May. 29, 2026, 8:56 PM EDT

A federal judge on Friday ordered President Donald Trump to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court in the settlement of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and whether the deal was designed to improperly benefit Trump and his allies.

In her order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams cited a request filed Wednesday by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case and look into whether the out-of-court settlement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.” In their court filingthe former judges say Trump and his co-plaintiffs failed to mention any plans of a settlement in their motion to withdraw the lawsuit against the IRS.

Earlier this month, Trump voluntarily withdrew his civil lawsuit against the IRS, in which he had sought $10 billion in damages from the agency over the leak of his past tax returns. Shortly after, the Justice Department announced it was creating an “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a settlement with Trump that establishes a pool of nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money earmarked to compensate people who claim to be victims of the government’s “weaponization.” Through an addendum issued the next day, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also released Trump, his family and his companies from any tax liability accrued through mid-May.

“The Court was deceived,” the former judges wrote in their Wednesday court filing, noting that the Justice Department’s settlement was announced shortly after Trump’s attorneys filed to dismiss the lawsuit.

“That ‘settlement’ commandeers the contrived sum of $1.776 billion from the United States Treasury, to be handed out to recipients chosen by a commission effectively controlled by the President,” the former judges wrote.

The unprecedented compensation fund drew criticism from lawmakers from both parties.

House Democrats denounced the settlement as a “slush fund” and “super-pardon” created to benefit Trump and his family. Some lawmakers were concerned the funds would be awarded to people involved in the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Blue Light News reported on a bipartisan House effort to stop the “anti-weaponization” fund.

This week, Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., told reporters that he did not sign off on the creation of the fund and insisted that no taxpayer money be given to “any January 6 insurrectionist.”

“I do not think one penny of any fund should ever go to any January 6 insurrectionist that was in the Capitol,” Flood said Tuesday. “I want to be very clear: I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement.”

Williams, appointed to the bench by then-President Barack Obama, gave Trump’s attorneys until June 12 to respond to the fraud allegations and address whether the lawsuit should be reopened over fraud on the court.

Carla Herreria is an editor for MS NOW’s breaking news and liveblog team. She was previously a senior assignment editor at HuffPost.

May. 29, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois has been in the news a lot lately — and for some disturbing reasons.

The Justice Department has reportedly opened an inquiry into a Chicago-based nonprofit backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and is considering possible charges of money laundering. According to The New York Times, the inquiry is focused, at least for now, on Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic, which helped fund certain legal expenses in E. Jean Carroll’s civil cases against President Donald Trump. The U.S. attorney’s office has said it has not opened a criminal investigation into Carrollthe New York writer who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s, although the reporting makes clear that prosecutors are examining the accuracy of statements made during the civil litigation about outside funding.

At this point, even if Carroll is not formally the subject of the investigation, the criminal inquiry looks less like an ordinary money-laundering or perjury investigation than an effort to use federal prosecutorial power to revisit a credibility fight Trump already lost in court.

The lead prosecutor for these investigations is Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. His office made headlines recently over its prosecution of protesters who came to be known as the “Broadview Six.” The cases collapsed amid extraordinary revelations about prosecutors’ conduct before the grand jury.

The office first downgraded from felony charges to misdemeanors and also reduced the number of defendants; last week it dismissed charges against the remaining individuals indicted last October after protesting outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. Boutros said in court proceedings that prosecutors’ conduct during the grand jury process led to the dismissal.

The conduct was stunning: Prosecutors reportedly interacted with grand jurors outside normal proceedings, improperly vouched for witnesses, and even removed or sidelined grand jurors viewed as skeptical of the government’s case. At one point, the judge, who noted the conduct was redacted from grand jury transcripts she was shownremarked that she had never seen such conduct before.

For any U.S. attorney’s office — and especially for one with Chicago’s history and reputation — this was a major institutional embarrassment.

Boutros’ office could be on the verge of another high-profile debacle, even if Carroll is not currently a formal target of the inquiry and the focus remains on American Future Republic.

To be clear, a false statement under oath can matter. But the particulars here make a potential case against Carroll look exceptionally thin — and proving she knowingly lied under oath would be particularly tough.

Carroll testified in 2022 that no one else was paying her legal fees. Her lawyers later disclosed that some expenses were funded by American Future Republic. The funding issue came out before trial, and Trump’s lawyers seized on it. The trial judge barred Trump’s team from introducing that evidence, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit later upheld that ruling. The appellate court noted that Carroll had plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding and that there was no evidence she personally secured the funding, interacted with the funder or even knew the funder’s political position.

In 2023, a New York City jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her in a department store in 1996 and for later defaming her. In 2024, another jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages. The president has denied wrongdoing and appealed the awards.

Simply put, this was not hidden fraud discovered after the fact; it was disclosed before trial, litigated before the trial court and addressed by the 2nd Circuit.

Ordinarily, federal prosecutors do not convert into criminal investigations collateral credibility fights from civil litigation, especially ones already known to the trial and appellate courts. Then again, the DOJ is not typically led by a lawyer who previously was the president’s personal attorney.

Legally, the Carroll and Broadview Six cases are unrelated. But they point in the same institutional direction: federal prosecutorial power being used not simply to enforce law but to relitigate political conflict through the criminal process.

The broader pattern is hard to ignore because the targets are not random. Consider: James Comey, the former FBI director whom Trump fired and has long blamed for the Russia investigation, has been indicted twice by Trump’s DOJ. Letitia James, the New York attorney general who won the civil fraud case against Trump, was indicted on mortgage-related charges. After that case was dismissedthe DOJ tried — and failed — to secure a new indictment. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned public critic, had his home and office searched by the FBIand he was later indicted under the Espionage Act.

There are more: Sen. Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s central impeachment adversaries, became the subject of a DOJ mortgage-fraud inquiry. Another prominent Trump critic, former Rep. Eric Swalwell, was referred to the DOJ over mortgage and tax allegations. Lisa Cook is facing a DOJ mortgage-fraud probe as Trump tries to remove her from the Federal Reserveand the Fed received grand jury subpoenas amid an investigation of its then-chairman, Jerome Powellafter Trump publicly attacked the Fed’s renovation project and repeatedly criticized Powell over interest rates.

The through line is unmistakable: federal investigative power being steered again and again toward people who have investigated Trump, sued him, impeached him, contradicted him, restrained him or became symbols of opposition to him.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago, once embodied a very different prosecutorial culture in the office that’s leading the investigation into American Future Republic. He once told the media about his job: “One day I read that I was a Republican hack. Another day I read that I was a Democratic hack. And the only thing I did between those two nights was sleep.”

That was the old ideal of federal prosecution: Both sides might accuse you of bias, but neither side could plausibly claim you were using the machinery of federal law enforcement as a political instrument.

Today, Fitzgerald — who prosecuted Republicans and Democrats and was respected precisely because he seemed fundamentally indifferent to partisan outcome — represents Comey against the federal government. In seeking the dismissal of Comey’s indictment, Fitzgerald and co-counsel wrote that “President Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute Mr. Comey because of personal spite” and that the indictment arose from “multiple glaring constitutional violations and an egregious abuse of power by the federal government.”

All of these prosecutions suggest the culture Fitzgerald represented — restraint, proportionality, respect for the grand jury, reluctance to turn marginal civil-litigation disputes into criminal cases — is no longer guaranteed, even in the offices most famous for it.

Duncan Levin is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who serves as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and is a frequent contributor to MS NOW.