Report: Joe Biden Calls for DOJ to Resume Obama-Era ‘Slush Fund’ Payouts to Left-Wing Groups

President Joe Biden is looking to the Justice Department to reinstate a controversial Obama-era practice that allowed prosecutors to make settlement agreements where defendants paid outside groups instead of the government or victims, according to a report.

The Trump administration stopped these payments in 2017, as outlined in a Justice Department manual that initially came from a memo from former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people — not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” Sessions said in 2017.

In 2017, Congress took aim at the “slush fund,” which incentivized corporate payments to left-wing groups such as La Raza.

Former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) sponsored a bill called the “Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2017,” but the bill never came to fruition.

The Sessions Justice Department policy, however, became an agency rule that went into effect in December 2020.

The rule is now part of several federal agency actions subject to review under Biden’s upcoming executive order called, “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” Fox News reported.

The Obama administration Justice Department extorted fines from major banks such as Bank of America and used them to fund left-wing groups that push the Democrat vote, according to a 2016 report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI).

Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer said in an interview with Breitbart News Daily in 2016 the Obama administration had been “diverting more than $650 million to left-wing groups”:

The problem is the Obama Justice Department has been diverting literally more than $650 million to left-wing groups. They do it under the guise of, “Well, you know, if this bank discriminated against lenders racially, we’re going to give this money to these left-wing quote-unquote housing groups to help deal with the problem.”

But that’s not what’s going on. These housing groups are advocacy groups. They’re left-wing organizations. They are registering voters and getting voters out to the voting booth. And they specifically target what they call quote-unquote progressive voters.

So this is taking the Department of Justice, which we’ve experienced so much in recent years has been politicized by this Administration, even further to where now the Department of Justice is transferring money to left-wing groups — in an effort, frankly I think, to influence this election.

Schweizer added that the Obama administration’s attempts to transfer money to left-wing groups was a way to politicize the election at the time.