WASHINGTON — Two police officers who helped defend the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have asked a federal court to dissolve a $1.776 billion settlement fund created by the Trump administration, arguing that the money is bound for the same rioters they once held off and that the program amounts to self-dealing by the president.
The plaintiffs, former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who is now running for Congress in Maryland, and Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges, filed their complaint in Washington against President Donald Trump, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Both men testified before Congress about the violence they endured that day, video of which showed Hodges pinned in a tunnel entrance as the crowd surged, and both say they still receive threats. They call the program an illegal slush fund and, in the complaint’s sharpest passage, describe its creation as “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”
The Justice Department unveiled the fund on May 18 to compensate people it says were victims of government lawfare and weaponization. It emerged from the settlement that ended Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. NBC News reported that officials fixed the amount at $1.776 billion, a nod to the nation’s founding year, after the president moved to drop a suit that he, as head of the executive branch, had filed against one of its own agencies.
More than 1,600 people were charged in connection with the Capitol attack, and over 100 officers were injured. Trump wiped away those cases last year through a sweeping grant of clemency, pardoning or commuting the sentences of roughly 1,600 defendants, including some convicted of assaulting police. The officers contend the new fund could now route taxpayer money to those same people and embolden further political violence. Appearing before a Senate subcommittee, Blanche declined to rule out that Jan. 6 defendants would be eligible for payments.
Legal scholars have challenged the arrangement on several fronts. Adam Zimmerman, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies presidential settlements, said the fund sits “in a totally different solar system than any past government settlement.” Other experts, as CBS News reported, have pointed to the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause, noting that Trump effectively stood on both sides of the underlying case. A former Justice Department special counsel has called the structure among the most corrupt uses of presidential power in the country’s history.
The administration has rejected those readings. Blanche told senators the structure was unusual but not unprecedented, likening it to a settlement the Obama administration reached with Native American farmers and ranchers. A Justice Department memo circulated to Republican senators said the money would go to Americans whose speech was censored, parents silenced at school board meetings and others it deemed targets of federal overreach, and it stated that the Trump family is barred from collecting. An attorney for the president said Trump entered the settlement “squarely for the benefit of the American people.”
Supporters of the program argue that many of those prosecuted under the previous administration faced disproportionate charges and years of financial strain over cases they consider politically driven. The White House has made what it calls its campaign against weaponization a central message ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The fund has nonetheless stirred unease among some Senate Republicans, who have pressed Blanche over how claims will be judged and who will oversee the payouts.
The fight arrives amid a broader argument over whether Trump has turned the presidency to personal advantage. The New Yorker, in an accounting by the journalist David Kirkpatrick, estimated that the president and his family have earned close to $4 billion through ventures linked to his office, a large share of it from cryptocurrency, alongside a $2 billion investment tied to a Saudi fund and a luxury jet from the emir of Qatar. NPR’s Planet Money, working through the same ledger, arrived at a similar figure.
The White House has waved away that criticism. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the suggestion that Trump has profited from office “absolutely absurd,” saying he had lost money to serve the country and that his family handles its dealings by the book.
The settlement’s fine print has drawn its own scrutiny. Tax specialists have warned that the deal’s broad waivers could shield Trump’s businesses from federal tax scrutiny reaching well beyond the narrow dispute over his leaked returns.
Dunn and Hodges are asking the court to declare the fund unlawful and to halt any disbursements while the case proceeds. The lawsuit sets up an early test of how far a president may go in settling his own claims against the government, and of whether the courts will weigh in before the first checks are written.
