THIS is How the Trump Slush Fund Gets DESTROYED

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Scott, um you did some of the most uh important reporting around January 6, but let's start with what you are hearing from folks on Capitol Hill about this fund and how this is all going down on the place that was attacked back on January the 6th.

[00:00:15]>> Aean, the sales pitch the Trump administration undertook for this slush fund on Capitol Hill is something they could put on a White House blooper reel.

[00:00:23]It has been a clown show. From the start of the pitch to where we are now, the Senate was to take up a critical Trump priority, a reconciliation plan, a priority list of things for Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies. That thing blew up. The Senate pieced out and left town for two weeks because they were stuck in the mud on what to do about the $ 1.7 billion fund for convicted crooks and riers. Haven't found a single senator, not a single one, who says declaratively that he or she supports this thing. Senator John Hovind of North Dakota told me that this is one of the issues. The slush fund or he calls it the potential guard rails that are needed for the weaponization fund is a wedge issue. Even inside the Republican conference, there are no owners of this thing on Capitol Hill and the White House has had trouble selling anybody publicly on it. And Aean, when you list the names of the January 6th defendants, the high-profile fraudsters who say they want millions of dollars from taxpayers, that makes this sales pitch even harder.

[00:01:27]>> Capital riers told CNN, "Take a listen to this.

[00:01:32]>> A lot of people don't agree with what happened on January 6."

[00:01:37]But when you step back and you you look at somebody like me, for example, my major felony had to be struck down by the Supreme Court. It's my crime that day of breaking a window. Technically, that's a misdemeanor charge. And yet, I had 3 years of a house arrest. Then having to endure everything I did through prison and getting a 5year sentence on top of that.

[00:02:02]That's clearly weaponization. I r rationalize people even violent people getting paid for that day because the government set it up and also on top of that they stole the election. So the first woman there you can see uh she was breaking the window at the capital. The second person interviewed still believes the election was stolen or believes election lies. Is this what Donald Trump is validating when he makes them eligible for taxpayer dollars?

[00:02:29]>> Here's the first sign that you have an indefensible idea. You have to pervasively put out false information to defend that idea. The critics of the January 6 prosecutions have alleged it was a Biden launched weaponization. It was Donald Trump's first term in which those prosecutions were launched. It was Trump's Department of Justice that did so. They called themselves victims of weaponized prosecutions. That assumes that every single grand juror and every single trial juror, hundreds of people, were all in on this, which is a preposterous notion. What's more, it also indicates to me that they haven't made peace with reality, that the 2020 election was not rigged, that January 6 was not a setup. I'll tell you, Aean, I was in the courtroom for hundreds of the hearings, hundreds of the cases. A lot of people were denying reality during their own proceedings to their own detriment at sentencing. They were denying reality.

[00:03:26]>> Yeah. Scott, what I was going to say in that process is people forget that Donald Trump was the president when the election happened on January the 6th.

[00:03:34]When people come out and say, "Oh, the FBI had people there or this was an attempt by the government to overturn an election." Who is the person that was in charge of the DOJ? Who is the person that was executive at the time? it was Donald Trump. They're claiming that Donald Trump rigged an election that he would lose.

[00:03:52]>> I'm also just gobsmacked, Aiden, by the idea that juries by the dozens all colluded with each other to convict every single person who went to trial by jury. Aean, every single person who went to trial by jury was convicted. You cannot get 12 people in lock step on anything in life. that they all were synchronized tells you how overwhelming and damning the evidence was. The same evidence that will be on television on our phones in perpetuity if copers get taxpayer money. So Scott, let me go back to a point that Tracy brought up which is hoping that Congress does its part and oversight and have some kind of visibility into this. You said that from the senators that you spoke to, not a single one showed an appetite for this.

[00:04:35]give us a sense if there's an effort right now, a concerted effort to try and prevent this fund uh from actually getting up off the ground. This is like the least popular thing I've seen in Congress, like getting carrot sticks on Halloween. Like, this is not what anybody wants and they don't even want to be talking about it. I can't find Republicans to even tacitly endorse this thing. and they know their constituents are well aware that as they pay so much for so many things in life as they're groaning beneath the weight of costs that they want any of their money going towards this fund they're not going to find constituents championing this either and they know it that they had to walk away from a critical priority of the Trump administration the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Reconciliation Bill today and just go home without it because they couldn't figure out what to do with the slush fund. That's a problem and it's not a problem that's going away.

[00:05:27]>> Scott, think any of them are going to be looking in the mirror and wondering, God, what have we done?

[00:05:33]>> I don't see how this fund survives in its current incarnation based on where we are right now. Katie, the senators are poised to offer amendment after amendment when they get back here next month to gut this thing like a fish to pull out pieces to firewall off anybody who hit a cop, to firewall off other people who tried to overturn an election. And I'm not sure where Republicans find 50 votes to stop any of these amendments. They can lose three Republicans on these votes. Seems they've already lost Bill Cassidy, Mitch McConnell, and Tom Tillis, who has absolutely coined the best phrase of the week, stupid on stilts. I'm going to get a t-shirt that says that for myself, but there are other Republicans who are poised to join them. I mean, I can't imagine Susan Collins, up for a fierce re-election, who's already expressed her concern is going to be on board. And what about anybody else up for reelection? There are competitive races across the country. Who wants any ownership of this thing right now? It's going to get gutted and it's going to get gutted as soon as the Senate gets back here. They ran away from town yesterday to avoid this topic. They can't avoid it forever.

[00:06:40]>> Yeah, but listen. Well, first off, Scott, I you look tall on the camera and I worry about you wearing a shirt that says stupid on stilts. I'm just going to put put that out there. Scott, Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican who's running for reelection in Pennsylvania, who by the way, Donald Trump is not liking right now. Um, he wants more information on this fund. Is what does he want exactly? And is he get is he gonna get some more backers in Congress?

[00:07:03]>> I have some new reporting on this. First of all, I wanted to give you props for invoking ARO Speed Wagon and can't fight this feeling on a Friday afternoon.

[00:07:11]Really well done, Katie. U Brian Fitzpatrick's teammate on his effort to stop this fund is Tom Suis, the Democrat from New York. They had partnered up, one of each, one Democrat, one Republican. And Tom Suis says, "We're going to do the Noah's Arc theory where we get one of each party to sign on to this legislation to outlaw the fund to soften the ground for Republicans to feel comfortable to get on board." I'm not sure how many Republicans they can get on that arc, but they don't need many. You saw this on Thursday when just a few Republicans derailed the plan to have an Iran war powers vote because Democrats and just a few Republicans were going to hand the president a defeat. Just a few can defeat the fund.

[00:07:52]Really want to thank you for watching.

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