The Key Moment You Know Jill Biden is Lying About Joe Biden's Cognitive Decline, with Jesse Kelly

Jill Biden ADMITS She Was Horrified At Joe's Disaster Debate!

 

Jill Worried Biden WAS DRUGGED Before Debate COLLAPSE

Former Proud Boys leader says he deserves $50m from Trump's new 'slush fund'

 

Is $1.8 Billion slush fund for supporters of President Trump, possibly including Jan. 6 rioters a way to create a private army directed to an insurrection?

 

Is $1.8 Billion slush fund for supporters of President Trump, possibly including Jan. 6 rioters a way to create a private army directed to an insurrection?

The newly established $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is officially structured as a legal compensation mechanism, though critics heavily argue it acts as a political reward system.

 

The Official Purpose vs. Political Criticism

• The Administration’s Stance: The U.S. Department of Justice announced the fund as part of a settlement agreement where President Trump dropped his personal $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over leaked tax records. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated the fund creates a lawful process to compensate victims of "lawfare and weaponization" who were allegedly targeted by the Biden administration for political reasons.
• The "Private Army" Accusation: The characterization of the fund as a means to build a "private army" or finance a future insurrection stems primarily from sharp rhetoric used by congressional Democrats. For instance, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer stated on the Senate floor that "Trump is shaking hands with himself in order to fund his insurrectionist army to the tune of two billion dollars." Similarly, Representative Jamie Raskin described the deal as a racket to pour money into a "slush fund... to hand out to his private militia of insurrectionists." [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Eligibility and January 6th Defendants

The fund is designed to review claims from individuals and entities who faced federal investigations or prosecutions during the Biden administration.

• Who is eligible: This pool includes the nearly 1,600 individuals charged or convicted in connection with the January 6th Capitol attack.
• How it is managed: A five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General will determine who receives payouts. When asked if those who committed violence against police on January 6th would receive money, President Trump stated that allocations would be entirely up to that committee.
• Future legal liability: A notable disclaimer in the fund's term sheet states the U.S. government holds "no liability whatsoever" for how the money is safeguarded or if it is misused after disbursement, which watchdogs warn removes oversight on how the cash is ultimately spent.

Current Status and Pushback

The fund avoids immediate congressional approval because it is drawn from the Treasury's Judgment Fund to settle a civil dispute. However, it is facing immense pushback:

1.      Legal Challenges: The House Democrats' Litigation Task Force has filed motions in court attempting to block the settlement on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional payout.

2.      Legislative Action: Lawmakers have introduced measures like the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to prevent sitting executives from orchestrating federal settlement funds for political allies.

3.      Internal Dissent: The unconventional settlement bypassed normal judicial oversight, prompting high-profile pushback—including the sudden resignation of the Treasury Department's General Counsel.

 

How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political Anxieties

 

How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political Anxieties

 

“Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.

 

By Lisa Lerer

April 21, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/politics/civil-war-movie-politics.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

One subject seems to be unifying the right and the left today: Disunion.

 

From the multiplex to social media, the prospect of America collapsing into armed conflict has moved from being an idea on the tinfoil-hat fringes to an active undercurrent of the country’s political conversation.

 

Voters at campaign events bring up their worries that political division could lead to large-scale political violence. Pollsters regularly ask about the idea in opinion surveys. A cottage industry has arisen for speculative fiction, serious assessments and forums about whether the country could be on the verge of a modern-day version of the bloodiest war in American history.

 

And “Civil War,” a dystopian action film about an alternative America plunged into a bloody domestic conflict, has topped box office sales for two consecutive weekends. The movie has outperformed expectations at theaters from Brownsville, Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

 

Of course, the notion of a future civil war remains a mere notion. But, as another presidential election approaches, it has suddenly become a hotly debated one, reflecting the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters have said they fear that the country’s divides have grown so deep that they may lead not just to rhetorical battles but actual ones.

 

“I personally do not believe we will descend into a formal armed civil war,” said Maya Wiley, who ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 and now serves as the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights group that has fielded several polls on the topic. “But it’s in the air. It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re seeing a very explicit fear of where things could go.”

