Washington Examiner:

In a little-noticed November report, Bank of America announced that it had donated more than $60.1 million to various charitable funds and nonprofit groups.

The donations were a good deal for Bank of America. For every dollar the bank gives, an independent monitor for the deal credits the bank with $2 toward the record $16.6 billion settlement with the Justice Department on financial fraud charges it signed in August 2014. To date, the donations have reduced that penalty by $138 million.

Ordinarily, this practice would be illegal. Not on the bank's part, but on the government's.

Federal law says that any funds obtained by a government official, such as a Justice Department prosecutor, must be deposited with the Treasury Department. Officials cannot instruct anybody making a payment to direct the funds anywhere else, much less offer them a deal if they do.

Yet President Obama's Justice Department has found a legal workaround to do just that in two of the biggest financial fraud settlements the government has ever obtained. Left-leaning nonprofit groups who would be eligible for the donations lobbied for this, according to Republican critics.

How does the Justice Department do this? By arguing that these are "voluntary" donations by the banks and therefore not funds that would otherwise go to the Treasury. Never mind that the banks would violate their plea agreements with the department if they did not make the payments.

"It's a cute lawyer's trick," said Paul Larkin, senior legal research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Rather than take the money and then hand it out, which they cannot do, they tell the bank to give it directly. It's really an effort to funnel public money to private parties."