Trump DOJ Settles Lawsuit By Vaccine Skeptic Despite Winning in Court
Anti-mRNA vaccine writer Alex Berenson said he received a six-figure payout from the case.
Last month, the Department of Justice sparked widespread outrage with its announcement that it had settled Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over an unauthorized leak of his tax returns.
The settlement raised eyebrows for its inclusion of a pledge by the IRS to drop any investigations into Trump’s family and organizations and the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate the president’s supporters who claimed to have been targeted by the previous administration.
Critics blasted the agreement as an effort by the administration to reward its allies—including potentially individuals convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. It wasn’t long before Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche conceded that his office was “not moving forward with the fund.”
But with all eyes focused on the Trump case, another unusual DOJ settlement from the week prior went largely unnoticed. The department conceded in a lawsuit brought by former New York Times journalist turned prominent vaccine skeptic—and Trump supporter—Alex Berenson. What made the settlement so strange was that it came after a federal court had dismissed the case on standing grounds. Courts cannot hear cases if the plaintiff lacks standing to bring the suit.
Berenson initially sued the Biden administration in 2023, alleging that it was responsible for Twitter suspending his account two years earlier after the company claimed he had violated its five-strike policy against posting COVID-19-related misinformation at the height of the pandemic. For evidence, Berenson presented email exchanges between administration officials and Twitter, in which the former requested the removal of some of his posts containing anti-mRNA vaccine musings.
The fact that the government’s attorneys had continued fighting the case surprised Berenson, who had endorsed Trump in 2024. He believed the Trump administration might be inclined to settle given the president’s political positioning. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order declaring that the Biden administration had “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
Berenson appealed the dismissal, and without even filing a response to his appeal, the administration settled. In a Substack post, Berenson noted his surprise at his good fortune.
“I knew last week if I didn’t settle with the government, we would likely be stuck next year asking the Supreme Court to make new law by extending my rights to sue for money damages,” he wrote. “Could we win? Of course we could based on the facts. But we would face long odds.”
The settlement included a six-figure payout, according to Berenson, and an acknowledgment that the government had violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to suppress speech like his.
Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California San Francisco College of the Law and leading expert in vaccine law, told Important Context that the administration “had no reason to settle.” She explained that payouts like Berenson’s come directly from the U.S. Treasury, which is fed by taxpayers.
“It’s clearly political,” she said. “His chances on appeal were really poor.”
Reiss said she was surprised by the settlement and could not see the logic in it, noting “The only reason to settle is political capital—a dig at the Biden administration—but if so…Why not settle earlier, why fight it in the lower court?…Why not publicize it? I think only Berenson wrote on it.”
The Trump and Berenson cases are part of a broader pattern where the Trump DOJ has settled politically aligned, Biden-Era lawsuits—often after the government’s attorneys have scored favorable court rulings. In several instances, those settlements have funneled large sums of taxpayer money into the pockets of the president’s allies.
In March, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, a key Trump ally, secured a $1.25 million payment from the government as part of a settlement in his wrongful prosecution lawsuit. Flynn was prosecuted during Trump’s first term for lying to federal investigators in 2016 about communications he’d had with a Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He pleaded guilty, but in May 2020, the DOJ moved to dismiss the case. Months later, he received a full pardon from Trump.
Flynn filed a civil lawsuit in 2023 seeking $50 million for malicious prosecution. The Biden DOJ sought to get the case dismissed. The Trump administration settled.
Not all the settlements with Trump allies have involved payouts. Another recent high-profile case in which the administration folded despite holding a winning legal hand is Missouri v. Biden. The DOJ reached a settlement in that case in March with anti-vaxxer Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. Kheriaty, a psychiatrist who lost his job over his refusal to get the COVID vaccine, had claims similar to Berenson’s, alleging that the Biden administration had censored him by pressuring social media companies to suppress his content.
Kheriaty has been broadly supportive of Trump for years and heralded the anti-censorship executive order as a “victory.” A conservative Catholic, he served as a witness in March for the president’s Religious Liberty Commission.
Kheriaty was one of several private plaintiffs in the suit, including current officials in Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services— Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, the chief science and data officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. They were represented pro bono by New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing lawfare group.
The case was originally filed in May 2022 by the Republican attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana general and joined by the NCLA plaintiffs that August. A Trump-appointed district court judge granted the plaintiffs a sweeping injunction against the Biden administration, prohibiting it from communicating with social media companies.
The injunction made its way up to the Supreme Court through the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and was overturned on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. The court ruled that they had not sufficiently demonstrated that the government’s actions were responsible for the moderation decisions. Following the ruling, the case went back to the district court and NCLA and Kheriaty kept fighting—Bhattacharya and Kulldorff left the suit to pursue their roles in HHS.
Despite the win at the Supreme Court, the administration settled the case in March with a consent decree—a legally binding agreement between the parties made without an admission of guilt or liability.
The Missouri decree stated that “The Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency…and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly—except as authorized by the Constitution, statute, judicial order, or regulation—to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment…unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. Nor shall Enjoined Defendants unilaterally direct or veto social media content moderation decisions of Social Media Companies.”
By that time, the narrative that the Biden administration had engaged in censorship had been absorbed by the political right, reflected in Trump’s January 2025 executive order. Details of Kheriaty’s settlement are not public, but NCLA and the anti-vaxxer celebrated their win with the former calling it “historic.”
The following month, the DOJ agreed to a consent decree to resolve another censorship lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, a pro-Trump publication founded by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro. The suit alleged that the Biden State Department had used third-party groups to censor conservative speech. Under the agreement, the department was barred from funding tools that suppress speech.
Berenson’s settlement drew cheers from right-wing groups like the Foundation for Freedom Online, the think tank founded by Trump’s former Secretary of State, Mike Benz, and far-right figures like Ann Coulter. The vaccine skeptic, meanwhile, has thanked and praised the president “for standing up for my rights.”