 

Such fear has been stirred by the violence and chaos that subtly and overtly pervades American politics. Violent threats against members of Congress have reached record levels, as have reports of hate crimes in the country’s largest cities. The husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, was beaten with a hammer in his home. The criminal trial of a former president unfolded in a courthouse while a man nearby doused himself with an accelerant and set his body on fire.

 

In his first campaign speech of the year, President Biden warned of threats to the country’s democracy and suggested that former President Donald J. Trump could stoke future political violence.

 

“I make this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency,” he said in an address near Valley Forge, Pa., the site of one of the darkest periods of the American Revolution.

 

Mr. Trump has glorified the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots and maintained his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When the former president was asked last August by Tucker Carlson whether the country was headed to open conflict, he declined to directly answer.

 

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen, and that’s probably a bad combination.”

 

The film has no grounding in such partisan politics. The sides are unclear and the ideology — a “Western Alliance” of secessionists from California and Texas — is impossible to imagine given the stark partisan divides between the states. No details are given about the cause of the conflict or the different visions each side has for the future of the country. There’s no mention of Congress, the courts or other civic institutions other than the presidency and references to the F.B.I.

 

That political vagueness was an intentional choice by the British writer and director, Alex Garland, who began working on the film in 2020 before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. “I’d say this film is about checks and balances: polarization, division, the way populist politics leads toward extremism, where extremism itself will end up and where the press is in all of that,” Mr. Garland told The New York Times.

 

His goal was to create a movie that could illustrate the risks of polarization — not just in the United States but globally — and reach the widest audience possible, said Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist who met with Mr. Garland in the fall of 2021 and worked as a consultant for the film.

 

The opaque politics have helped the movie attract an audience that bridges political divides. Exit interviews conducted for A24, the studio that produced the movie, found that half of moviegoers identified as “liberal” and half as “conservative,” according to a person with knowledge of the film’s performance in various markets.

 

The film outperformed expectations in traditionally conservative markets like Oklahoma City and Colorado Springs, as well as more liberal ones like Portland, Ore. In Phoenix and Dallas, a majority of filmgoers identified as moderate or conservative. The top reason viewers cited for seeing the movie was not an interest in independent cinema or action films but the “political dystopian story line.”

 

The interest in political chaos tracks with a growing body of research showing a dramatic uptick in public fears of violence.

 

The polling by Ms. Wiley’s organization found that 53 percent of likely voters believed the country was on the path to a second Civil War.

 

Other surveys show related concerns. Forty-nine percent of adults said they expected violence from the losing side in future elections, in a poll conducted by CBS/YouGov this year. And a survey by The Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican adults said American democracy could be at risk depending on who won the next election.

 

Jess Morales Rocketto, a leader of Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, said discussion of a civil war could stem from more of a feeling of insecurity than a reality for voters.

 

“I think that people believe we are on the brink of civil war,” she said. “When people say stuff like civil war, World War III, what they mean is volatility and instability. They are saying, ‘I feel unsafe.’”

 

But Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, says the prospect of such a conflict isn’t just metaphorical. She believes the country is facing a decade or two of political instability and violence that could include assassinations of politicians or judges and the rise of militia groups.

 

The movie’s realistic portrayal of such violence taking place in deeply American settings — a golf course, a roadside gas station, the Lincoln Memorial — put the scenes of violence Americans associate more with foreign conflicts into sharper relief, she said.

 

“This notion that America could never have a civil war; we’ve already had a really, really big one,” said Ms. Walter, the author of “How Civil Wars Start.” “There’s a sense of naiveté, of innocence, that we’re too good for that sort of stuff. We’re not.”

 

David Mandel, a producer and writer on the television show “Veep,” said the most successful movies and shows about American political life had a “reciprocal relationship” with public opinion about politics. His show, a comedy about a bumbling vice president that began during the Obama administration, was based on the idea that politicians behaved differently in private, and that a miscalculated public remark could lead to their political destruction. As president, Mr. Trump routinely defied that norm, and “Veep” ended before he left the White House.

