As usual, left-wing hysteria sounded the alarm. OMG!! A $2 billion slush fund controlled by Trump to pay off his MAGA operatives, like the insurrectionist thugs who beat up U.S. Capitol cops on January 6th! Just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, here’s an entirely new pinnacle of corruption!

While overwrought for sure, the Democrats were right about one thing: The Trump Anti-Weaponization Fund is a really bad idea, and it was quickly recognized as such by both sides. The Senate, Republicans included, saw fit to reject its inclusion in the reconciliation bill working its way through Congress, although, unfortunately, they allowed it to preempt for now the full restoration of Homeland Security funding.

But the good news is that last week’s anti-weaponization hiccup shone a spotlight on a very real disease that has infected our government and is worsening at every turn: the use (abuse, actually) of our justice system by both political parties to derail their political opponents. Call it lawfare. That’s the stuff of third-world countries — just lock up your political opponents and throw away the keys.

In the years following upstart Donald Trump’s unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton, Democrats tried valiantly to do exactly that, targeting both Trump and his associates. Now it looks like Trump is turning the tables, which will only make matters worse. We’ve already come far too close to Banana Republic behavior for comfort.

The consequences of lawfare are deep and long-lasting. After his first term, Trump was hit with a barrage of civil suits and criminal indictments, resulting in civil penalties of more than half a billion dollars and 34 nonsensical felony counts (at their core, matters of disputed bookkeeping practices). All were widely publicized — scenes that felt like something from Kafka.

By all indications, it seems that the legal bombardment backfired on Trump’s enemies. Evidently, the voting public understands the concept of fairness. But the character assassination aspect remains, and it’s certainly a contributor to the extreme partisanship we see today, the constantly reinforced hatred of our president, and arguably a big step toward physical assassination (three attempts, and counting).

In effect, every moment of both Trump terms has been adversely affected by the lawfare against him. And there is no telling to what degree those actions, or similar attacks on future candidates, may actually influence the results of future elections.

The point here, in summary, is that the victims of lawfare targeting elected officials are not just the individuals targeted — they are the public at large.

And since they’re back in the headlines, let’s take a harder look at the plight of those supposed January 6th insurrectionists.

The January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol Building was a violent riot, and its perpetrators should be held accountable. But contrary to whisperings of an orchestrated attempt to overturn an election, all evidence points to a lawful demonstration that simply got out of control. Have we ever seen that before? Yes, roughly a thousand times during the 2020 George Floyd summer of love — and even in frozen Minneapolis just last year during ICE operations in apprehending illegal immigrants.

In the 1/6/21 riot, angry protesters broke through or pulled aside barriers, broke windows, and fought their way through Capitol Police to gain entry into the Capitol. In their battle with police, the assailants had no firearms, but they employed makeshift weapons (flagpoles, canes, crutches, portable fire extinguishers, and the like). They caused physical injuries to the defenders, none life-threatening.

One person was killed — an unarmed protester attempting to climb through a broken window, shot at close range by a Capitol Police lieutenant.

It is estimated that a few hundred protesters clashed violently with police to gain entry to the Capitol, but once inside and the situation had quieted, the Capitol Police opened the doors and allowed many others to enter. Several thousand people — most of whom had attended the Trump rally just blocks away that morning — were present on the Capitol grounds that day.

All in all, it was a very ugly, but also very brief affair, and relatively inconsequential — some injuries sustained by police and their assailants, some physical damage to the building and grounds, and a several-hour delay in the official certification of election results by the Congress, in that building, that very evening.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration made the pivotal — and clearly political — decision to treat the three-hour disruption as an actual insurrection, an attack on our nation. For years, Joe Biden often described it as “the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.”

What followed was a concerted effort by his party and administration to cement that view in the public consciousness. House Democrats impeached the president just prior to leaving office and conducted a multi-year inquiry by a “select committee” with prime time national TV coverage. And the Biden Department of Justice, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, conducted the largest manhunt in FBI history, a coast-to-coast initiative to identify, locate, apprehend, and prosecute J6 participants to the maximum extent of the law.

The numbers are staggering. Nearly 1,600 individuals were arrested, 1,270 were convicted for offenses including trespassing on government property (nearly all), use of deadly weapons (flagpoles, etc), and interruption of a government process (the three-hour delay in election certification). Nearly 700 received jail terms.

Every one of those prosecutions was a personal calamity for the person affected — public disgrace, jobs lost, reputations shattered, career aspirations abandoned, family dissolutions, and so on. Some of those penalties were deserved, but the majority were grossly out of line with usual treatment in our country of unruly protesters, even violent ones, in thousands of situations nationwide.

In 2025, the newly reelected President Trump granted sweeping pardons to all January 6 defendants, regardless of their individual infractions. As a result, the stigma remains for all.

In my view, the Biden DOJ’s prosecution and punishment of J6 participants stands as the single greatest miscarriage of justice in U.S. history.

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How to stop lawfare once and for all? I think we know what won’t work. Doling out money to victims from an anti-weaponization fund, even with its Obama administration precedent, is in my view a nonstarter — a flagrantly political response to a flagrantly political abuse of power.

Similarly, relying on elections to weed out the justice abusers simply puts shoes on other feet. We’ve seen only too clearly that both sides play the game — it’s too attractive to pass up, and as we watch, each successive administration ratchets the process up, Banana Republic, here we come! And it makes no sense at all to use taxpayer money to compensate victims of lawfare abuse, while their abusers remain in office, free to keep on doing it.

Donald Trump got it right, in campaign mode, declaring that the most effective retribution is a successful presidency. But now in office, driven perhaps by the continuing fierce and hateful resistance to everything he tries to do, he has evidently changed his tune. No help there.

That leaves us with one, not particularly satisfying mechanism to root out lawfare. We must shine the light, as brightly as possible, on every case. That calls for a full examination that goes back years. Let’s really find out, once and for all, who cooked up and executed the Russia collusion allegations, who orchestrated the interaction between the DOJ and several states in the barrage of civil and criminal cases against Trump, and then shine that light internally on the perpetrators.

The voting public understands fairness. If we shine that light brightly enough on clear examples of politically motivated misuse of our legal system and processes, they will support accountability and will demonstrate in the ballot boxes that they will tolerate it no longer.

Once he or she realizes that abuse of our legal system will render him or her unelectable, even the most crass politician of either party will see that light and self-correct accordingly.

The problem can be fixed by responsible politicians acting responsibly. That’s the only way.