President Donald Trump said on Monday he wasn’t involved in the creation of a $1.776 billion Justice Department fund to compensate victims of alleged lawfare during the Biden administration.
The fund was announced this week as part of a settlement resolving Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his confidential tax records. The “anti-weaponization fund” could help compensate Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants and Trump allies, who say they were politically targeted during the Biden administration.
“It’s been very well received, I have to tell you. I know very little about it,” the president responded when asked if taxpayers should be on the hook for compensating pardoned Jan. 6 defendants. “I wasn’t involved in the whole creation of it and the negotiation, but this is reimbursing people that were horribly treated.
“They’ve gone bankrupt,” Trump said. “Their lives have been destroyed, and they turn out to be right.”
Trump said his administration would be setting up a committee of “very talented people, very highly respected people” to review compensation cases brought before the fund.
“I think it’s a committee of five,” he said. “And again, I didn’t do this deal. It was told to me yesterday. It’s all going to be determined by a committee of four or five people that are respected and very brilliant at what they do.”
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You can watch Trump’s remarks in full below.