Bob Goodlatte urges Sessions to seize money directed to Obama’s … – Washington Examiner

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a roadmap for recovering money that former President Barack Obama's team gave to Native American groups, a plan that was conceived of by a federal judge and is being championed by a top House Republican.

"[T]he Trump administration may have an opportunity to claw back $380 million for taxpayers, but it must act fast," House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte wrote to Sessions.

The money traces back to a settlement fund that the Obama administration used to compensate for racial bias against Native Americans allegedly committed by the Agriculture Department a deal that was struck even though the Justice Department was poised to win in the courts. But most of the people who received money in the settlements never claimed to have faced discrimination.

Moreover, the settlement was so large that there was money left over after making the payments, so the Obama administration sent that money to non-profit groups who were not a part of the lawsuit.

Goodlatte spent years trying to block the Justice Department from using a Judgment Fund to settle lawsuits and send the money to third-party groups. "Congress must not tolerate Justice Department political appointees using settlements to funnel money to their liberal friends," he said in January. "This is also an institutional issue. Once direct victims have been compensated, deciding what to do with additional funds recovered from defendants becomes a policy question properly decided by elected representatives in Congress, not agency bureaucrats or prosecutors."

Now he's gotten a boost from a federal judge. "This is not justice," Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in a May 16 court document. "It is not even law."

Brown issued that criticism as part of a dissent to a circuit court ruling that affirmed the settlement could stand. But that lawsuit didn't involve a direct challenge to the settlement as a whole; instead, the plaintiff in that case argued that the extra money should have been used to increase the payments made to the Native American individuals, rather than to third-party groups. "In short, everyone apparently presumed a bloodied-shirt party could be thrown at the taxpayer's expense," Brown wrote. "Why risk Congress being a killjoy?"

As part of the dissent, she suggested that the Sessions-led Justice Department could void the agreement to send money to third-party groups. "The Justice Department can argue, as explained above, that the Executive Branch lacked the constitutional and statutory authority to enter into these [agreements]," Brown wrote. "The conduct of those in this case proves how little the Constitution will matter when good character ceases to be informed by adherence to one's oath of office, and is primarily defined by how generous you are willing to be with someone else's money."

That's music to Goodlatte's ears. "These settlements were an abuse of the discretion that Congress granted DOJ in creating the Judgment Fund," he wrote to Sessions, urging the new AG "to reverse some of the damage wrought by your predecessors."

Read more from the original source:

Bob Goodlatte urges Sessions to seize money directed to Obama's ... - Washington Examiner