CHIPPEWA FALLS, Wisconsin (LifeSiteNews) – President Donald Trump defended his administration’s shelved proposal for an “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate victims of government persecution during a combative interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Announced last month with a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release, the fund was part of a settlement agreement created in exchange for Trump dropping his lawsuit against the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over a contractor leaking his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020. Under the agreement, the plaintiffs (which also include the president’s sons and the Trump Organization) will not receive direct compensation or damages and have also agreed to drop complaints pertaining to the “unlawful raid of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia-collusion hoax.”
Instead, the new fund would be empowered to “issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants” using $1.776 billion from the DOJ’s judgment fund until December 2028. Claimants would have to submit a claim, a process the DOJ says is open to anyone regardless of political persuasion – a point Vice President JD Vance highlighted Tuesday by claiming former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was “welcome” to apply and “go through a normal process where we vet everything.”
Billed as a way to provide restitution to Americans targeted by Biden-era abuses of power for their peaceful conservative activism or traditional Christian values, the fund was quickly derided as a “slush fund” ripe for abuse due to a government panel deciding how to award taxpayer money rather than awarding damages by adjudicating specific cases in civil court. The fund was to be managed by a five-member commission whose members will be chosen by the attorney general, its rulings would not have been subject to appeal or legal challenge, and the payouts did not have to be publicly disclosed.
Even several Republicans publicly and privately pushed back on the details amid questions of how impartially it would be implemented and fears of having to answer questions about it during difficult midterm election campaigns.
On June 2, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress “we are not moving forward with the fund,” followed by a formal DOJ statement that “compensating the victims of weaponization and making them whole remains a priority for this administration,” but the DOJ is “not proceeding” with the fund due to “extraordinary misunderstanding” of its purpose.
NBC host Kristen Welker pressed Trump on the state of all this during a sit-down interview at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where the president was addressing an agricultural roundtable event. Trump insisted that most of the opposition to the fund was from Democrats and that “very few” Republicans objected.
“Just to be very clear, are you backing off the fund completely as your acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said, or are you looking for another avenue to revive the fund?” Welker asked.
“People have been hurt so badly by radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe,” Trump said. “They’re vicious. They’re violent, what they did to people. And, of course, they went after me more than anybody else. They raided Mar-a-Lago and all the other things. But people have been badly hurt. They’ve committed suicide. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re lost their families. They’ve lost their wives. They’ve lost everything. They’ve lost everything over a fake weaponization of government.”
“If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve. People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. Many suicides, think of it. People have committed suicide because a bunch of thugs went after them,” he continued. “So me, personally, I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans. You have to get it approved. If they get it approved, that’s great. If they don’t get it approved, I’d be disappointed.”
The conversation quickly veered into an argument over the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and whether California’s current elections were being “rigged” against Republicans, with the lion’s share of press attention focusing on Trump walking out of the interview after calling Welker and her network “crooked.”
But the answer suggests the president is still interested in reviving the fund in some form.
Many sympathetic victims could potentially benefit from such a fund. The politicization of justice was one of the defining controversies of the Biden years, from the prosecutions of pro-life activists and a gender “transition” whistleblower to lax prosecution of pro-abortion violence to another memo identifying “Radical Traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology” as a potential motivator for “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”
In January 2023, a jury found Philadelphia pro-life activist Mark Houck not guilty after the Biden administration tried to make a federal case out of a local altercation with an out-of-control pro-abortion agitator. During his first week back in office in 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned a group of 23 pro-life activists the Biden DOJ had jailed for peaceful protests outside of abortion facilities.
However, critics raised the possibility of the fund being used as a way to enrich friends of the administration, and the mainstream media fixated on the prospect of money going to violent January 6 offenders. Many arrested in connection to that day found themselves subjected to harsh prison conditions and politically motivated prosecutions for little more than walking through the open doors of the Capitol building. All were granted a blanket pardon on Trump’s first day back in office.
But while the 699 charges for violent offenses were less than half the 1,575 total charges, and a far more minuscule percentage of the 10,000 to 80,000 estimated rallygoers, violent offenders have been a focal point of the controversy. Both Blanche and Vice President JD Vance refused to rule out their potential eligibility, saying it would depend on the facts of individual cases. Trump told Welker he would be “inclined” to say those who assaulted police should not get money, but “I have to see it” because “you had a lot of crooked cops.”