 

“By a couple of weeks into the Trump administration, there was no ‘behind closed doors’ and there was no such thing as comeuppance,” Mr. Mandel said. “The show became impossible to do.”

 

David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University who specializes in the Civil War period, said he did not believe the country stood on the precipice of another one. But if the country were to reach that point, he said, the conflict could share more with the movie version than the historical one.

 

The Civil War was a regional and ideological crisis that featured some of the largest armies ever formed, he said. A second one would most likely be far more local and vigilante, and stirred by increasing polarization and institutional mistrust.

 

“For the last couple of years, there’s been all this chatter and a few books out about whether the U.S. is on the brink of a new civil war, and you have to keep telling people, ‘Well no, not in the way you may think about it,’” he said. “Our real Civil War blinds us in that sense.”

 

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer

Inside the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S.

 

Inside the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S.

 

Discussions among a group of lawyers with allegiance to the president were closely held. Some senior White House officials were said to have felt blindsided as the agreement took shape.

 

An agreement to set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people deemed to have been harmed by government “weaponization” and to grant tax benefits to President Trump, his family and businesses was brokered by a tight-knit group of lawyers.

 

 

Alan Feuer Andrew Duehren Glenn Thrush Ben Protess Maggie Haberman

By Alan FeuerAndrew DuehrenGlenn ThrushBen Protess and Maggie Haberman

May 30, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-deal.html

 

Time was running out.

 

President Trump had sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion, and a federal judge was pressing the Justice Department to explain how it could muster an independent defense of the agency against the man who ultimately controlled it.

 

Behind the scenes, the job of addressing the vexing problem of how to settle the suit fell to a tight-knit group of lawyers, all of whom had allegiance to Mr. Trump.

 

On one side of the talks was a Justice Department run by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who once served as Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.

 

On the other were the president’s private lawyers, among them Boris Epshteyn, who was a former client of Mr. Blanche’s. Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving forward the deal to end the suit, coordinating and holding discussions with all of the sides involved: Mr. Trump, the president’s personal lawyers and Justice Department officials, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

 

The discussions were so closely held that some senior White House officials told others that they were blindsided, learning of them only once the agreement was nearly complete.

 

In the end, the lawyers’ solution did not give Mr. Trump what his lawsuit had demanded, which was simply to move funds from the Treasury Department into his own pocket. But the agreement that was reached was still a big victory for the president and his allies: It set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people deemed to have been harmed by so-called government “weaponization” — possibly including hundreds of rioters charged with storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and released Mr. Trump and his businesses from potentially costly I.R.S. audits.

 

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who discussed internal deliberations about the I.R.S. suit on the condition of anonymity.

 

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment.

 

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that anyone who believed they were a victim of government weaponization could apply for money from the fund, claiming that many people had been victimized by the Biden administration.

 

Much is still unknown about how the arrangement came about. But the plan drafted by a group of Trump allies posed conflicts of interest that are remarkable, even for an administration riddled with them.

 

As questions have mounted about the nature of the deal, the federal judge who oversaw the lawsuit, Kathleen M. Williams, took the extraordinary step on Friday of revisiting the case, asking whether the parties had deceived her.

 

When the details of the agreement were first revealed two weeks ago, Democrats and former government officials lodged accusations of corruption and self-dealing, and even some Republicans reacted with scornful disbelief. Some G.O.P. senators were so angry they abandoned plans to approve a measure to finance the administration’s immigration crackdown.

 

Within days of the agreement becoming public, and before the judge raised questions about it, senior administration officials began preparing to get rid of the fund amid the intense blowback. Those discussions were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

 

But while the agreement appeared to have emerged abruptly, it fused two ideas that had been kicking around in Mr. Trump’s circle for years: a desire by him and his family to avoid extensive tax audits, and a longing by his allies to obtain financial restitution for legal wrongs they claimed to have suffered during the Biden administration.

 

In its broad strokes, the plan was in keeping with other maneuvers by Mr. Trump. As president, he has often used the levers of power at his command to serve himself at a moment when he still maintains control over the government, including having the United States accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar that he could fly as president and intend to take later. But in establishing a fund that would involve billions in taxpayer money, the deal stands alone.

