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- [00:00]
A
So this settlement fund, it's real. Donald Trump really is creating this $1.7 billion pot of money to pay out to a bunch of his allies, a bunch of his people who were supposedly had the government weaponized against them under Joe Biden. It's really happening. They're saying it all out in public. I'm Andrew Egger with the Bulwark White House correspondent for the Bulwark joined today to talk about this with our congressional correspondent, Joe Perdicone. Joe, the anti weaponization settlement, it's here. It's real. It's $1.7 billion. It's beautiful. First of all, I guess my first question is when, when this was reported as, as a likely thing Friday, did you, as I did have a little bit of a, ah, come on. Like, it can't quite possibly be quite as shameless as ABC is suggesting, or did you actually think it was going to be really, really real from go.
- [00:45]
B
Nothing's like ever not as shameless as you think it'll be. But the, the point is like 1.77 billion. It's 1.776 billion. 1776. So let's at least, you know, breathe a sigh of relief that it's not 47 billion to honor the 47th president.
- [01:03]
A
Yes, yes. There are symbolic numbers that are larger that he could in theory have tried to cook up. That's true.
- [01:08]
B
And they love doing that. They love branding things. 47, 1776. Yeah, this happened very quickly. At least he's dropping his $10 billion suit against his own government that he's the head of. But the way this is going to go down now is like a lot of these J6ers are just going to get cash. And the, the way that this will move is so fast that it's going to be, everything's improbable, but it's, it's impossible to stop because Congress isn't going to intervene. I'm anticipating when I go to the Hill later today that they'll say, well, I haven't seen the full details yet. And by the time they maybe have seen the details, money will be in the pockets and they're, the taxpayer will be fleeced.
- [01:52]
A
Yeah. So let's pause here for a minute and break this down a little bit because this is one of those stories. I mean, it's like looking at the Grand Canyon. Right. It's like you almost like cannot wrap your mind around the size and the majesty of the shamelessness and the corruption that's on offer here. So the genesis of all of this, this is a lawsuit that's been going on for a little while now. It's been Trump suing his own IRS for $10 billion over the leaking of his tax returns and as well as the tax returns of some other wealthy people by an outside IRS contractor. A few years ago, that guy went to prison for this. But Trump is not satisfied with that. He wants damages. He wants $10 billion in damages. This lawsuit has been proceeding despite the fact that everybody has been looking at it and saying, how can this really work when Donald Trump is suing in his personal capacity, a government that he now runs? The people who are, you know, the named defendants in this case, the irs, the Treasury Department, these are people who report to him in, in a very, you know, there's no pretense of independence of, you know, them going their own way. Nobody in their right mind imagines that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is going to, you know, stand up to the President and fight hard in an adversarial lawsuit to keep him from getting what he wants in this lawsuit. And so even the judge, even the judge in this case has been wondering exactly that. The judge has been asking the two parties, asking plaintiff or asking lawyers for Donald Trump and asking lawyers for the government to basically send her briefs saying why she ought to believe that they are essentially not on the same side in this case. And that is the most striking thing about this settlement right now, is that it appears to have been rushed out in order to beat a deadline imposed by that judge, a May 20 deadline imposed by that judge to file those exact briefs. Right. To. To. To basically not let this judge have a chance to throw this case out on the grounds that there is no adversarial process happening here. So that's why this is all happening right now. You know, two days before, when that deadline would be, the attempt is to sort of short circuit this, get the judge out of the loop completely. Just let Donald Trump's personal lawyers and Donald Trump's employees at treasury and the IRS hash it all out, and this is the result, this $1.776 billion fund. So, Joe, you were talking a minute ago about, you know, the very likely complete lack of response that we're going to see from Congress here. Can you just talk a little bit about, like, I mean, what could happen? Like, imagine we're in a different universe where, where we don't already know that this Republican Congress is utterly spineless. They're not going to get in the President's way. I mean, surely, even though they have sort of cleverly gotten the judge out of the loop here. Congress itself as a body is not powerless to touch something like this.
