ll let Liz Dye of Public Notice run with it because hers is the best I’ve read yet:
The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.
People who actually believe racism is something that’s “manufactured” or otherwise blown out of proportion generally tend to be racists or, at the very least, throw their support behind bigoted politicians. The acting attorney general is running with this narrative, implying that racism would cease to exist if alleged fraudsters like SPLC weren’t so busy keeping it alive just to turn a profit.
Patel’s follow-up makes it sound like the indictment is full of caught-in-the-act crimes perpetrated by the SPLC and its employees. “State and federal crimes,” he says, suggesting there’s far more to it than [checks official statement] the profitable manufacturing of racism.
But you can read it [PDF] for yourself below. It portrays every payment to an informant as deceptive funding of hate groups. That might have meant something if anyone who’s given their money to the SPLC had ever expressed concern about misuse of their donated funds. Back to Liz Dye at Public Notice:
No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC.
For reasons everyone knows (but will never be admitted by the administration), no one at the FBI or DOJ considered this to be a form of fraud until after Trump took power again, following years of the SPLC flagging some of Trump’s biggest fans as members or operators of hate groups. This is pure vengeance being dressed up to look like a standard criminal prosecution.
Oh, and back to those alleged crimes Kash Patel crowed about. The “federal” crime is the use of dummy corporations to obscure the source of money being paid to informants. Sure, it’s a crime to sign your name to false statements, but this wasn’t done to hide the payments from donors or launder illegally obtained funds. It was done to protect the informants, which is something the FBI does all the time.
On top of that, this “fraud” had already been detected and handled by the bank. The end result of the bank’s 2020 internal investigation was SPLC voluntarily closed the accounts and informed the bank that these had been opened on behalf of the Center. That happened in 2021. Even though the bank had a full admission/confession from the SPCL in its hands, it never tried to pursue criminal charges against the Center.
And the DOJ isn’t content to settle for mere wire fraud charges. It also alleges actual money laundering was happening here, a statute that requires the funds to have been obtained illegally. If the DOJ tries to connect the dots, it’s going to end up presenting a circle with no origin point in court because both the fraud and money laundering allegations involve the same set of bogus bank accounts. The money that traveled back and forth between these accounts originated elsewhere and nowhere in the indictment does the DOJ even attempt to claim the origin point was illegal activity.
The “state crime” is this:
In 2014, [Informant] F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents. F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9.
Even if this can all be proven, it still doesn’t amount to much direct criminal activity by SPLC itself. The indictment says this informant was paid “more than $1,000,000” from 2014 to 2023, it doesn’t say the SPLC directed the person to engage in this theft. The indictment also alleges SPLC paid another informant $6,000 to take the fall for the theft, which is a bit more worrying. (And I can’t imagine that informant is going to be too happy about that after seeing how much the other informant was allegedly paid.)
If that state crime needed to be prosecuted, it could have been handled by the state it occurred in more than a decade ago. Bringing it up now just means the DOJ is looking for anything it can stack on top of a bunch of overblown accusations to drag the SPLC into court for the sole purpose of putting it out of business. The last three pages of the indictment set out the DOJ’s forfeiture demands, which makes it clear that the government hopes to drain it of its resources while it engages in its completely bullshit prosecution.
The SPLC is far from perfect. But it’s not being targeted because it strayed too far from the constraints of the law. It’s being targeted because it has repeatedly pissed off Trump and his supporters. It might be almost impossible to get a court to agree on record that this is a vindictive prosecution (at least without something showing up in discovery), but everyone involved — including the judge who eventually handles this case — knows that that’s exactly what this is.
Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering that every major party presidential nominee since Nixon had voluntarily released their tax returns — Trump was the exception, not the rule, and the “harm” he suffered was exposure to the same transparency his predecessors embraced without incident.
The original piece laid out why the whole thing was a scam: Trump is the plaintiff, the IRS and Treasury are the defendants, and the DOJ defending those defendants is stocked with Trump’s former personal attorneys who have made clear they still consider themselves his personal attorneys — a problem that has only gotten worse with Todd Blanche now serving as acting AG. The fix was obviously in. The only real question was how brazenly the parties would go about it.
