How Trump Created a Slush Fund for His Allies

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. The day after the Justice Department announced the creation of an enormous “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to recompense self-proclaimed victims of government overreach, a Florida-based Republican operative named Michael Caputo filed what is believed to be the very first claim, for $2.7 million in damages, that Caputo says he and his family suffered at the hands of the Biden Administration. “The machinery of government was clearly politically weaponized against my family from July 2016 to December 2025,” Caputo wrote to Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, last Tuesday, May 19th. Over the years, Caputo has been, variously, an ally of the Trump adviser Roger Stone (he was once Stone’s driver); a media consultant to the Russian state-owned energy conglomerate Gazprom; and the Trump Administration’s chief spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. (He went on medical leave in September, 2020, after using his personal Facebook page to accuse government scientists of “sedition” against Donald Trump.) In his letter to Blanche, which was also posted on X, Caputo claimed he had been a target of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and a separate probe into his 2020 documentary, “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder,” for the One America News Network. “This nine-year assault,” he wrote, “drained our savings, destroyed our peace of mind, ruined my career, wrecked my health, and wreaked far more havoc on our family. They found nothing; we lost everything.” When I spoke with Caputo later that day, he mentioned the significance of the fund, whose size was set at the politically resonant amount of $1.776 billion. “Without this fund,” Caputo said, “the political, weaponized assault on thousands of families would go uncorrected, and it will just happen again.”

Not everyone greeted the creation of the fund with similar expressions of joy, and for good reason: the entire arrangement reeks of self-dealing on a scale impressive even for Trump, an in-plain-sight raiding of the Treasury to reward the President’s allies. The mechanism for the payouts is a little-known entity known as the Judgment Fund, which allows the government to sidestep the ordinary congressional appropriations process and dip into an unlimited pool of money to settle lawsuits against it. In this case, the lawsuit was President Trump’s ten-billion-dollar claim against the government for the leak of his tax returns to the Times and ProPublica; the leaker, Charles Littlejohn, had worked for an I.R.S. contractor. As Trump acknowledged, the fact that he serves as the chief executive of the government he was suing was more than uncomfortable; the federal judge overseeing the case demanded that the parties explain how the case met the requirement of two sides with interests adverse to each other. (This is not a legal nicety but a constitutional mandate; the Constitution authorizes federal courts to hear cases or controversies, not to bless back-scratching.) The Justice Department might have had meritorious arguments to defeat the lawsuit: it was arguably filed too late, for one thing; for another, it was not clear that the I.R.S. could be held liable for the conduct of its contractor, which, as it happens, occurred during the first Trump Administration. Instead, Justice settled with the President to whom it answers, and arranged for an astronomical sum, one with no factual basis in the sparse court record, to flow to unknown—indeed, unknowable—parties with no connection to the underlying litigation. (Trump also agreed to drop two other claims seeking two hundred and thirty million dollars from the federal government to compensate him for the 2016 election and classified-documents investigations.)

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