I know what it costs to be on the receiving end of a partisan federal prosecution. I know what it costs in dollars: millions. And I know what it costs in the harder currencies — reputation, career, family life, trauma. President Trump’s proposal for a $1.776 billion legal fund to reimburse Americans who were targeted by a politicized Justice Department isn’t a partisan gesture. It’s a recognition of something I and thousands of others have lived through. It’s also a measure of reform for government agencies infested with corruption and weaponized ideology.
President Trump understands this better than anyone. The FBI raided his home. He faced down 88 baseless criminal charges. His tax records were leaked to the press. And he watched the weaponization of the DOJ against American citizens.
President Trump is owed restitution for the unlawful leak of his tax records. But instead of taking a settlement for himself, he wants those funds to be used to make whole other victims of injustice.
For victims of political prosecution, the process is the punishment, and the DOJ knows this. No one can stand up to the near-limitless resources of the U.S. government. Imagine the immense harm done to a small business owner, a parent framed as a domestic terrorist, or a jailed pro-life grandmother. This legal fund will begin to give them some justice and enable Americans to fight DOJ weaponization.
President Trump called my case a baseless “witch hunt.” The government manufactured a case against me and let the real criminals walk free. The prosecutor in my case donated to a group called “Stop Republicans” and buried that donation from scrutiny within the ActBlue front site. He was aided by FBI and IRS agents who targeted me and lied to me. They wanted a trophy, so they picked a conservative Republican congressman from Nebraska who supported President Trump. This is not law enforcement. It’s weaponization. This is the kind of wrong that the legal fund is designed to right.
A $1.776 billion legal fund — the number echoing the year Americans threw off a regime that used its courts to prosecute pretended offenses — does several things at once. It acknowledges and repairs harm done to Americans. It puts consequence-free prosecutorial abuse on notice. And it provides resources for people who have no real way to fight back against the most powerful litigation operation on Earth.
This fund is not unprecedented, although it’s probably the first time a government official has put a settlement due to his family at the service of the American people. President Obama established a settlement fund. And President Biden’s DOJ compensated supporters for what they termed injustices committed against them.
Establishment critics are smearing this as a payoff to political allies of the president. But remember, the United States Senate recently voted itself access to $500,000 for members secretly surveilled by the government. American citizens deserve at least the same consideration as the senators who represent them. More consideration, in fact.
The fund could reimburse Americans whose prosecutions were brought in bad faith, dropped, reversed, or pursued in ways that violated the equal application of the law. If a Democrat official was railroaded by a Republican prosecutor on flimsy grounds, the fund should make that person whole, too. I am pleased that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said as much during his recent testimony before Congress.
I lost years I can’t get back. I can’t un-resign from Congress. I can’t un-spend the legal fees. I can’t make the trauma inflicted on my family a fiction. The same goes for anyone similarly targeted. No fund repairs that.
But a fund of this scale, backed by President Trump, says something the American system has needed to say for a long time: Neither the people who run the machinery of federal prosecution nor federal judges are above the citizens they prosecute; and when they cross the line, the country owes a debt to the people they injure.
I hope every American who has watched a neighbor, a colleague, or a stranger ground up by a wrongful prosecution understands what is actually being offered here — not a partisan favor, but the first serious attempt in a generation to put a price tag on what the weaponization of justice has cost real people.
The bill came due a long time ago. It is time to pay it.
Jeff Fortenberry was elected to the United States House of Representatives for nine terms. He served Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District and rose to a senior level on the House Appropriations Committee, with a distinguished record in foreign policy, food policy, and health care policy.
