Stephen Miller insisted that nearly $2 billion is a “small measure” of reparations for those who have been “unfairly targeted” by previous administrations.
President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser rushed to defend the Justice Department’s $1.776 billion slush fund to reporters on Thursday.
“You seem to be interested in the $1.8 billion fund, and that clearly was a sticking point today up on Capitol Hill,” a reporter asked Miller. “Is there anyone that the president is reaching out to? Making calls to? It’s not going to be on his desk by June 1, which I think is a deadline he had set earlier.”
“Well, that’s a good closing question only because it allows me to say this,” Miller, 40, said, “which is that, the, we lived through four years of—more than four years, actually, but I’ll just say four years in this case—of unimaginable weaponization of the federal government against innocent people."
“So many lives destroyed, so many livelihoods ruined, so many people who were deprived of their fundamental rights and freedoms as American citizens,” he continued. “And this settlement is just a small measure of the justice that they are owed.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The DOJ released a memo on Thursday outlining how the “anti-weaponization fund” would work, as even Republicans expressed outrage at its creation.
The memo clarified that it was created to help people “who were victims of lawfare and weaponization,” including millions of Americans “whose online speech was censored at the behest of the government, parents silenced at school boards, Senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed, churchgoers targeted by the FBI, and so on.”
It also said that there “is no partisan restriction,” meaning Democrats could also apply to the fund, though it remained unclear how it would be enforced. Critics have noted that the fund’s structure gives Trump and his allies considerable power over who would receive taxpayer money, including the potential to remunerate Jan. 6 rioters who attacked police officers.
The fund was announced earlier this week after Trump agreed to drop a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leaking of his tax records, as part of a controversial deal with the DOJ.
Also included in the deal was a motion, signed by acting Attorney General and Trump’s former lawyer, Todd Blanche, to prevent the federal government from ever examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization over their taxes.
Trump, like Miller, has also diminished the magnitude of the $1.8 billion scheme, telling reporters on Wednesday that it was “peanuts” for taxpayers.
