Settlements-as-Spin: The Trump DOJ’s Slush-Fund Politics

On May 13, 2026, the Trump Justice Department announced that it had settled pandemic contrarian Alex Berenson’s First Amendment lawsuit, Berenson v. Biden — after the district court had already dismissed his claims against the federal defendants. The settlement, which included a $150,000 payout, is a negotiated contract between the parties. It is not a judicial ruling; no court ever found that the Biden administration unconstitutionally censored Berenson. The language of the settlement says it “is not, is in no way intended to be, and should not be construed as, an admission of liability or fault,” and “shall not be construed as evidence or as an admission regarding any issues of law or fact, or regarding the truth or validity of any allegation or claim raised in this action.”

It will shock you to learn that right-wing media is reporting things differently. In the alternate universe inhabited by The Federalist et al, the settlement is proof of a “”Censorship Industrial Complex””. In the universe where the earth is round and vaccines don’t cause autism, what happened is more mundane: a plaintiff once again couldn’t prove the Censorship Complex theory in a courtroom, so the DOJ cited a Trump executive order as justification, and wrote a check.

Let’s break down why the Berenson settlement matters, because things like this are going to continue happening. People who have grievance narratives that are politically useful to Trump — or who have done egregious things directly in his support — will be getting government handouts of your tax dollars, so you should be paying attention. One story is finally breaking through: the Trump DOJ just stood up a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay out supposed victims of “weaponization” of the government. Who do you suppose will be collecting?

The third settlement in a series

Berenson’s settlement happened before the establishment of that fund, and his payment did not come from it. But it offers a preview of the same governing style: convert grievances into government-recognized claims, then use settlement machinery and public money (your tax dollars) to ratify them. It was also the third court case in quick succession, tied to the fantasy of a censorship complex, that was not proven in court but instead settled by the Trump DOJ.

The other two were Murthy v Missouri, and Daily Wire v. State Department (with The Federalist as another plaintiff). Most people haven’t heard of the latter; it argued that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – tasked with countering foreign propaganda abroad – had given grants to, and promoted, counter-disinformation outfits’ foreign-focused work. Those outfits hadseparately rated the plaintiff outlets ‘unreliable’ in tools for advertisers. The plaintiffs’ ambitious theory was that funding or promoting some of the entities’ foreign work made the State Department responsible for the domestic ratings as well. No court tested this theory; the case survived a motion to dismiss, Trump came back to power, and it was subsequently settled.

I wrote about both consent decrees in Lawfare as they came down, because of a data void problem in the coverage: right-wing media got straight to reporting them as confirmation of the underlying claims. They weren’t. No findings of fact went into either settlement. Once the administration changed, the new defendant – the Trump DOJ – was incentivized to lose, because it was politically aligned with the plaintiffs. It, too, wants the Biden Censorship Regime to be a real thing. So it settled. The plaintiffs got to claim victory, a political win for MAGA writ large. And because mainstream media didn’t cover the decrees — treating them as the nonevents they normally would be — the partisan ecosystem set the narrative agenda, including for the AI answer engines that increasingly synthesize reality for everyone else.

The Facts of the Berenson Case

For those who’ve forgotten: Alex Berenson is a former New York Times reporter who became one of the most prominent COVID-vaccine skeptics on social media; The Atlantic famously dubbed him “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man“. Twitter banned him in 2021. He sued the company, and as part of that suit’s discovery he obtained internal records; the ban was reversed and his account reinstated in 2022.

Here is where I want to be precise: Berenson’s jawboning record is fuller than anything in Murthy. The Murthy plaintiffs mostly lost at the Supreme Court on traceability — they couldn’t tie specific moderation to specific government demands. There was no evidence that the government defendants had so much as mentioned Jay Bhattacharya, for example. That’s not the case with Berenson. The Twitter records, as summarized in the judge’s opinion, show that the White House did single him out by name: at an April 2021 “Vaccine Misinfo Briefing,” officials including Rob Flaherty pressed Twitter on why Berenson “hadn’t been kicked off,” with the White House treating him as a sort of “ground zero” for vaccine misinformation. 

