“There's been numerous other occasions over the years where things like this have been done, but these were people that were weaponized and really treated brutally by a system that was so corrupt, with corrupt people running it, and they're getting reimbursed for their legal fees and the other things that they had to suffer.”

The department named one precedent, not numerous ones. The Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion fund drawn from the Judgment Fund, administered by five members appointed by the Attorney General, created in resolving a suit whose plaintiffs were the President, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and the Trump Organization, brought against the Treasury and the IRS after the leak of their tax returns. The same announcement pointed, most notably, to a single earlier example: the Keepseagle case, in which the Obama administration created a $760 million fund to redress claims of racism against the federal government over a period of decades. That fund compensated Native American farmers and ranchers who alleged discrimination by the Agriculture Department.

Keepseagle is a real precedent, and it is the claim's best defence. What distinguishes this fund is what a federal judge later found about the case that produced it: that there was never adverseness between the parties and never a case or controversy. A federal judge's temporary restraining order halted the fund, and the administration appeared to back off after Republican opposition, with him saying that a court had it held up. House Democrats said the fund raised a spectre of corruption unparalleled in American history.