 

The president himself has said little about how the agreement came together or who played a role in resolving the suit, which faulted the I.R.S. for the leak of his tax information to The New York Times during his first term. The closest he has come in recent days was a post on social media in which he declared that he had given up “a lot of money” by “allowing” the fund to be created.

 

“I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

 

Trump v. Trump

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. landed at the Justice Department with a thud in late January.

 

By early spring, lawyers there were already wrestling with the legal dilemma the president’s pleading had created.

 

After all, to defend the I.R.S. against Mr. Trump, the department would have to fight a sitting president who was technically in charge of the agency and who demanded total loyalty from his subordinates.

 

Department lawyers were not the only ones who had identified this problem. Judge Williams, an Obama appointee who sits in Miami, had also homed in on it, wondering whether there was actually a conflict to adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was effectively on both sides of the suit.

 

The suit contended that the I.R.S. had not done enough to prevent a contractor for the agency, Charles Littlejohn, from leaking to the news media reams of Mr. Trump’s tax information, along with the returns of hundreds of other very wealthy Americans during the president’s first term in office. Even though Mr. Littlejohn was prosecuted by the Biden administration and sentenced to five years in prison, Mr. Trump argued he was owed $10 billion by the I.R.S.

 

At first, there was a hope inside the Justice Department that lawyers would respond to the suit with a procedural maneuver to side step or delay the case. One option department lawyers quietly discussed was to ask Judge Williams to put the suit on hold until after Mr. Trump left office.

 

But that never happened. And it left Mr. Blanche and his team in a tight spot: They did not want the Justice Department to go into court and fight the suit, as it normally would, but also did not want to settle it by paying Mr. Trump directly, according to people familiar with their thinking.

 

Ending the case by funneling taxpayer money straight to the president struck them as politically untenable. Some department officials even worried that doing so could, under a future Democratic administration, expose them to a criminal investigation of conspiracy to defraud the government.

 

Inside the I.R.S., the suit was treated more or less as business as usual, even though the plaintiff was the president. Lawyers at the agency followed normal procedures for responding to claims and prepared a 25-page memo for the Justice Department, outlining their views of the case.

 

In the memo, the I.R.S. recommended that the department move to dismiss the suit, pointing to two main problems: It had been filed too late and had wrongly blamed the I.R.S. for the actions of Mr. Littlejohn.

 

I.R.S. officials sent the memo to colleagues in the Treasury Department but it remains unclear whether those Treasury officials ever passed it on to the Justice Department. In fact, no Trump administration lawyer responded to the president’s suit at all — or even made an appearance on the court docket.

 

What finally pushed Judge Williams into action was a request on April 17 from one of Mr. Trump’s private lawyers, Alejandro Brito — not from a government lawyer — to delay all proceedings in the case for three months. A week later, the judge effectively ordered the Justice Department to tell her whether it intended to defend the I.R.S., giving the department until May 20 to provide an answer.

 

The pressure of that deadline set off a scramble, as lawyers on both sides of the suit started looking for a way to resolve the case and avoid further scrutiny from the judge.

 

Central in the negotiations was Trent McCotter, Mr. Blanche’s senior deputy and a rising star in the department, according to people familiar with the talks. He served as one of the administration’s chief interlocutors with personal lawyers in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including Daniel Epstein, who often works with Mr. Epshteyn and once served as a special assistant to Mr. Trump during his first term in the White House.

 

Ultimately, the discussions about settling the I.R.S. suit were combined with talks about ending two other unusual claims previously filed by Mr. Epstein, who works for America First Legal, the outside group co-founded in 2021 by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s powerful White House adviser. Those claims demanded that the Justice Department pay the president about $230 million in compensation for the investigation into possible ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign, as well as the well-publicized F.B.I. search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents in 2022.

 

The idea that emerged was a global settlement of all of the claims that would push Mr. Trump away from the politically damaging effort to take money for himself. Instead it would create a fund for his allies and supporters — including the pardoned Jan. 6 rioters — who believed they had been wronged in the courts by previous Democratic administrations.