- [04:41]
B
Congress can do almost anything at once, especially when it comes to things like money and where government money is spent. Something like this. That money's already been appropriated in which they have money for these large funds. Settlements that are occur, that regularly occur because somebody is wronged by the government. People can sue the government all the time, not always successful. So that money exists. A way Congress could step in but won't is that they could say, actually, no, you can't do this, that money does not apply. Or they could pass law saying all of this settlement money for various suits against the against the government no longer apply to this case. They could do oversight things where they say, we need to know exactly the name and amount of every individual receiving money from this fund. Because there's a very common theme among pardoned and convicted January Sixers is that they go and recommit other crimes, sometimes more heinous than trying to overthrow the government, believe it or not. So there's going to be a lot of criminals who could very likely end up with the cash from this fund. So there's oversight capabilities. The reality of what will happen is this will probably go through. It'll probably go really fast. We see in the government's points about what what this entails is that there's not going to be liability once this money is dispersed. So these individuals would get this money. The government should retain records of who gets money. Whether that's public or not, we won't know. For example, when, if Democrats take back the House of Representatives and then they have jurisdiction over the oversight Committee, they could use that to probe this, how it happened from start to finish. If they traced and retained records of where this money went and who got it and how much, they'll be able to do that. But at the same time, the oversight committee has very full plate because there is widespread corruption in this government right now that they're already going to be pursuing. They're looking at inside insider trading on prediction markets. They're looking at the Trump sons getting their taste all around the globe by investing in these companies that the government then decides, needs they need to prop up and be involved in. They're looking at the President's own stock transactions from companies he's boosting as president and therefore profits when their stock goes up. They have a really full plate. This is going to be one more of those things. There's going to be a lot More that happen in the final, you know, eight months, seven, eight months of the year. If they take back the House, which they likely will, then they have all of these things that they have to pursue. And this is just another one. So will they have space for it? That's my question for members of the oversight committee, some of the Democrats, if they're going to pursue oversight of this fund the way that they're going to pursue oversight across the board, I would probably say yes. But these things can get, you know, lost in a very big pool of corrupt acts.
- [07:59]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, it's not up to me. If it were up to me. My, my, my vote is this goes straight to the top of the pile. I mean, this is, this is really astonishing stuff. I mentioned before that, that it's, you know, it's sort of like the Grand Canyon in terms of the, the scope and the size and the majesty of it. We could just like sit around continuing to list sort of like further aggravating facts about this thing for quite some time. Let's just do a few of those right now. And again, we know so little about this fund, we basically just have a cheat sheet that the Justice Department has chosen to release in terms of like, the basic facts of what's going on here. But even just in that, even just in what we're getting out of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch right now, there's still just so much that should just make your eyeballs pop out of your head. So, so let's just do a couple of those right now. First of all, is the dollar amount, right, the $1,776,000,000 that's, that's in the account here. This is, this is from the document. The corpus of the anti weaponization fund's funding does not represent the value of any claim by plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants claims. So that's obviously a lie. They did not actually do any work to sort of like tally up what they think. All of the people who have weaponization claims against the Biden government, against the Biden administration, they did not sort of do the clerical work of deciding, we actually think that those will come out, those payouts will come out to this amount of money. No, they just picked a big patriotic sounding number and then they said, come on, guys, come on in. The water's fine. Come get your cash. Which leads me to a second thing here, which is that in, you know, like you said before, this is not a totally unused mechanism. This, this settlement fund from The Justice Department. This is money that is set aside to pay out settlements that the government has reached with people who are suing it in various capacities. However, there are a number of enormous differences in the specifics of what that entails, because usually when you have, you know, a group that's, that's suing the government in this capacity, they are a specific class of people. They have their well documented and established in court grievance. They have established that they have standing to sue. They've gotten a certain distance into the proceedings. So those are the people who are going to get money. This is a completely different thing. This civil suit had one plaintiff, Donald Trump, and as a settlement for that, we are now throwing open the gates to who knows which claimants. There's, there's. There's been no suggestion that there's any particular class of claimants other than people that the Justice Department and, you know, this board that's been set up to oversee this money will determine later ought to get these disbursements. Then there's another thing which you alluded to a minute ago, Joe. I'll just read it here. Once the funds are deposited into the designated account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds. Again, this is just like one of the nine relevant facts that the Justice Department has seen fit to tell us. You know, right off the top is going to be true about this money is that they can't be held accountable for misuse of it or fraud. Other facts that we haven't even mentioned yet. These are people who serve at the, at the pleasure of the President. You know, the people, the five members of this, of this board who are going to be, you know, responsible for divvying out this cash can be fired and replaced by the President of the United States at any time without cause. He gets to decide. He gets to decide which of his allies will get these $1.7 billion. I guess I wanted to get one more take from you, Joe, on the specific question of, of what Congress can do, because I think you're right that this is going to start fast. We are already seeing this online, like a lot of the, the sort of J6 community influencer type guys are rejoicing.