President Donald Trump’s latest scam against the American taxpayer is brazen even by his usual, shameless standards.

The president’s Department of Justice this week announced a $1.776 billion fund that will make secret payments to Jan. 6 defendants and other Trump allies who say they were wrongly prosecuted by the Biden administration, without any legal or congressional oversight.

That fact alone is so blatantly corrupt that it almost seems like things can’t get any worse, and yet, scratching the surface reveals yet another layer of grift.

It turns out that both Trump and the DOJ—led by his former personal attorney Todd Blanche—are working hard to surround the fund with a bogus aura of legal legitimacy that obscures its inherent lawlessness.

The fund was created by a supposed “settlement agreement” resulting from a $10 billion lawsuit brought this year by Trump against the Internal Revenue Service over tax returns that were leaked to the press by an independent contractor.

The DOJ has also compared the fund to legal settlements reached during the Obama administration.

But this $1.8 billion slush fund was not a court-approved settlement. In fact, it didn’t even arise from a court-sanctioned lawsuit.

Given that........

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