They Invented the Weapon. Now They Are Shocked Someone Picked It Up.

Clayton S. Wood

May 19, 2026

The left is in full outrage this week over the Trump administration’s creation of the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund. They are calling it a slush fund. They are calling it corruption. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it an insane level of corruption. Representative Jamie Raskin called it a political grievance fund. Ninety-three House Democrats filed an amicus brief calling it the specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.

There is something important I want you to notice before we go any further. Many people, including some who cannot stand Donald Trump, have come to believe that he was uniquely and illegally targeted by government agencies. Some of them accept that conclusion reluctantly. Some have explained it away by arguing that Trump is uniquely dangerous and therefore extraordinary measures were warranted.

That argument collapses the moment you look at the timeline.

Donald Trump came down that escalator in June 2015. The IRS targeting of conservative organizations under Lois Lerner began in 2010 and was in full operation through the 2012 election cycle. The grandmothers in Kentucky organizing constitutional study groups, the veterans in Ohio applying for nonprofit status, the Tea Party chapters across the country whose applications sat in a drawer for years while left-wing groups sailed through in weeks, none of them were Donald Trump. None of them were threats to democracy. They were ordinary Americans who held the wrong political views, and a federal agency run by a partisan operator used its power to silence them before an election to help one party win.

The targeting of conservatives using the machinery of neutral government agencies did not begin with Trump. It was already mature, already operational, and already unpunished before Trump was a political figure. When he eventually did appear on the scene, he did not create a new pattern. He walked into one that had been running for years.

The targeting of conservatives using supposedly neutral government agencies did not begin with Trump and it was not about Trump. It was already mature and operational before he entered politics. He did not create the pattern. He walked into one that had been running for years.

This distinction matters enormously, because it means the question is not whether one man was treated unfairly. The question is whether an entire political party decided, at some point in the recent past, that government agencies are legitimate weapons against their opponents, and then used them that way systematically, over years, across multiple administrations, against anyone who threatened their power, from Tea Party grandmothers to presidential candidates.

The answer, documented and on the record, is yes. Let us review exactly what they built, in the order they built it. Then let us talk about what the Anti-Weaponization Fund actually is, and why it terrifies them.

First, They Went After the Tea Party

In 2010, the Tea Party movement was generating the most significant grassroots conservative political energy in a generation. Ordinary Americans were forming local organizations, applying for tax-exempt status, and preparing to engage in the 2012 election cycle. The IRS was the chokepoint. Tax-exempt status determines whether an organization can receive donations, whether donors can deduct contributions, and whether a group can sustain itself financially over time. Without it, most small civic organizations simply cannot function.

Lois Lerner ran the IRS Exempt Organizations division. She understood this. Under her direction, beginning around 2010, the IRS implemented a systematic policy of flagging applications from organizations whose names included words like Tea Party, Patriots, or Constitution, or whose stated purposes involved educating citizens about the Constitution or challenging government spending. These applications were not denied outright. They were delayed, sometimes for years, while the IRS sent invasive and often legally dubious questionnaires demanding donor lists, lists of volunteers, lists of books discussed at meetings, details of members’ social media activity, and in some cases the political affiliations of family members of the applicants. Liberal organizations with comparable purposes moved through the same process in weeks.

The effect in the 2012 election cycle was exactly what you would expect. Conservative grassroots organizations were frozen. Their donors had no tax deduction. Their volunteers had no organizational structure to plug into. Their ability to recruit, train, and mobilize was crippled at precisely the moment it mattered most. Barack Obama won reelection.

What happened next is where this story moves from political abuse into something more deliberate.

On April 9, 2013, with congressional inquiries already underway, Lerner sent an email to colleagues warning them to be cautious about what they said in emails. She then asked whether the IRS internal instant messaging system was archived. When a colleague told her it was not, Lerner responded with a single word: Perfect.

