The $1.8 billion fund ostensibly created to compensate people who claim mistreatment by the “weaponized” Department of Justice under President Joe Biden may face legal obstacles — ironically created by Donald Trump’s own former attorney general Pam Bondi.
According to the New York Times, after Bondi was sworn in as attorney general in February 2025, she immediately placed guardrails around settlements “that largely prohibited payments to groups not involved in an underlying lawsuit.” Now those same restrictions are threatening to derail the Trump administration’s controversial compensation scheme.
On her first day as attorney general, Bondi signed a directive titled “Reinstating the Prohibitions on Improper Third Party Settlements” that revived a Justice Department policy adopted in 2017 and was later canceled by the Biden administration.
According to the Times’ Devlin Barrett, the memo explicitly stated that, except in “limited circumstances,” the department should not use settlements “to require payments to nongovernmental, third-party organizations that were neither victims nor parties to the lawsuits.”
“I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity. That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president,” Jennifer Ricketts, a former branch director in the department’s civil division, told the Times.
Ricketts added: “I’ve just never seen litigation risk outside the four corners of the complaint being used as justification for something in a totally unrelated lawsuit.”
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