Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department in Supreme Court.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And today on the show, we're talking about a new Justice Department fund that could send more than a billion dollars of taxpayer money to January 6th defendants and other Trump allies.

Carrie, this pot of money is being called an anti-weaponization fund. Tell us more about exactly what's happening here.

The Justice Department announced this week that it was creating a fund of $1.776 billion, that's 1776, the year the

country was founded, to compensate people who have suffered from government weaponization.

And this fund is going to be overseen by five commissioners that the acting attorney general,

a former personal lawyer to President Trump,

will appoint. What we understand at this point, the president will have the power to remove

those commissioners without any cause given. So the details are a little murky at present,

but we now know we have a pool of almost $2 billion of taxpayer funds

waiting for people to apply. Okay, that's a lot of money. And as you mentioned, this was announced

this week, but how did we actually get to this point? I know this isn't the first development

here. Yeah, it's kind of been a slow role all year.

What happened was in January, President Trump filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns by a federal contractor back in 2019.

And the president asked for $10 billion from the government.

It created an ethical outcry. The case had been kind of moving slowly from the government. It created an ethical outcry.

The case had been kind of moving slowly through the courts.

And then the judge, the federal judge in Florida,

started to ask some tough questions about whether there was really a controversy

if President Trump was suing the same government he leads.

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