On June 13, 2011, the hard drive on Lerner’s computer had failed. An IRS technician and a Hewlett-Packard contractor both examined it. The HP contractor concluded the failure was likely caused by a physical impact, not heat or ordinary mechanical failure. The laptop itself showed no visible external damage. When the IRS Criminal Investigation unit’s senior forensic analyst opened the drive, he found well-defined scoring in a concentric circle on the top platter. He concluded that additional recovery steps could have been taken. IRS management decided the effort was not worth the expense. The hard drive was magnetically erased, then physically destroyed using an industrial AMERI-SHRED AMS-750 shredder, which cut it into quarter-sized pieces later sold for scrap. A certificate of destruction was issued April 16, 2012.

The crash had occurred less than two weeks after Republican members of Congress first began formally questioning the IRS about its treatment of conservative groups. The building entry logs that would have shown whether anyone accessed Lerner’s office on the night of the crash had been destroyed by the building security vendor after one year of retention, which placed their destruction in 2012.

In March 2014, while the investigation was active and congressional subpoenas were in force, IRS employees at the agency’s data center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, magnetically erased 422 backup tapes. Those tapes were most likely to have contained up to 24,000 of Lerner’s emails from 2011. This occurred after the IRS had already told Congress it had preserved all relevant records. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified in June 2014 that since the start of the investigation, every email had been preserved. That same month, the IRS informed Congress for the first time that years of Lerner’s emails were gone. It later emerged that the IRS had failed to search five of the six available sources for Lerner’s emails before declaring them unrecoverable. When investigators eventually went looking, they found more than 1,000 emails the IRS had never produced to Congress, the DOJ, or the inspector general. It also emerged that Lerner had conducted IRS business from a second personal email account registered under the name Toby Miles. Toby Miles was her dog.

When the full scope of the targeting was eventually exposed, Lerner appeared before Congress, made a brief statement denying wrongdoing, then immediately invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any further questions. She was held in contempt of Congress. She was never prosecuted. She was never stripped of her pension. The Department of Justice under Eric Holder investigated for nearly two years, interviewed more than 100 witnesses, reviewed more than a million pages of documents, and found insufficient evidence to bring charges. In 2017, under a new administration, the DOJ settled a class action lawsuit by Tea Party groups, issued an apology, and paid settlements to over 400 organizations. That settlement was narrow and capped. It did not document the full scope of what was done. It did not punish anyone who did it.

She warned colleagues in writing to watch their emails. She asked if the instant message system was archived. When told it was not, she wrote: Perfect. Then her hard drive crashed, was declared unrecoverable, and was fed into an industrial shredder. Then 422 backup tapes were erased while under subpoena. Then she pleaded the Fifth. Then she retired with her pension. No charges. No prosecution. Perfect.

This is the template. An agency official uses her position to tilt a federal election. She destroys evidence while under investigation. She refuses to answer for it. She retires comfortably. The institution closes ranks. A future administration issues a narrow apology years later. The system works exactly as designed for the people running it.

And Donald Trump was four years away from entering politics when it started.

Then the Attorney General Modeled the Same Behavior from the Top

Lois Lerner was not operating in a vacuum. The man running the Department of Justice during the years the IRS targeting was active was Eric Holder, and his tenure as Attorney General is a documented record of the same two-track system in operation at the highest institutional level: protection for the left, enforcement against the right, obstruction of any accountability for either.

On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party stood in paramilitary uniforms at the entrance of a polling place in Philadelphia. One of them brandished a billy club. A career DOJ attorney who witnessed it later said that if this does not constitute voter intimidation, nothing will. Poll workers inside the building, a husband and wife, were afraid to leave and had their lunch brought to them rather than go outside. The incident was captured on video. The Bush administration filed a civil complaint for voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act against the two individuals, the national organization, and its leader.

The Obama DOJ won a default judgment in April 2009 when the defendants did not appear to contest the charges. Then, in May 2009, the Obama DOJ moved to voluntarily dismiss the case. Not narrow it. Not settle it. Dismiss it. Three of the four defendants had all charges dropped entirely. The fourth received only a limited injunction prohibiting him from displaying a weapon at a polling place until 2012.

