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Did you know that you could sue any recipient of money from Donald Trump's slush fund?

By you, I mean any American citizen, and possibly domestically domiciled corporate entities as well.

You see, everyone has standing to sue under the False Claims Act, AKA the Lincoln Law:

The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been accurately described as one of the most nakedly corrupt actions in American history. It would give a tacit endorsement from every American taxpayer to the notion that the Capitol Riot’s only transgression, for example, came from those who tried to punish its perpetrators for attempting to halt the outcome of an election.

News of the fund has triggered massive political backlash and at least temporarily derailed a party-line reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement operations for the next three years. Senate Republicans didn’t want to go on the record siding with Donald Trump’s crony slush fund, and left Washington rather than being confronted with such a question in a reconciliation “vote-a-rama.” What they will take up in June is currently unknown.

There are efforts within Congress to kill the slush fund, but those will inevitably run up against Republican politics in the wake of Trump demonstrating full control of the party base in recent primaries. Congress has the power of the purse, but it delegated the authority for the Justice Department to pay out settlements unilaterally when it established something called the Judgment Fund in 1956. Any attempt to change that legislatively will almost certainly meet the president’s veto pen.

Yet there is another potential deterrent to January 6th rioters or anyone else taking money from the fund: a mechanism whereby any American can recover improper government payments deemed “false claims,” plus significant additional damages. Recipients of the slush fund, under this approach, could have to pay back three times as much money as they took out.

Sweet! 

………

But if a judge can be convinced that this fund, established with no transparency and no congressional or judicial oversight, which emerged from a lawsuit between a sitting president and his own government, and is arguably contrary to the purpose of the Judgment Fund from which it derives authority, is an unconstitutional scheme to defraud the government by its very structure, then anyone can sue to recoup the money, and then some, under the False Claims Act of 1863. 

This law could also apply to the Acting Attorney General as well as whoever sits on the committee making the grants. 

The legal principle behind this is called qui tam.