Judge Sounds Trump Slush Fund’s Official Death Knell

A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” on Friday, demanding the Trump administration release signed proof that the president’s pet project is really dead.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against the president’s slush fund, but said she was willing to drop the case altogether if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a document under penalty of perjury saying they would not move forward with the fund.

The judge gave Blanche and Bessent one week to provide their sworn testimony.

Last week, Blanche insisted publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund,” and claimed it wasn’t necessary to release a document reversing the DOJ’s position. It turns out Blanche’s pinky promise won’t be good enough.

Staffers in the Justice Department and White House have reportedly been telling the president’s MAGA allies they can still expect to receive some form of payment, and Trump has continued to talk up the fund, later telling NBC’s Meet the Press he and Republicans thought it was a “great idea.” (Spoiler alert: They did not.)

Trump’s fund had attracted the attention of some of his most notorious allies, as well as one top DOJ official.

This story has been updated.

President Trump blasted Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin Thursday evening on Truth Social, accusing the Maryland progressive of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and saying he should be expelled from Congress.

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History,” Trump posted.

“He spent time on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, and was rebuffed on that, just as he has been rebuffed on Impeachment, and many other things. If Biden didn’t give him a pardon, he’d be in jail right now! Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process,” Trump added. “I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM.”

Trump was responding to a post on X from conservative commentator Mark Levin calling for Raskin’s expulsion, claiming the Maryland congressman was “already leading a plot to impeach the President if the Democrats take the House.” Raskin has long been a thorn in Trump side, serving on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and supporting both congressional attempts to impeach Trump during his first term.

Raskin responded to Trump’s post on MS Now’s All in With Chris Hayes Thursday night, saying the president “is obviously having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment.”

“There’s a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Don’t go to war and usurp the powers of Congress to declare war,” Raskin told Hayes, saying that Trump should stop defying Congress and the Constitution.

The post comes as Trump and his allies are working on a plan to expunge Trump’s previous impeachments from the record, even though that isn’t constitutionally possible. But that won’t stop Trump, as he can’t accept the idea that he could ever do anything wrong. Not only does he wants his record to reflect that, he also wants to punish anyone who tries to hold him accountable.

President Trump threatened Washington, D.C. mayoral front-runner and Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George with a federal takeover if she were to win next week’s primary.

“Here in Washington, D.C., there’s a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign—focused on socialist policies,” Trump was asked at a Thursday afternoon press conference. “How would you feel if she emerged victorious?”

“Well I wouldn’t like it. Maybe we’ll take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump responded bluntly. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”

Lewis George responded on X.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President. Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself,” she wrote. “The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump.”

While the extent of Trump’s threat is unclear, he is no stranger to “federal takeovers” of the nation’s capital. He instituted one last summer, which current Mayor Muriel Bowser largely cooperated with. As for home rule, Trump would need 60 Senate votes to end it—something he’ll likely never have in this term.

The president’s preference for who fills the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly comes down to a casual disregard for the role in its entirety.

Donald Trump tapped Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on Thursday as his pick for Tulsi Gabbard’s permanent replacement. It was a shocking about-face for the typically stubborn commander in chief: Trump had earlier this week doubled down on his temporary pick for the job, real estate developer Bill Pulte, though his nomination quickly became a headache in Congress.

Lawmakers argued that Pulte’s appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal, as his resume lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, which is set to expire Friday.

Clayton rose to the top of a second round of considerations to, in part, “quell all the bitching,” one administration official told Politico Friday.

Other Hill staffers speculated to the publication that Trump may not have understood—or cared about—the tight timeline that Congress was facing with regard to the FISA section renewal. The whole ordeal may have just been another irritant to a president that has little interest in the office.

Trump has “always hated the ODNI role,” one Capitol Hill aide told Politico.

If he passes muster with the FBI and the Senate, Clayton will enter ODNI with zero relevant experience in national security. He has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was similarly handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience.

Yet Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, and unquestioningly done the president’s bidding in the Southern District of New York.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tasked Clayton with probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

President Donald Trump and his allies are plotting to push Congress to void his past two impeachments from the record—even though it’s not constitutionally possible.

A measure to expunge Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments likely wouldn’t be considered until after the midterm elections, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Thursday night.

“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.”

Experts said that the resolution would have little legal weight considering that the Constitution has no mechanism for expunging impeachments, and Republican lawmakers noted that it wouldn’t be easy to get enough support to pass the bill.

The president’s plan to erase his impeachments gained new momentum in April, after the Trump administration published new documents related to his first impeachment that MAGA claimed undermined the credibility of the witnesses.

In a show of fealty, California Representative Darrell Issa introduced legislation to have Trump’s impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Issa has claimed the president was “wrongfully accused” of the crimes that had him impeached.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has taken up that mantle this time around. “I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” he told the Journal. “They make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyper-partisan attack job.”

Johnson said that wiping Trump’s impeachment record was “not an order of first priority” but it was a priority all the same.

In the case of his 2019 impeachment, there is a literal transcript of Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian government demanding they dig up dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Issa’s measure has attracted 23 co-sponsors, but not every Republican seems interested in getting on board. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who is retiring, suggested it was political suicide for his party. “Maybe they’ve given up on holding the majority? It’s silly. What happened is history.”

But his impeachments are clearly still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. On Thursday, Trump posted a lengthy screed attacking Representative Jamie Raskin, who led the House’s legal effort to impeach the president in 2021.