We now have an answer, and it turns out the answer is: extremely brazenly, and in writing, on the public docket.
Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation. This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.
[…]
The Parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation. This brief period will allow the Parties to initiate and structure those discussions in a manner that best serves the interests of all Parties and the Court.
Read that the normal way you’d read any consent motion, and it’s mundane. Two adversarial parties are exploring settlement. Courts love this. Judicial economy! Everyone wins.
Now read it again with the actual parties in mind.
The plaintiff is the sitting President of the United States. The defendants are two agencies of the executive branch that the plaintiff (again, the President of the United States) runs. The lawyers representing those defendants report, through a chain of command, to Trump’s former personal lawyers. “The Parties are engaging in discussions” means Trump’s lawyers are negotiating with Trump’s other lawyers over how much of your money Trump gets to take home. The “interests of all Parties” reduces, functionally, to the interests of one guy. The phrase “avoid protracted litigation” means “skip the part where a judge or a jury or any actual adversarial process might interfere with the predetermined outcome.”
Real negotiations require two sides with opposing interests. This is just a man haggling with his own wallet over how much of your money to take.
The filing notes that there hasn’t even been an attempt at a defense from the government yet:
None of the Parties will suffer prejudice: the case is newly filed, no scheduling order has issued, and the Government has not yet answered or otherwise responded on the merits. An extension will conserve judicial and party resources and avoid piecemeal litigation that could arise if the Parties are forced to proceed without first exploring these discussions.
The consent motion even includes, with a straight face, the boilerplate certification that plaintiff’s counsel ‘conferred in good faith’ with the very people he effectively works for:
Pursuant to Southern District of Florida Local Rule 7.1(a)(3), Daniel Epstein, co-counsel for Plaintiffs, certifies that he conferred in good faith with counsel for Defendants on April 15, 2026 by telephone regarding the relief sought in this motion. Defendants consent to the requested extension.
The only party with an actual adverse interest here — the American public — has no seat at the table and no lawyer in the room.
The structure of the scam is clear. Step one, filed back in January: sue your own government that you control for $10 billion over something that wasn’t its fault, using a complaint so flimsy it quotes the leaker himself saying Trump suffered “little harm” — and demanding damages for being exposed to information that every other modern presidential candidate simply released voluntarily. Step two, filed this week: get the defendant you control to agree with you that litigation should pause so you can work out a deal. Step three, coming soon to a docket near you: announce a “settlement” in which the taxpayers cut a check to the president for some eye-watering sum, with the DOJ loudly proclaiming that this was the responsible outcome that avoided wasteful litigation.
At each step, the paperwork will look perfectly normal, indistinguishable from thousands of other consent motions on other dockets. The corruption lives entirely in the gap between what the documents say and who is actually on each side of them.
This is worth naming plainly: what’s happening here is exactly the kind of self-dealing abuse of public office that the impeachment clause was written to address. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, defined impeachable offenses as those:
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
If a sitting president negotiating a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded payout to himself — through agencies he controls and lawyers loyal to him personally, over damages he demonstrably did not suffer (he is richer than he has ever been and won re-election after the leak) — does not qualify as an abuse of public trust, then the phrase has no meaning.
But none of that matters, because the political machinery that would be required to act on any of this has been thoroughly captured or cowed. Congress has largely abdicated. The Supreme Court, as noted in January, has made it clear there’s not much the courts can do about presidential self-dealing. The DOJ is, for these purposes, Trump’s law firm. And so the scheme proceeds on schedule, in plain sight, with everyone involved politely pretending that “the Parties are engaging in discussions” describes something other than what it is.
We’ll almost certainly be back for part three when the inevitable settlement drops. You already know roughly what it will look like. The only real variables are the size of the number and how straight a face whoever is serving as Attorney General at that point manages to keep while announcing it.
You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.
This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.
It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.
But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.
Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.
Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.
Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.
The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.
But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.
Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me come home.”
The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.
Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn’t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.
Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump’s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped.
Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump’s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the “Friends of Trump.”
The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.
The Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter, and more than a third of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit.
But even amid this turmoil, Ver’s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump’s family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver’s team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word “fraud.”
It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.
Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.
“Roger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.
In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department.“I know of no cases like this,” said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. “They’re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.”
Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump’s or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called “the happiest day of my entire life.” In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world’s supply.
Ver is clean-cut and fit — he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He’s often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.
Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new “non-country” without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.
“Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people’s income to control them in any way,” he told a gathering of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. “It makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes.” More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They “say, ‘Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?’”
Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn’t a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep “exit tax” on the appreciation of all their property.
In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes.
Ver’s defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors’ advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies’ holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.
The Biden administration’s Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver’s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was “rock solid,” according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver’s defense that he made a good-faith error.
By the time of Trump’s election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials worried he might use to escape on the high seas.
In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was “barking up every tree,” said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump’s orbit.
Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president. “If anybody knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare it’s Trump, so I think he’ll be able to see it in this case as well,” Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. On Charlie Kirk’s show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word “censored” written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver’s prosecution was unfair. Ver paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.
Ver’s pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign — in which he kept comparing himself to Trump — was not landing, according to Pierce. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors — shut up,” his friend recalled saying.
One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver’s flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, “Roger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.”
But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the “Friends of Trump,” a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state’s solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump’s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.
Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump’s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche to join Trump’s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump’s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022.
On Ver’s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver.
Kise scored the legal team’s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.
In that meeting, however, it wasn’t clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver’s case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged.
Bhirudinitiallyexpressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was “hard to believe” that a man going by “Bitcoin Jesus” would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.
Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.
The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.
But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees’ zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges.
Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.
“While there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,” said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver’s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.
It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being “weaponized” against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.
While many cases failed to grab the administration’s attention, Kise got results. Last week, Kise’s client Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon from Trump.
“Every defense attorney is running the ‘weaponization’ play. This guy gets an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise,” said a person who recently attended a high-level meeting Kise secured to talk the Justice Department down from prosecuting a client.
As Kise stepped up the pressure, Ver’s case ate up a significant share of Bhirud’s time, despite his job overseeing more than 1,000 Justice Department attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter. Ordinarily, it would be rare for a political appointee to be so involved, especially to the exclusion of career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.
Bhirud began to muse to coworkers about whether failure to pay one’s taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn’t it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware Ver’s advocates could try to elevate the case to the White House.
The government ceded ground and offered to take prison time off the table. Eventually, Ver’s team and Bhirud hit on the deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed on a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for a payout and an agreement not to violate any more laws. The government usually reserves such an agreement for lawbreaking corporations to avoid putting large employers out of business — not for fugitive billionaires.
By the time fall approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche’s blessing, were negotiating Ver’s extraordinary deal line by line. Once more, career prosecutors were cut out from the negotiations.
Ver’s team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government’s supposed final offer because it required him to admit to “fraud,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In the end, Ver agreed to admit only to a “willful” failure to report and pay taxes on all his bitcoin and turned over the $50 million.
The government arrived at that figure in a roundabout manner. It dropped its claim that Ver had lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on how much he had evaded in taxes in 2014 alone, plus what the government asserted were interest and penalties. In the end, the deal amounted to the sum he allegedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a U.S. court.
Under any previous administration, convincing the leadership of the tax division to drop an indicted criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a nonstarter. While the Justice Department settles most tax matters civilly through fines, when prosecutors do charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate is over 90%.
People “always ask you, ‘Can’t I just pay the taxes and it’ll go away?’” said Jack Townsend, a former DOJ tax attorney. “The common answer that everybody gave — until the Trump administration — was that, no, you can’t do that.”
When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it touted it as a victory.
“We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and satisfied his obligations to the American public,” Bhirud said in the Justice Department’s press release announcing the deferred prosecution agreement. “This resolution sends a clear message: whether you deal in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe.”
Inside the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: “He’s admitted he owes money, and we get money, but everything else about it stinks to high heaven,” said a current DOJ official familiar with the case. “We shouldn’t negotiate with people who are fugitives, as if they have power over us.”
Among the wealthy targets of white-collar criminal investigations, the Ver affair sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in that kind of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are asking which of the “Friends of Trump” they should hire. One prominent criminal tax defense lawyer said he would give his clients a copy of Ver’s agreement and tell them, “These are the guys who got this done.”