 

Mr. McCotter proposed a patriotic marketing gimmick, setting the fund’s amount at the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, according to people familiar with the idea.

 

Still, it was not entirely a new idea.

 

In mid-2025, Ed Martin, a longtime advocate for the Jan. 6 rioters who was leading the Justice Department’s pardon office and a special working group intended to counteract government weaponization, had proposed a plan to address what he believed was mistreatment of Trump supporters by the legal system, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Martin envisioned a “truth commission” of sorts that would assess accusations of misconduct by the Justice Department and possibly make payouts to worthy claimants.

 

He even floated the idea to senior administration officials like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary who has long complained that Americans were harmed by the government’s response to Covid-19, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

 

Mr. Blanche, who has often clashed with Mr. Martin, rejected the idea, the person said. But with the May 20 deadline quickly approaching, the Justice Department, at Mr. McCotter’s urging, came up with its own plan to redress the supposed past wrongs suffered by the president’s supporters.

 

The plan was closely based on an Obama-era case called Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a class-action lawsuit that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Native American farmers to settle accusations of government discrimination. Mr. McCotter took the idea to the Office of Legal Counsel, which offers advice on the law to Justice Department leaders. The office, run by T. Elliot Gaiser, a former clerk for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., blessed the proposal, agreeing that Keepseagle could serve as a model.

 

When the plan was made public, it faced an avalanche of criticism. The Treasury Department’s top lawyer, a Trump appointee, resigned.

 

Among the loudest critics were former Justice Department lawyers who had worked on the Keepseagle case, who pointed out that the Keepseagle settlement was overseen by a federal judge after years of litigation and analysis of the claims and evidence.

 

The resolution to Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S., by contrast, was reached in private by lawyers loyal to the president and without any judicial oversight.

 

Appearing on CNN in recent days, Mr. Blanche was asked directly who came up with the terms of the agreement and said that there had been negotiations between Mr. Trump’s “outside counsel” and the Justice Department.

 

But he quickly added, “Not me.”

 

Broad Immunity From Audits

 

There was more.

 

Even as the two sides were hashing out the contours of the fund, there were also discussions about a second agreement that would end the lawsuit: a plan to give the Trump family and their businesses broad protection from I.R.S. investigations of tax returns they had already filed.

 

The tax immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million.

 

That fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected — starting in about 2010. He justified the refund by declaring huge business losses, including on his tower in Chicago.

 

Early in Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the matter was put on hold, but it came back to life before he left office.

 

More recently, the company had entered settlement talks with the agency, laying the groundwork for a potential resolution, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

 

Now, it seemed, the audit would vanish.

 

Acting as a cheerleader for the overall plan, including the tax deal, was Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s top outside legal adviser who has been close to the president for about a decade, both when he was in and out of office.

 

Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving the proposals forward, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, discussing the issue with Mr. Trump and circulating drafts of the tax agreement to Trump advisers.

 

While the origins of the tax maneuver remain somewhat obscure, the Justice Department began to assess the proposal about a week before Judge William’s May 20 deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the questions raised was whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.

 

The tax proposal did not end up appearing in the initial document that declared the lawsuit resolved and described the details of the compensation fund. That document was signed by the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Stanley Woodward Jr., who had worked with Mr. Blanche on Mr. Trump’s defense team and represented several of the president’s close aides in various investigations.

 

In a curious twist, the tax addendum was posted, without fanfare, on the Justice Department’s website one day after the terms of the main agreement were released. It was a murky piece of writing, full of long sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and the Trumpian use of words in capital letters. Only Mr. Blanche, and no one from the I.R.S., signed it.

 

The details of the fund were also somewhat inscrutable. Although the Justice Department had explicitly stated that the Trump Organization and the Trump family were ineligible for the fund, one confusing clause appeared to open the door for them to file claims.

 

Indeed, officials at the Trump Organization briefly discussed whether to do so, according to people with knowledge of the matter. No decision was made. On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily froze the fund.

 

Devlin Barrett and Russ Buettner contributed reporting.

 

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

 

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

 

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

 

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.

 

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.