Rachel Maddow observed that “the pushback always and ever matters” while discussing the end of President Trump’s planned $1.8 billion “slush fund.”
In recent weeks, the president and some of his allies have made public plans to use the $1.8 billion settlement Trump had been positioned to receive from his lawsuit against the IRS to create a “weaponization” fund to compensate people who were alleged victims of legal and prosecutorial misconduct during the Biden administration. The fund was quickly denounced and seen by members of both sides of the political aisle as a potential slush fund to pay the MAGA supporters who were convicted for their parts in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“The White House tonight is reportedly backing off that plan to try to take that money for Trump,” Maddow noted Monday night. “That is in part because it hasn’t just been Democrats in Congress. It has been Republicans in Congress who said no to this thing and who showed themselves to be prepared to vote against it as well.”
“But I think the under-appreciated part of all of this … is that it is really starting to look like they were going to get in trouble for this,” Maddow said. “There was that one court ruling on Friday that ordered Trump not to start up the fund or make any disbursements from it. But there was also the other court ruling on Friday that essentially indicated that a judge had made a court ruling [to start] an investigation led by a federal judge into whether or not the whole process by which Trump was trying to take this money might have been an act of fraud.”
You can watch the “Rachel Maddow Show” segment yourself in the video below.
Maddow continued to explain why she believes Trump and the others involved in said slush fund plan may end up facing serious legal repercussions for it.
“The whole idea that this was a settlement of a lawsuit appears to have been false from the beginning,” Maddow explained. “It was designed that way simply as a pretext to give the appearance of legality to what was otherwise just a bank robbery against the American people.”
“It is one thing politically to try to pull that off [on] the American people. It’s one thing to try to scam people and tell people not to believe their lying eyes about what’s happened,” the MS NOW anchor said. “But to do it to a federal court essentially gives the federal judge overseeing that court the right to look into it to see whether you might have committed fraud against that court and thereby be subject to sanctions for it.”
“Trump may be dropping this slush fund as of tonight,” Maddow continued. “But as far as I understand it, him dropping it won’t necessarily stop the judge’s investigation, the now ongoing investigation, into whether all of this was a crime.”
“[You] never know how all the pushback is going to work out,” the MS NOW host concluded. “But the pushback always and ever matters.”
