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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, manager at the Bulwark. I'm with Andrew Egger, author of Morning Shots, and we're here to talk about the breaking news that just happened as we're recording this about 3:30ish on Monday that the Trump administration is planning for now to drop the highly controversial, blatantly corrupt $1.8 billion Anti Weaponization Fund that was set up through some ridiculous backroom settlement to basically reward J6 riders. For now. I'm going to put for now before everything, because with Trump, you never know, this thing is being pulled. According to administration officials, a number of outlets reported the news, Axios notice, and so on and so forth. But yeah, Andrew, this is kind of interesting.
- [00:44]
B
Yeah, it sure is. I mean, this is sort of a. This has been an unstoppable force meets immovable object type story ever since it was very first reported. Right? I mean, like, it's an article of just sort of something we all know about the world now that Republicans don't stand up to Donald Trump, they let him do whatever he wants. They let him walk all over them. And, and yet this, from the minute it was reported, was like, You've gotta be fucking kidding about, like, every single element of it, from the way it came to be through Trump, you know, this ridiculous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
- [01:16]
A
Let's talk a bit about the way it came to be.
- [01:18]
B
Yeah, let's just do this one more time from the top because we've done it a lot, but like, it bears doing.
- [01:22]
A
Trump's so important, right? It's like the most absurd context for this thing. Yeah, the 1.8 billion is crazy, but the actual context of this whole thing is even crazier. So go ahead.
- [01:34]
B
Trump sues the irs. They've leaked his tax returns. The guy who did it is in prison because he committed a crime. But that's not enough for Trump. He thinks he should get $10 billion in damages because his tax returns came out this way. That's a crazy number. But it's not that crazy when you think about the fact that if you're Donald Trump, you get to play both sides of the case, Right? Because you're President. You've been reelected president since you filed the lawsuit. You now are the plaintiff in the case in your personal capacity, and the defendants are your employees at the IRS and the Treasury Department. And everybody spends months sort of like with this case on the back burner. There's all this other news going on, but anytime anybody brings it up, it's like, what's going to come of that case? That's sort of strange. Well, then we find out what's going to come of the case because Trump settles it, and Trump and the IRS settle it. And not only do they settle it, but they settle it on an accelerated timetable because the judge who was overseeing the case, the, this judge named Kathleen Williams, had told them, hey, it seems kind of weird how the president is kind of on both sides of this. Please send me some briefs by the end of May about why I shouldn't see you guys as basically both being on the same side here. So instead of filing those briefs, they hustle out a settlement in the case. And not only is the settlement in the case, like, really good for Donald Trump, which obviously it was always going to be because he's playing both sides in the case. But it's like the most appalling, outrageous, ludicrous thing anybody could ever have imagined, which is this slush fund, this $1.8 billion federal slush fund for people who have claims of weaponization against them by the Biden Justice Department. And that might be January sixers. That might be other. Stop the steel heads. That might be as administration officials tried to sell on Capitol Hill to get approval for this thing. That might be Republican senators who were targeted by Jack Smith's investigation, who had their phone records tapped as part of his investigation into Donald Trump's many alleged crimes in the wake of the 2020 election. So, like, I could keep going, but that should give people a good idea of just how jaw on the floor this was for everybody, including for many of those very Republican senators. Yeah.
- [03:35]
A
So why, I guess the question is now, why did they do this? You know, it's not the MO of the administration to sort of say, okay, you know, you're, we give in. You're right, we, we shouldn't do this. This is, you know, looks bad. In fact, that's not what they're saying. There's a couple things that are happening here. One is legal and the other is legislative. I'll start with the legislative. Congressional Republicans are trying to pass a reconciliation bill. It's like a budget bill they can pass with 50 votes in the Senate, majority in the House. They want to put a lot of ICE money into it. Remember, this is all extending. Andrew wrote about this back to the shutdown. And they have ICE money and DHS money and they want to get it through with a simple party line vote. But they can't do it right now because enough people on the Republican side in the Senate are objecting to the slush fund, and they want to put language into this bill saying that this slush fund can't be administered. And so if the administration wants to get that reconciliation bill over the finish line, they need basically to get rid of this. Which leads me to believe on the one hand that this might not be dead. Right. Like, in the most cynical universe, you could see where they say, hey, we're taking off the table. Go and pass your bill. They pass the bill. And then they're like, actually, we thought about it and we want to. We do want to do this after all. Okay, that. That's my case. Why it might not be dead. My case for why it might be dead is the legal. Which is there were two judicial rulings recently. One was from the Eastern District of Virginia, which said they can't just halted disbursements of money from this fund. The other, more important one, I think was from Judge Kathleen Williams down in Miami, an Obama appointee who said she was launching an inquiry because she was. She was involved in this entire thing. And she was. She was overseeing the settlement. It's even ridiculous coming up, the argument,
- [05:15]
B
the case, when it was supposedly. When supposedly these guys were on opposite sides of. Yeah, the whole thing is.
- [05:21]
A
And she was like, go ahead. No, no, it's fine. Because in the middle of it, she's like, it's very hard to adjudicate this when it's, like, unclear if there's adversarial sides here. Anyway, she. She let it, you know, after all that happened this weekend, she came back because 35 former judges said, you have to look into this. The fraud of the court. And she said, yeah, I'm. I'm going to look into this. I'm going to launch an inquiry into how this $1.8 billion slush fund came to be. And so that was a big turning point where she's like, I have to look into this because you may have misled the court. You may have defrauded the court. I need more information about how this happened, and that's something that the Justice Department does not want to see happen. They don't want any of that. So that might be why it's dead. Where do you come down on that? Dead or not dead?
- [06:07]
B
I'm leaning toward dead. Let me give you one additional reason. First of all, let me just say I really hope that inquiry goes forward. Like, doesn't seem to be there, taking it off the table. It's an egregious thing that they ever even tried this and it should absolutely be looked into by Kathleen Williams, absolutely be looked into by Democrats should they retake Congress next year. Like what an appalling farce. PED should roll over this. But, but the one other reason that I will add that it may be dead in addition to the, that the one that you gave already is that. Well, actually I'll give two real quick. This is the lesser one is Republicans in the House and the Senate are actually getting pretty fed up with Donald Trump in a way that we have not seen before where they, he is getting less popular than he's ever been and he has been monkeying with the normal Republican meal ticket which is like the kind of quiet bargain that he's had with both, with everybody in both houses as far as the Republicans are concerned for years has been you just like suck it up and do what I want you to do and I will rubber stamp your reelections. And he has, he has stopped doing that. He has started to get rid of senators who he thinks are not sufficiently maga, even though they have been like basically on his team like forever. So that's part of it. But I think the bigger reason why I just don't think Trump is gonna fight tooth and nail for this one at the end of the day is it's not his money. Right? I mean like this is not actually the same sort of thing. Like, like if, if the Senate or if some judge Trump tried really hard to like claw back the billions of dollars that Trump has gotten in ill gotten crypto gains from like random foreign billionaires and the like oil and crypto barons of small Arabic countries in the Middle East. I think he would fight that one basically to the death. Right? Like that's money out of his pocket. Trump has always kind of seen himself as like sort of being magnanimous with this anti weaponization fund. He's like, I had a right to all this money and I'm just trying to give it to my supporters and I can't believe people would make a stink about that. But like he's, he does not care about these people the same way that he cares.
- [08:07]
A
But that presumes that he himself wasn't going to try to get a cut somehow, right? Like I know he said I'm not
- [08:12]
B
maybe, I don't know. I never really bought that he was barred from it. Like maybe the trailer.