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I think this boils down to "If Trump does this, then the Democrats will escalate"
Well maybe, but you could just as easily say "If the Democrats escalate, then some future Republican will escalate even more." Well, maybe not. Perhaps people on both sides subconsciously believe that for the most part, the Democrats are the party of "Defect!" I think there are a lot of reasons Trump is intensely unpopular with the Left, not the least of which is that they pretty much automatically hate all Republican presidents. But I do think that @JTarrou kind of has a point that the Left is rather upset that Trump "does politics back to them."
It isn't an escalation if all they're trying to do is get the money back. While going after people who had nothing to with the impropriety of the payments may seem unfair, it's something the government does all the time. In this case, though, the government might not have a choice. If Trump had structured the settlement so the money went directly to him, and he then gave the money away, it would be a straightforward case of suing him to get the money back. But instead, he wants to implement a complicated system where he creates a quasi-government agency that he controls and uses it to distribute the money. If he gets sued in the future he's going to argue that since he never took any of the money he's not on the hook to pay it back. If this agency or commission or whatever still has the money, then it's easy, but if they've already given it away, then the government has to go after whom it was given to. Any litigation surrounding this is going to be incredibly complicated, and any attorney is going to have to sue anyone whom they plausibly have a claim against. Given that the money is to be distributed by what is a quasi-government agency, this takes on a similar tenor as going after any other government benefit overpayment.
In other words, it's not escalation, just the nature of litigation. I'm currently defending a case where we forced the plaintiff to sue his daughter. He's not asking for any damages, but I have an argument that she's liable for contribution (which I probably won't use). She still had to hire her own attorney, and the claim isn't covered by insurance. Whenever you file a lawsuit, you have to account for the possibility that there is going to be some blowback that can affect third parties you didn't intend to involve.
Is there precedent for the government trying to void a settlement agreement on these sorts of grounds?
To put the question another way, has any US agency gone to court and argued that settlement agreements signed on behalf of the United States during the previous administration are invalid and therefore the government should be able to recoup the settlement proceeds?
I've never heard of this happening, but if it's a regular practice, then I'll agree it's not an escalation.
One of the underappreciated tragedies of the second Trump administration is the wholesale destruction of the credibility the Justice Department had spent 200 years building. What was once one of the most respected institutions among attorneys and judges alike has been reduced to having the reputation of the kind of lawyer you hire out of the yellow pages, and the only people who are willing to work for them are those who would otherwise be practicing divorce law in West Virginia. Judges as recently as two years ago gave the government wide deference because it was assumed that they wouldn't launch a prosecution unless the case had merit, wouldn't make an argument that didn't have merit, and would comply with judicial orders.
When you come up with a set of seven criteria and tell me that unless meeting all of them is something the government regularly does, then doing so this time will meet some broad definition of "escalation" conveniently ignores the fact that six months ago the president would use a bullshit collusive lawsuit to get personal access to taxpayer money that hadn't been appropriated by congress would have seemed completely unthinkable. Settlement agreements are voidable if there was a conflict of interest. The Federal government regularly goes after people who received funds that were improperly distributed, even when those people aren't at fault. Putting two and two together and letting a court decide isn't escalation.
I'm not sure I understand this, can you give me a couple of examples so I know what you are talking about? I've never heard of the government entering into a settlement agreement and the agreement later being voided due to there having been a conflict of interest. I suspect you are confusing settlements that require judicial approval, such as class actions, with settlements that do not require judicial approval.
Again, can you give me a couple of examples? The word "improperly" is vague. I certainly agree that if you receive money you were never eligible for, you are potentially on the hook. But if the eligibility criteria are changed retroactively?
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Most previous cases revolve around active fraud, noncompliance or unintentional mispayments, although I'll note that the latter have pretty wide avenues for relief and you get deep into equittable relief estoppel whatever really quick. Even there, a lot of the clawbacks come under other specific statutory authorization.
I can't find anything that's about intentional disbursements that a different DOJ later concluded were unauthorized. Even Iran-Contra didn't get unwound like Rov_Scam's hypothesizing: the feds tried and had some legal success to pull back money the executive spent and definitely didn't 'legitimately' have, but never got the money back, there was a much more constrained appropriations interface, and it was a mess in general.
EDIT: on the other hand, this isn't a settlement-settlement; because it's not reviewed by a judge, voiding it has a lot more options available.
I think that -- generally speaking -- settlements of legal claims do not need to be reviewed by a judge to be binding. I'm not sure how this Anti-Weaponization Fund will work, but presumably a claimant completes some kind of documentation; at some point the fund offers the person money; and, if the claimant accepts the offer, he signs some kind of release. Presumably if the claimant supplied false (and important) information in connection with his documentation, that would potentially be a basis for the government to take the position that the settlement is void and the money needs to be paid back. Absent that, I'm skeptical that there's much precedent for trying to recoup the money on the ground that the underlying settlement was collusive; or ultra vires; or whatever. So that if a future administration tried to do so, it could reasonably seen as escalation.
Here's a question: When the Trump administration cut off funding for a lot of USAID recipients, did the US also file lawsuits to recoup monies already paid? If not, that's another area for possible future escalation.
A purely contractual settlement has the defendant and claimant sign an agreement to end the lawsuit; it is remedied by bringing a court case again (though the second time, it's for breach of contract). These don't have to be reviewed by a judge unless there is a breach, and the standard is very generous toward the non-breaching party.
A judicially enforced settlement is one that's been presented to and accepted by a judge, and formally become part of the settlement of the case. These have to be reviewed first, but they become res judicata and a breach of the settlement terms can be punished with contempt.
As far as I can tell, no. The closest I can find was the big EPA fund held at CitiBank, but there it was still an attempt to go for funds awarded to Citibank rather than delivered to the grantees.
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Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".
If you are talking about predicting who wins the elections, I would say you are probably right. In terms of lawfare, partisanship, resistance, etc. though, it's pretty much human nature that if one said hits the defect button, the other side is more likely to defect once it gets the opportunity.
If the Trump administration hands out millions of dollars in settlements to January 6 protestors, conservative organizations, etc., will a future democratic administration turn around and sue them? I actually tend to doubt it; it's rather a big escalation. But even so, mutual escalation obviously can spin wildly out of control very quickly.
That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone managed to eke out a win against Trump.)
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