Career DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams resigned in protest and testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he and other career attorneys working the case were ordered to drop the charges. He testified that the dismissal was intended to send a direct message inside and outside the Civil Rights Division that cases like this one would not continue under the Obama administration. A colleague, former Voting Section chief Christopher Coates, also testified under subpoena that a superior appointed by the Obama administration had prohibited him from asking job applicants whether they would enforce the voting laws in a race-neutral manner.

Holder testified under oath that he was not aware of the decision to dismiss the case until after it was made. Documents later obtained by Judicial Watch showed that Holder’s own Civil Rights Division had sent him weekly reports referencing the case before the dismissal. Political appointees had been involved in the decision at multiple levels. A federal court reviewing the documents found the DOJ’s own explanations internally contradicted. The Commission on Civil Rights concluded the DOJ’s refusal to cooperate with its investigation violated the law.

The Obama DOJ won a default judgment against armed voter intimidators, then voluntarily dismissed the case. Career attorneys resigned in protest. Holder testified he did not know about the decision. His own division’s weekly reports to him said otherwise.

Then came Operation Fast and Furious. Beginning in 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, operating under the Justice Department, ran an operation in which it allowed illegal gun purchases to proceed in Arizona gun shops with the stated intention of tracking the weapons as they crossed into Mexico. The operation lost track of more than 1,400 of the roughly 2,000 weapons it had allowed to walk. On December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed in the Arizona desert. Two weapons found at the scene were traced to Operation Fast and Furious.

On May 3, 2011, Holder testified under oath before Congress that he had first heard about Fast and Furious over the last few weeks. Documents subsequently obtained showed that Holder had received written briefings referencing the operation from his own department in July 2010 and October 2010, and that a notification was sent to his office the day Brian Terry was murdered. He had been briefed on the operation, in writing, at least twice before he told Congress he had only recently heard of it.

When Congress subpoenaed the documents surrounding the operation and the cover-up, Holder refused to produce them. On June 20, 2012, President Obama asserted executive privilege over the documents, the first use of executive privilege in his presidency, to block congressional access. On June 28, 2012, the House of Representatives voted 255 to 67 to hold Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress. It was the first time in American history that the head of the Justice Department had been held in contempt by Congress. The bipartisan vote included 17 Democrats.

The Justice Department, which Holder ran, declined to prosecute him for contempt. The department he led investigating his own contempt and finding nothing prosecutable is the same department that declined to charge Lois Lerner for destroying evidence under subpoena, declined to prosecute the New Black Panther Party after winning a default judgment against them, and would later decline to find criminal intent in the FISA warrant process. Eric Holder is not a collection of unfortunate coincidences. He is the institutional architecture that made all of it possible. He was the roof over the operation.

He was never prosecuted. He left office and became a partner at a major law firm. He has since worked to fund legal challenges to Republican redistricting maps. He is, by all accounts, comfortable.

Then They Escalated to Spying on a Presidential Campaign

The IRS targeting established something important: that a Democratic administration would use the machinery of a supposedly neutral federal agency as a political weapon, that the people who did it would face no consequences, and that the institutional culture rewarded this behavior rather than punishing it. The people who built and operated that system were still in place. The culture they created was intact. The only thing that changed was the target.

Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in June 2015. By April 2016, lawyers for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee had retained the research firm Fusion GPS through the law firm Perkins Coie. Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. Steele compiled a dossier of claims about Trump and his campaign’s alleged connections to Russia, drawing primarily from anonymous sources, many of them Russian nationals and former Russian intelligence officials. The dossier was, by Steele’s own later admissions and by the findings of multiple subsequent investigations, largely unverified and in significant part fabricated.

The Clinton campaign and DNC disguised the payments as legal fees in their FEC filings. The FEC later found probable cause of a campaign finance disclosure violation and fined them a combined $113,000. Their spokesperson called it a silly violation of a purpose description. A foreign national had been paid by a political campaign to gather information from foreign nationals, including Russian intelligence sources, about the opposing candidate.

