Just three days into his second term as president, Donald Trump granted a series of pardons to nearly two dozen people who were convicted of blocking access to reproductive health clinics. Among the beneficiaries was a Tennessee man named Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of having violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes it a felony to interfere with reproductive healthcare services.
Vaughn, however, didn’t just receive a pardon — he also apparently received a rather generous taxpayer-funded check. Fox News reported:
Vaughn pursued legal action against the Justice Department over his prosecution. He shared first with Fox News Digital that he recently reached a seven-figure settlement with the government agency. […]
“Obviously, money doesn’t equate justice, and there’s not a true sense of justice in the settlement, but it is an acknowledgment of wrong, and it is something to help make up for the time lost,” he told Fox News Digital.
The Justice Department hasn’t yet commented on the settlement.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because the circumstances have become rather common. In fact, in response to some dubious civil lawsuits, the Trump Justice Department has been exceedingly generous lately, agreeing to lucrative settlements with plaintiffs who are politically aligned with the White House.
For example, the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter fatally shot by a police officer during the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, received roughly $5 million in taxpayer money last year.
The list has been growing since. Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn was recently awarded more than $1.25 million in response to two civil suits, and Mark Houck, a longtime anti-abortion activist, received $1.1 million in a settlement of his own.
In April, they were joined by Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia, who received $1.25 million in a DOJ settlement.
When Trump himself reached a settlement of sorts with his own administration in May, leading to the creation of the since-withdrawn $1.776 billion compensation fund — widely panned by members of both parties as a “slush fund” — countless critics envisioned a system in which the president and his team spent the next two and a half years simply writing taxpayer-funded checks to their political allies. The gambit proved so scandalous that the White House claims that it has completely abandoned earlier plans for the payouts.
But as the recent pattern helps prove, Team Trump doesn’t need a $1.776 billion compensation fund to provide financial rewards to its friends. Trump’s Justice Department can instead keep using public funds to reach settlements with the White House’s allies.
Indeed, the message to the president’s friends couldn’t be clearer: Head to court and file a civil suit of your own, confident in the knowledge that there might very well be a generous check available for you, too.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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