The justice department’s inquiry into E Jean Carroll is part of an investigation into an entity backed by the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, according to people familiar with the matter.

A source familiar with the investigation told the Guardian that Carroll is not the subject of the investigation, but said that it was related to Carroll and her deposition, and is more focused on Hoffman’s non-profit. The non-profit, American Future Republic, helped fund a lawsuit in which Carroll won $5m in damages in 2023 against Donald Trump based on allegations Trump sexually assaulted and defamed her. Carroll won a second, $83.3m defamation award against the president in 2024. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.

The justice department investigation is being led by Andrew Boutros, the US attorney for the northern district of Illinois, where the non-profit is based.

A second person familiar with the matter said the Hoffman-entity investigation involves potential money-laundering conspiracy and obstruction.

The Department of Justice declined to comment. On Thursday evening, Boutros posted on X: “In light of wide-spread reporting and intense media and public interest into the E Jean Carroll matter in New York, the Chicago US Attorney’s Office can confirm that it has not opened – and has never opened – a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false.”

Carroll’s legal team also did not provide comment on the news of the investigation. Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hoffman is a major donor to Democrats and other liberal causes, and the investigation is the latest example of Trump using the justice department to punish political rivals. Justice department officials have also pushed prosecutors to crack down on a non-profit led by George Soros, another major leftwing funder.

The justice department filed similar money-laundering conspiracy charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center in April that experts have said are flimsy. Lawyers representing the civil rights organization moved to dismiss those charges earlier this week, claiming a vindictive prosecution.

According to CNN, which first reported the news of the justice department investigation related to Carroll on Wednesday, the prosecutors’ theory is related to an October 2022 deposition made by Carroll, in which she said that she was receiving no outside funding for her lawsuit against Trump.

“Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms Carroll?” she was asked in the deposition. “No,” Carroll responded.

However, in 2023, Trump’s lawyers wrote to the judge stating that they had received a letter from Carroll’s attorneys stating that Carroll “now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees” and that Hoffman had been helping to financially support Carroll’s case against Trump. Trump’s lawyers accused Carroll of concealing that information and argued that it raised “significant questions” as to Carroll’s credibility, “as well as her motive for commencing and/or continuing the instant action”.

Carroll’s legal team at the time argued in their own letter to the court that Hoffman’s support was “plainly irrelevant to Carroll’s claims”. Her lawyers also pointed out that it was almost a year after Carroll had filed her first lawsuit against Trump that their firm obtained the financial support from the non-profit to “help pay certain costs and fees in connection with the firm’s work on Carroll’s behalf”.

The judge allowed Trump’s attorneys to question Carroll about the discrepancy before trial. But ultimately, per CNN, the judge concluded that he saw no credibility issue with Carroll, and barred Trump’s lawyers from raising Hoffman’s funding during the trial.

Trump and his team appealed the verdict in that case, citing the evidentiary rulings made by the court, but in a 2024 ruling, the second US circuit court of appeals upheld the district court’s handling of the issue.

The appeals court wrote that Carroll “plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise”.

In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, Hoffman discussed financially supporting Carroll’s lawsuit and said that “it is a standard practice that happens a lot where there is outside funding of lawsuits”, adding that “we didn’t encourage the lawsuit to happen, we only got on board after she’d already filed it and was down the road”.

“My team looked at it, and thought that her voice should be heard, that because she was challenging someone who’s so much more wealthy and powerful, it shouldn’t be squashed and that providing that voice for people who otherwise would be ground down by the system or the powerful is, I think, a good thing,” he said.

“Providing that support was something that I felt very happy to do,” he added.