The dossier found its way from Fusion GPS through Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS on the same project, to the FBI. The FBI used it as a central component of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application to conduct electronic surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser. This is not the same as an IRS delay letter. This is the federal government’s most powerful surveillance apparatus, authorized by a secret court with no adversarial process, turned against the campaign of a presidential candidate based on a document paid for by that candidate’s opponent.

The critical legal violation was not merely that the dossier was unverified. The violation was that the FBI knew, before submitting the FISA application, that the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign. Bruce Ohr had told FBI agents explicitly that Steele was desperate to defeat Trump and was politically motivated. The FISA application buried the relevant disclosure in a convoluted footnote that the House Intelligence Committee concluded obscured rather than clarified the political origins of the document. The FISA court operates on an honor system, as James Comey acknowledged under oath, meaning the government is expected to disclose exculpatory information. It did not.

The FBI knew the dossier was Clinton campaign opposition research. It obtained a warrant to electronically surveil a presidential campaign using that document without straightforwardly telling the secret court who had paid for it.

The documented evidence of specific, provable law-breaking is not a matter of inference. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in 2020 to a federal felony for altering a CIA email used in the fourth FISA renewal application. The original email stated that Carter

Page was a CIA source, which would have been exculpatory and would have undermined the surveillance justification. Clinesmith altered it to say Page was not a source, then submitted the falsified document to the federal court. He received probation. He was reinstated to the DC Bar in good standing within months. The DC Bar is simultaneously pursuing disbarment proceedings against Jeff Clark for drafting a memo about election irregularities.

The Durham investigation produced one guilty plea, one conviction, and multiple acquittals. The senior officials who authorized the surveillance of a presidential campaign kept their pensions. The foreign spy who compiled the fabricated dossier was not charged. The FBI director who signed off on applications to a secret court that contained incomplete disclosures retired and wrote a book.

The escalation from the IRS model to the FISA model follows a straight institutional line. No consequences for Lerner meant the culture was intact and rewarded. Intact and rewarded cultures do not self-correct. They escalate. The next available tool against the next available target was the one they reached for.

Meanwhile, They Were Also Running the Slush Fund Network

While these two targeting operations were running, one against grassroots conservatives during the Obama era and one against a presidential campaign during the 2016 cycle, a parallel set of financial mechanisms was operating to direct billions of taxpayer-adjacent dollars to left-wing organizations. This is where the hypocrisy of the slush fund complaint becomes farcical.

Sue and settle is a process by which left-wing activist groups file lawsuits against a sympathetic Democratic administration, the administration immediately surrenders and agrees to a consent decree, and the resulting court-enforced settlement imposes regulations that Congress never voted for and the public never had a chance to comment on. The suing group then collects its legal fees from the taxpayer. The administration gets political cover to enact an agenda it could not pass legislatively.

The Obama EPA entered 60 Clean Air Act consent decrees in his first term alone, more than twice the rate of the Bush years, and 137 total across both terms. Major cases include the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, driven by a 2008 environmental lawsuit and ultimately imposing an estimated $10 billion in annual compliance costs on the power industry. The Utility MACT Rule. The Boiler MACT Rule. A 2011 ESA mega-settlement covering 779 species across 85 lawsuits in a single consent decree. A 2023 pesticide settlement covering more than 300 active ingredients, described as the largest Endangered Species Act case ever filed against the EPA. Every one of these was a private negotiation between an activist group and a sympathetic agency, producing a court order with the force of law and bypassing the regulatory process Congress established. Open the Books tracked the direct attorney fee payments from 2013 to 2024 at $20.3 million, with the Sierra Club alone collecting more than $4 million.

