Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, manager at the Borg. I'm with Andrew Eggier, author of Morning Shots, and we're here to talk about the breaking news that just happened as we're recording this, about 3.30-ish 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 rioters.

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 violence report of news,

Axios, notice, and so on and so forth.

But yeah, Andrew, this is kind of interesting.

Yeah, it sure is.

I mean, this has been an unstoppable force meets and movable 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 yet, this, from the

minute it was reported, was like, you've got to 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. We'll talk a bit about the way it came to be. Yeah, let's just do this one more time from the top because we've done it a lot, but like it bears doing. Trump sues the IRS. But it'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.

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 your president, you've been

re-elected 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, 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,

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