Heads, Trump Wins

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Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced plans to settle Donald Trump’s personal lawsuit against the IRS over allegations that it had mishandled his tax information. The president, two of his sons, and their family business had been seeking at least $10 billion from the American government, all of which would have come directly from taxpayers. Now Trump is withdrawing the suit—but taxpayers are still footing the bill.

In exchange for Trump dropping this lawsuit and his two other pending claims against the government, the Justice Department will create a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund to compensate people who say they’ve been wrongfully targeted by the federal government. According to an addendum published this morning, the IRS is also “forever barred” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, and his companies over previously filed taxes. (A DOJ spokesperson told me that this applies “only with respect to existing audits, not future.”)

The money for the new project will come from the Judgment Fund, an uncapped source of taxpayer dollars that’s used to pay out judgments against the government. As precedent, a department memo cites a Barack Obama–era settlement that tapped those same reserves to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who’d been deprived of access to federal loans. Now that same fund might end up benefiting the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Testifying before a Senate subcommittee today, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed that the Anti-Weaponization Fund could potentially funnel taxpayers’ money to people convicted of crimes connected to the Capitol riot—most of whom Trump pardoned early last year. Blanche also said that claimants could include GOP lawmakers whose phone records were seized by Special Counsel Jack Smith in 2023 during his January 6 investigation, and that Trump-campaign donors “are not excluded from seeking compensation.” (The IRS declined to comment.) Yesterday, when asked by a reporter why taxpayer dollars should be directed to J6ers, Trump said that the payments would be a way of “reimbursing” people who had been “horribly treated.” Recall that some of those people advocated for the vice president to be hanged, and violently attacked Capitol Police officers. If money does end up flowing their way, Trump’s settlement would function as a financial reward for participating in a violent insurrection.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund represents a massive commitment of federal resources to one of the president’s long-standing fixations. Trump, who has cast the four criminal prosecutions he faced during the Joe Biden era as examples of unfair targeting, routinely claims that he and his political allies were singled out by the previous administration. Early last year, Attorney General Pam Bondi created the Weaponization Working Group, intended to root out purported “abuses of the criminal justice process” under Biden. But Trump and his team have weaponized the Justice Department far more than past administrations did. Take, for example, the flimsy legalattacks against two of Trump’s perennial enemies, James Comey and Letitia James. The new fund likely won’t pay their legal fees, as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed this morning: “To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.”

Part of the issue with Trump’s claim against the IRS was that both sides of the lawsuit ultimately answer to him. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he told reporters at the time. The judge overseeing the case indicated last month that she was considering dismissing it for that reason. With this settlement, Trump has effectively turned his uphill legal battle into an allocation of funds for his own political and personal aims. Today’s revelation that the past tax filings of the president, his family, and his businesses are now shielded from IRS audits underscores just how much this arrangement will benefit Trump’s inner circle. Danny Werfel, who led the IRS under Biden, told me that he couldn’t envision any scenario in which granting that kind of immunity “would be an appropriate settlement term or remedy.”

Trump has said that he was not involved in the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund—which is odd, given that his personal lawyers negotiated the settlement. The fund will be overseen by a committee of five members, all of whom will be appointed by the acting attorney general, and any of whom can be removed by Trump. In his testimony earlier today, Blanche said that information about claimants and their payouts “will for sure be made public along the way,” but the White House hasn’t provided details about how that will happen. Pulling money from the Judgement Fund doesn’t require congressional approval, meaning that the committee will have little oversight. Hours after DOJ announced the settlement, the top lawyer at the Treasury Department—the agency that oversees the Judgment Fund and is therefore responsible for providing this money—resigned.

Throughout his time in office, the president has used the power of the federal government to enrich himself and his allies, and settlements have at times played a role in that effort. Earlier this year, Trump signed off on $1.25 million payouts for one of his former lawyers, Michael Flynn (as part of a settlement for a case in which Flynn pleaded guilty), and for his campaign adviser Carter Page (whose lawsuit against the government was dismissed twice). It’s in line with what my colleague David A. Graham has identified as a newly “shameless” stage in the president’s corruption: Trump is more and more open about his interest in rewarding the people in his orbit. Since taking office again last year, he has pardoned a cryptocurrency billionaire whose company facilitated a lucrative deal with his family, a tax cheat whose mother attended a $1-million-per-person fundraiser for his campaign, and a pair of reality-TV stars whose daughter advocated for his reelection at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The New Yorker estimated in January that Trump and his family had made $4 billion during his second term.

Another example of this approach arrived just yesterday. On the same day that DOJ announced the Anti-Weaponization Fund, federal prosecutors asked a judge to drop all charges against Gautam Adani, the Indian shipping-and-manufacturing magnate accused of running a bribery scheme (he has denied the allegations). The New York Times reported that the Justice Department planned to drop the charges after Adani hired one of Trump’s personal lawyers. As part of his pitch for Adani’s freedom, that lawyer reportedly told the Justice Department that Adani would invest $10 billion in the American economy.

Whether Trump and his allies are directing money toward themselves, their circle, or their supporters, they are sending a message about how this administration understands the work of governance. The rewards always seem to accrue to a favored few; the rest of us just pay for it.

Related:

Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is worse than stealing.
Trump is suing his own government. (From February)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Three people, including a security guard, were killed in a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego yesterday. Authorities say that two teenage suspects were later found dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds; investigators are treating the attack as a hate crime after discovering racist writings and hate speech connected to the suspects.
President Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state’s Republican primary runoff for Senate, backing Paxton over the longtime incumbent John Cornyn and criticizing Cornyn for not supporting him strongly enough in the past.
The head of the World Health Organization warned that he is “deeply concerned” by the rapid spread of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, where officials have reported more than 500 suspected cases and more than 130 suspected deaths.

Evening Read

illustration with back of blond head looking at fanned-out flash cards that say LUXEMBOURG, THE PLATTE RIVER, MACBETH, PICO DE GALLO, AUSTRALIA, and FREDDIE MERCURY — Illustration by Igor Bastidas

The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy

By Drew Goins

When you wake up on the day of your first appearance on America’s favorite quiz show, you will have more knots in your stomach than a quipu, the tied-string recordkeeping device used during the Inca empire. You will take a nervous walk through beautiful, weatherless Culver City, California, where the title song of Singin’ in the Rain was shot during a water shortage. Perhaps you will stop for a $14 juice at the boutique grocery store Erewhon, telling yourself that you have to spend money to make money. From the entrance of the Sony Pictures lot, you will be conveyed to the “check-in area” in the back of a dim parking garage; you will wonder whether this is actually some sort of hostage situation that is going to end with you at the bottom of a tar pit or, worse, on Wheel of Fortune.

And when you walk into the greenroom for contestants, you will see a door in the corner labeled Jeopardy! Champion, and you will be consumed by one thought, which I will phrase in the form of a question: How do I get in there?

Read the full article.