How to Stop the Next Corrupt Justice Department Settlement

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced what it called an “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: a $1.8 billion pool of taxpayer money to compensate people who claim they were wrongly targeted by the prior administration. The fund emerged from a settlement between the DOJ and President Trump, who had sued the IRS in January 2026 over the leak of some of his tax returns during his first term in office.

The entire effort is a breathtakingly corrupt pillaging of public funds to pay off the President’s family, friends, and political allies. The sitting president sued the government he controls for something that happened to him under his own prior administration, settled with himself, and created a nearly two billion dollar slush fund to make payments to his supporters. The fund is overseen by an acting attorney general who, before taking the job, was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer.

Thankfully, a few Republican Members of Congress seem willing to join Democrats to stop this slush fund using the appropriations process. But success is uncertain. Congress could fail to muster the necessary votes. The President continues to staunchly defend the fund and could veto any effort to restrict it, which would then require a super-majority vote in Congress to override. In the meantime, the slush fund money might be disbursed before any restrictions are enacted. The bottom line is that the public cannot rely on Congress to step up and legislate in time to stop this particular slush fund. And it certainly cannot rely on Congress to act quickly and decisively each time a president pulls this kind of corrupt maneuver.

What the public needs instead is a way to challenge, review, and stop plainly corrupt settlements without congressional action. We offer some recommendations here. But first, some relevant history.

The History

Fifty years ago, Congress confronted a president who had corrupted his own Justice Department for personal and political gain. In 1971, President Nixon’s Justice Department quietly settled an antitrust case against International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. The settlement came after Nixon had personally intervened and ITT had pledged $400,000 to underwrite the 1972 Republican National Convention. Like the Trump slush fund, it was a corrupt bargain, laundered through the machinery of the president’s own Justice Department.

Congress passed the Tunney Act in 1974 in direct response. It required mandatory public disclosure of proposed DOJ antitrust civil settlements, a public comment period, and a judicial finding that any proposed consent decree serves the public interest.

In practice, the law has been toothless. To date, no settlement has ever actually been blocked under it. The D.C. Circuit repeatedly narrowed the Tunney Act’s judicial review standard, and courts have deferred to the executive branch in part because there is no adversarial process. The government and the settling party — who have already agreed with each other in proposing the settlement — are the only parties to Tunney Act proceedings. There is no party in the case that has an incentive to introduce facts to challenge the settlement.

Democrats have sought to fix this problem in the antitrust context. Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Jamie Raskin introduced the Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 4107) as a response to the pattern of suspicious antitrust settlements under this administration, including the DOJ’s cave in the Ticketmaster-Live Nation case and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper merger settlement that DOJ’s own official called pay-to-play. The bill would extend Tunney Act review to the FTC, require disclosure of side deals and prior settlement offers, strengthen the judicial review standard, empower state attorneys general to intervene in the proceedings to review the settlement as of right, and allow them to step into the DOJ’s shoes and continue litigating the case.

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The Solution

We recommend building on the Klobuchar-Raskin bill’s general approach to provide greater oversight of questionable DOJ settlements of all kinds, not just antitrust matters.

First, this Congress should prohibit the President, Vice President, and Cabinet members from initiating, maintaining, or settling civil suits against federal agencies while in office. If you choose to serve in one of the highest offices in the land, accepting that you cannot sue your own government while you’re running it is a reasonable condition of the job. A bright-line rule is needed to prevent judicial deference from excusing a mockery of the rule of law in which courts disclaim any meaningful role while a president sues, and then settles with, the government he controls to enrich his family and cronies.

Second, beyond that hard rule, the Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act’s general approach — meaningful judicial oversight via a real adversarial process — should be extended to voluntary dismissals of civil suits by DOJ and to DOJ civil settlements involving a government payout over $50 million. In those circumstances, the DOJ should be required to publish the proposed dismissal or settlement in the Federal Register for public comment and to disclose all prior settlement offers and side deals. The dismissal or settlement should not take effect until a court finds it is in the public interest and that, in the case of a settlement, it is reasonably tailored to address the violations alleged in the complaint. And most importantly, state attorneys general should have the automatic right to intervene, generate a record, and be heard in a timely way. Allowing intervention of right before a court evaluates the settlement’s merits would inject elected, accountable officials who can create the adversarial contest that the original Tunney Act never had. (Where state attorneys general lack the Article III standing necessary to intervene and participate as a party, they should be entitled to participate as amicus curiae as of right.)

By providing state attorneys general a right to participate, the judge’s role becomes refereeing a real dispute, not second-guessing the executive in a vacuum. And by requiring this process for voluntary dismissals, we can stop the kind of collusive dismissal that purportedly stripped the court of jurisdiction before it could rule on whether Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund was appropriate.

In the face of the Nixon DOJ’s corruption, Congress acted on a bipartisan basis to create a mechanism for oversight of DOJ settlements. But the Tunney Act’s fatal flaw was that it failed to create an adversarial process that could elicit new facts to call a settlement into question. The Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act is a good start toward closing loopholes for antitrust, and Congress should pass it. But Congress should also build on that bill as we describe here to address questionable settlements outside the antitrust context. The issue at stake — that the executive branch cannot be its own prosecutor, defender, and judge — is the foundation of every rule-of-law democracy, and it’s vital that Congress stitch up any loopholes that undermine this bedrock principle.