Hello everyone. Welcome to the Kato podcast. I'm Molly Nixon's senior fellow and executive power here at the Kato Institute.

This is Dan Greenberg. I'm also senior legal fellow at Kato, and I'm coming to you from Kato's podcast studio.

And I'm Tad de Haven. I'm a policy analyst in general economics.

Today we are going to be talking about the anti-weaponization fund, which came out of a settlement

of President Donald Trump's lawsuit brought in his personal capacity against the IRS in connection

with an IRS contractor's unlawful disclosure of his private tax information.

What is the fund? How would it work? Is it legal? And is it now dead? And if so, should we still be

concerned about it? And to start, let's go to TAD. And maybe you could set some background here. What is the anti-weaponization fund and what does it do?

So the anti-weaponization fund is a rather unique agreement that was struck between the president's

Justice Department in regards to a lawsuit, a $10 billion lawsuit that the president

has pursued on the basis that his tax returns were improperly released and therefore

he deserves redress. They decided the administration that instead of pursuing

actual money back for themselves, for their family, for the Trump organization, that instead

they would create a giant fund, this fund being used to pay out those who bring claims that they were victims of weaponization by the government.

The price tag is $1.766 billion.

The administration says that this number was arrived at on the basis of what they calculated to be the volume of claims that they'd be paying out.

But of course, 1.776 also happens to match 1776, which points to some sort of effort to paint this as in conjunction with our nation's founding.

Probably not, but this is also part of a longer trend, a hallmark of this administration,

where the president repeatedly seeks to have slush funds created for them. This goes back to the beginning of the

administration with the president desiring a giant federal investment fund made up with taxpayer

money, that he himself would be allowed to invest across the United States. That has started to

play out over the course of the last year with the

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