The only one of Ver’s many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.
It’s hilarious that a single Salvadoran migrant has made the Trump administration look so pitiful. During one of its first purge efforts, the administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and another 100-plus migrants to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison.
Since then, the administration has done nothing but lose when it comes to Abrego Garcia. He not only managed to get returned to the US, but he’s successfully pushing back against the bullshit prosecution the DOJ cooked up to punish him for daring to stand up for his rights.
At this point, the DOJ is almost out of options. The Tennessee judge overseeing the attempted prosecution has not only allowed Abrego Garcia to go free on bail, but has taken setting a trial date completely off the docket until the government can provide an argument for engaging in the prosecution that isn’t just “because he pissed us off.”
The timeline of this prosecution strongly suggests the government can’t contradict Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution allegations. Abrego Garcia’s first experience with US law enforcement happened in November 2022 when he was pulled over for speeding by Tennessee Highway Patrol officers. The locals referred the case to Homeland Security Investigations based on “suspicions of human trafficking.” Garcia, however, was free to go and didn’t even get a speeding ticket.
On March 12, 2025, he was arrested and interviewed by HSI. The decision was made to deport him. Although the 2022 traffic stop was discussed, Abrego Garcia still wasn’t charged with any crime beyond being in the country illegally. HSI closed its human trafficking investigation on April 1, 2025. Again, no charges were brought.
Three days after that, a Maryland court ordered Abrego Garcia returned to the US because his due process rights had been violated. More litigation ensued with the Supreme Court finally weighing in on the issue on April 10. Then this happened:
[O]n May 21, 2025, a Middle District of Tennessee grand jury presented a two-count indictment against Abrego arising from the November 30, 2022 traffic stop. An arrest warrant issued, prompting the United States to return Abrego from El Salvador. Abrego was arrested on June 6, 2025, and was brought to this District.
So far, the government has turned over 3,000 pages to the court. Abrego Garcia hasn’t seen many of these because the government claims almost everything it has provided are privileged communications. The court says that may be true in some cases, but it hardly matters because what it has seen so far undercuts the sworn statements the DOJ has previously made in this case. The government has argued (not very convincingly) that this can’t possibly be vindictive prosecution because the acting US Attorney Robert McGuire did all of this on his own without any input from the rest of the administration.
The central question after Abrego established a prima facie case of vindictiveness is what information in the government’s control sheds light on its new decision to prosecute Abrego, after removing him from the United States without criminal charges. These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with (Associate Deputy Attorney General Akash] Singh and others.
Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences. For example, Singh contacted McGuire on April 27, 2025, to discuss Abrego’s case. On April 30, 2025, Singh asked McGuire what the potential charges against Abrego would be, whether the charging document would reference Abrego’s alleged MS-13 affiliation, and asked for a phone call before any charges were filed. In a separate email on April 30, 2025, Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche). He then told McGuire to “sketch out a draft complaint for the 1324 charge [making it unlawful to bring in and harbor certain aliens].”
On May 15th, McGuire emailed his staff that “DAG (Blanche) and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” Then, on May 16, 2025, counsel of record Jacob Warren emailed Singh and reported, “if the DAG (Blanche) does want to move forward with the indictment on Wednesday, we think it would be prudent to loop in the press office ASAP.” Finally, on May 18, 2025, Singh emailed McGuire and others, and instructed them to “close[ly] hold” the draft indictment until the group “g[o]t clearance,” to file. The implication is that “clearance” would come from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, not just McGuire.
The upshot is this: the government can assert all the privilege it wants to, but the system of checks and balances means it can’t bypass constitutional rights just by denying criminal defendants access to anything that might support their arguments.
The Court recognizes the government’s assertion of privileges, but Abrego’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution outweighs the blanket evidentiary privileges asserted by the government.
For now, the government is barely managing to hang onto a case it’s probably going to end up losing. All the power of the government — especially this government which has repeatedly expressed its disdain for courts, judges, and orders it doesn’t like — is meeting an unexpectedly immovable object. And if Abrego Garcia walks away from this a free man, he’s going to make it clear that even the cadre of thugs currently inhabiting White House cabinet positions still have soft, white underbellies that can be exposed.
