As this week got underway, Donald Trump and his legal team announced that it was prepared to withdraw the president’s outlandish $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. The question, however, was what the Republican would get in exchange for the decision.

A few months ago, shortly after Trump filed the radical (and by any fair measure, frivolous) lawsuit, he told reporters that he assumed “nobody would care” if he reached a settlement agreement with the administration he leads because he and his team were “thinking about doing something for charity.”

That was in early February. In mid-May, “charity” no longer appears to be the priority.

On Monday morning, just a few hours after the president’s lawyers moved toward withdrawing their civil suit, Trump’s Justice Department announced the creation of a pool of money that it’s calling “The Anti-Weaponization Fund,” as part of an agreement to settle the IRS lawsuit. Officials said in a press statement that the fund will “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

The DOJ’s press statement is filled with partisan and conspiratorial nonsense — it references, for example, the “unlawful raid of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia-collusion hoax,” despite the fact that the search at Mar-a-Lago was legal and Trump’s Russia scandal was real — including an ironic quote from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”

Of course, in reality, Republicans have never presented any evidence of Biden-era “weaponization,” and Trump’s Justice Department has repeatedly done the very thing it’s accused its predecessors of doing.

Nevertheless, those who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system (which, again, did not actually happen) would be eligible for a payout, including Jan. 6 rioters who were charged, convicted or both for their role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Early last year, the president endorsed the idea of a possible “compensation fund” for Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol in his name. Trump didn’t elaborate on the details at the time, but taken at face value, he appeared to describe what would effectively be financial rewards for the criminals he pardoned.

It wasn’t clear at the time where exactly he expected to get the money. Fourteen months later, the answer has since come into focus: Trump is getting the money from taxpayers, in the form of a settlement agreement that results in a giant pool of money his team could use to reward his allies with little meaningful oversight.

How giant a pool? According to the DOJ press release, the “fund” will have $1.776 billion. (With the nation poised to celebrate its 250th birthday, the amount is not coincidental.)

When this arrangement started to take shape last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren characterized the deal via social media as an “insane level of corruption — even for Trump.” The Massachusetts Democrat said the agreement would create a “slush fund for Trump’s hand-picked stooges to hand money to January 6th insurrectionists and his political allies.”

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, added, “This administration is dripping with corruption from top to bottom, but rushing a settlement to steal $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars for a slush fund before a judge can toss your junk lawsuit would be among the most corrupt acts in American political history.”

Similarly, 93 Democratic lawmakers last week filed a brief with the judge in this case, arguing that Trump was working to “undermine the Constitution” with this deal, warning that it created the “specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.”

Now that the transaction is official, those condemnations are not hyperbolic in the slightest. The incumbent president and his team have engaged in some breathtaking corruption, but a giant, taxpayer-financed reparations fund for Trump’s pals represents a new low.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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