The bank settlement slush fund dwarfs the EPA numbers. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama DOJ used the leverage of mortgage-backed securities lawsuits against major banks not primarily to compensate defrauded homeowners but to redirect money to politically aligned organizations. The total redirected from 2009 to 2015 was $37.3 billion, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Institute report. The mechanism offered banks what the DOJ called an enhanced credit: for every dollar donated to a DOJ-approved left-wing organization, the bank received two dollars of credit toward its settlement obligation. Beneficiaries included the National Council of La Raza, the National Urban League, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. One recipient’s executive director wrote in an email that he would build a statue to the Obama DOJ official responsible. Internal DOJ emails show that officials simultaneously worked to prevent conservative organizations, specifically naming the Pacific Legal Foundation, from receiving any of the same funds. Congress had defunded some of these same organizations in the FY2011 budget, which Obama signed. The DOJ routed money to them anyway through the settlement mechanism, bypassing the appropriations Congress had just enacted.

In 2016, the Obama DOJ required Volkswagen to pay $2 billion to fund an electric car initiative as part of the emissions cheating settlement. Congress had specifically rejected that initiative. The money went not to defrauded consumers but to a policy program the legislative branch had declined to authorize.

State judiciaries layered on their own version through cy pres class action distributions, routing consumer settlement funds to organizations lobbying for causes with no connection to the injured class members, including groups advocating for affirmative action, public funding for abortion, and benefits for undocumented immigrants.

$37.3 billion redirected through bank settlements to political allies. $2 billion from the Volkswagen settlement to a program Congress rejected. Hundreds of regulatory consent decrees bypassing the legislative process. And a $113,000 FEC fine for paying a foreign spy to fabricate a surveillance predicate. These are the actual numbers. Now they are outraged about a $1.776 billion fund with a commission, quarterly reports, and an expiration date.

What the Anti-Weaponization Fund Actually Is

The fund is $1.776 billion drawn from the federal Judgment Fund, the same permanent Treasury appropriation Democrats used for the Obama-era Keepseagle settlement and multiple other large-scale disbursements. A legal expert who spent 32 years at the DOJ’s Civil Division described the Judgment Fund as a huge loophole in Congress’s power of the purse that sat dormant for a long time before the Obama administration used it for large-scale settlements. Democrats opened that door. Trump walked through it.

A five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General will hear claims from individuals who believe they were improperly targeted by any presidential administration. The commission has authority to issue formal apologies and monetary relief. It reports quarterly to the Attorney General. It stops processing claims December 15, 2028. Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization receive no money. They receive a formal apology. The fund is for everyone else.

Here the press and critics have been consistently sloppy, and it is worth being precise. Not every January 6 defendant is a candidate for this fund. The person who attacked a police officer deserved jail time and got it. The person who smashed a window, breached barriers with weapons, organized a coordinated assault plan, committed violence or destruction of property deserved the sentence received. Anyone claiming this fund rewards those people is being dishonest about what the fund actually does.

The people who may have a legitimate claim are a different category. At least 227 people were arrested at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018 for disrupting an official Senate proceeding and unlawful presence in restricted Capitol areas. Most paid fines of $35 to $50. One protester physically disrupted the Senate floor vote, causing it to halt while she was removed. She paid $50 at a DC police station. Some January 6 defendants who walked through doors held open by Capitol Police, touched no one, broke nothing, and were charged with the same class of federal offense, trespassing during an official proceeding, received sentences measured in months or years.

A Kavanaugh protester who halted a Senate floor vote paid $50. A January 6 defendant who walked through an open door and touched nothing served months in federal prison. Same statute. Different politics. That is the definition of weaponized prosecution, and it is exactly what this fund exists to address.

Justice Neil Gorsuch raised precisely this comparison during Supreme Court oral argument in Fischer v. United States, asking the government’s attorney whether someone who yells during the State of the Union address would face twenty years under its broad reading of the obstruction statute. The Court’s conservative majority was skeptical. The concern was not abstract. The fund is a claims process. It requires documentation. The commission evaluates each claim. People who committed violence do not qualify. People who received sentences radically disproportionate to legally identical conduct by political opponents of a different party may qualify. That is not political charity. That is the constitutional principle of equal application of the law.

Why This Terrifies Them

The Democrats calling this a slush fund are not stupid. They know what a formal claims process produces. It produces claimants. Claimants produce documentation. Documentation produces witnesses. Witnesses produce testimony.