But the same record also shows Twitter pushing back. The company told the White House that Berenson hadn’t violated its policies, and did not ban him. The permanent suspension didn’t come until late August — and the evidence closest to that ban runs not through a government official but through Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner under Trump (2017-2019) and a Pfizer board member, a private citizen by that point, who had sent Twitter’s lobbyist a “partner report” flagging a Berenson tweet that then apparently became the fifth strike. The morning after the ban, documents show Twitter’s senior executives saying that it shouldn’t have happened.

So even in what was relatively the strongest of the censorship complex cases, the record establishes Twitter resisting direct government pressure, and then possibly acting on the Gottlieb complaint — this was the causal link gap that a judge never had to resolve. Berenson is currently also suing Gottlieb and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) — a Reconstruction-era statute creating a cause of action against private conspiracies to deprive people of federally protected rights based on membership in a protected class. He’s arguing that unvaccinated people are a class, and Gottlieb and Bourla conspired with the government.

Why the case was dismissed — and what the settlement skips over

Berenson’s case had been dismissed in July and September 2025: first the judge dismissed the private defendants because, among other things, unvaccinated people are not a class, and later the federal defendants on standing because they were no longer in office and there was no available remedy. (The judge did not dismiss for lack of evidence on the standing claim).

But the Trump DOJ chose to settle the case, to give Berenson $150,000, and to recite language that partisan media framed as the government admitting it censored him. In reality, it says this:

Read it carefully. The first whereas recites what “Plaintiff asserted in the litigation” – what Berenson said in his complaint about being censored. The second recites that the federal defendants “recognize” that a formal Executive Order issued by President Trumphas “acknowledged and conceded” that speech “like Plaintiff’s” was stifled. The agreement then spends two full pages quoting that executive order, and follows it with Trump’s July 21, 2025 “Promises Made, Promises Kept” statement — in which the President was, per the settlement’s language, “rightly and deservedly taking pride” in keeping his campaign promise to “bust up the censorship regime.”

The Free Press called the settlement a “huge victory for free speech,” and asked “Why hasn’t the mainstream media noticed?”

There is no actual independent finding there, based on the record, that the Biden government censored Berenson. There is the Trump administration reciting its own executive order and calling it a concession. Executive orders say whatever the president wants them to say. EOs are political documents. Remember the decreegoing after CISA head Chris Krebs for “falsely and baselessly den[ying] that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen”? Yeah. Trump isn’t God, he doesn’t speak reality into existence through the Word. Saying “My EO is the evidence that Biden censored you” is not a serious claim.

Now, The Free Press is not serious media, it’s agenda-driven advocacy journalism headed in the direction of becoming The Federalist. The right-wing media ecosystem constantly spins to support this narrative in particular, because the fact that none of these cases could pass muster in court is pretty inconvenient for the censorship hoaxers. TFP did get one thing right, though: mainstream media should be reporting on the cases. It should be reporting the losses, and what they reflect about the hollowness of 3 years of weaponized investigations by Jim Jordan. It should be reporting on the political and financial gifts, which establish a narrative the movement couldn’t otherwise. Murthy v Missouri was an embarrassing loss! Sen. Eric Schmitt has struggled to cope. If mainstream media wanted to, it could report on the work that orgs like FIRE are doing to tackle jawboning through legislation to mandate transparency in government requests to tech companies – which I support.

For the record, since this post will make my online screamer fandom big mad: I don’t think Berenson should have lost his account. As I’ve long said, takedowns mostly just turn cranks into martyrs, and Berenson promptly just set up shop on Substack and monetized anyway. I think labeling, Community Notes, user-controlled feeds, protocols, and speech-not-reach policies (centralized platform editorial speech) are solid interventions when transparently deployed. It’s also worth noting that Berenson has been critical of Trump a handful of times; what we’re going to see with the $1.776B fund is going to be fully off the rails, “for my friends, everything” mass grift. 

But to be clear: the Berenson settlement does not say that a Court found the Biden administration violated the First Amendment. It says “the current Trump government has taken the position that violations occurred.” This is not a merits ruling after fact-finding. It creates no binding precedent, and it’s hard to imagine it’s going to do much for Berenson’s ongoing conspiracy case against Bourla and Gottlieb. It is just the administration incorporating a political position into legal language.

And it came with a $150,000 government handout.

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