Cambria added that there could be serious legal or monetary ramifications if the DOJ were to find out that trust money was appropriated for another use.
"It's given for a specific purpose, and that's highways," he said. "If it were used for something else, I would certainly see the Department of Justice considering that a potential criminal act and doing something about it, or at least civilly, mandating that the money be used for the purpose that it was designated for."
He also noted that this kind of potential investigation isn't particularly common, so he couldn't really provide a timeline that we could expect to see.
"I think this is a fairly unique situation; I, frankly, haven't heard of it happening in the past," Cambria said. "I'm sure that there have been other circumstances where trust money wasn't used for the intended purpose, but as far as a timeline, there'd be no way for anybody to tell how Barr would take that and how emergent it would be in the scheme of things that he has to deal with."