For the first time, there is a financial and procedural incentive for people inside these agencies to come forward. A person who witnessed IRS targeting of conservative groups, stayed quiet because there was no personal upside to speaking, and has since left government employment now has reason to document what they saw. A person who observed the FISA process being manipulated and said nothing because the institutional culture rewarded silence now has a reason to describe what they know. The claims process requires substantiation. Substantiation requires witnesses. And witnesses have, for the first time, something to gain from telling the truth.

The quarterly reports to the AG mean none of it disappears quietly. The commission runs through the end of 2028. The pattern that began with Lois Lerner, that predates Trump, that has never been fully documented or punished, may finally produce a record that outlasts the people who built it.

This is the thing the left cannot say out loud but absolutely understands: they are not afraid of the fund because it is corrupt. They are afraid of what the claims process might surface about how corrupt they actually were, over how many years, and how many levels of government, and how much of it was never about Trump at all.

They are not afraid of the fund because it is corrupt. They are afraid of what the claims process might surface about how corrupt they actually were, over how many years, against how many people, and how much of it predates Trump entirely.

The Final Accounting

In 2010, the IRS began systematically freezing conservative organizations during election cycles. While under congressional investigation, the official running the operation warned colleagues in writing to watch their emails, asked whether the instant message system was archived, responded “Perfect” when told it was not, suffered a hard drive crash the forensic unit concluded was likely caused by physical impact, had that drive shredded rather than subjected to available recovery techniques, watched 422 backup tapes erased while under subpoena, conducted government business from a secret email account registered under her dog’s name, pleaded the Fifth before Congress, and retired with her full federal pension. No prosecution.

The Attorney General running the Justice Department during those years won a default judgment against armed voter intimidators at a Philadelphia polling place, then voluntarily dismissed the case after career attorneys testified under oath they were ordered to drop it. He testified he had not heard about Operation Fast and Furious, a gunwalking operation his department ran, until a few weeks before his May 2011 testimony. His own department’s written briefings to him referenced the operation in July and October 2010. A notification reached his office the day a Border Patrol agent was killed with one of those guns. He was held in criminal contempt of Congress by a vote of 255 to 67, the first attorney general in American history to receive that citation. His own department declined to prosecute him for it. He left office and became a law firm partner. No prosecution.

In 2016, a political campaign paid a foreign spy to fabricate surveillance predicates, disguised the payments as legal fees, and used the resulting document to obtain secret warrants against the opposing presidential campaign without fully disclosing its origins to the authorizing court. The lawyer who falsified evidence to sustain those warrants received probation and got his bar license back. No senior official was prosecuted.

From 2009 to 2015, $37.3 billion in bank settlement funds was redirected to politically aligned organizations under a two-to-one credit scheme that incentivized corporations to donate to left-wing groups while specifically blocking conservative organizations from receiving any of the same funds.

The Obama DOJ required Volkswagen to fund a $2 billion electric vehicle program Congress had specifically refused to authorize.

The Obama EPA imposed over 100 regulations through consent decrees with allied activist groups, including a mercury rule estimated at $10 billion in annual compliance costs, with the groups’ legal fees paid by taxpayers.

State courts routed class action settlement funds to ideological causes unrelated to the injured consumers.

Then, when a $1.776 billion fund is created through a legal settlement using the same Judgment Fund authority Democrats themselves pioneered, with a five-member commission, quarterly reporting, a fixed expiration date, a prohibition on the plaintiffs collecting any money, and a documented claims process that requires proof of targeting, Elizabeth Warren calls it the most corrupt act in American history.

They built this system. They ran it for years. They ran it against people who had nothing to do with Trump. They ran it against people whose only offense was organizing politically on the wrong side. They ran it against a presidential campaign using fabricated foreign intelligence. They celebrated every result as justice and accountability and the rule of law.

The only thing that changed is who is holding the tool.

And they know, better than anyone, what that tool can find.

Clayton Wood is an attorney, pastor, and Executive Director of Wears Valley Ranch and Thrive. He writes on Substack and Facebook and shares posts on claytonswood.com.