If we're still on this website in two years and this fund is either unused or barely used, I expect you to come back and admit that I'm really just that much better than you at these things.
Funny events in anti-woke world
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Sure. And if the fund was used, doled out to political sympathisers, i would expect you to come back and offer more limp excuses for why it's fine.
But how would we know? They're excluded from audit!
"On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.
At the Attorney General’s direction, the Fund can be audited."
Justice Department Announces Anti-Weaponization Fund
The U.S. Department of Justice today announced that as a part of the settlement agreement in President Donald J. Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, the Attorney General established “The Anti-Weaponization Fund” to provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered...
www.justice.gov
"Sweeten the deal" contextually meaning "it's there purely because it's something Trump wants, not reflective of legal merit". That the audit-termination provision does not track legal damages analysis. It tracks Trump's personal incentives.
Let me lay it out again:
- The original $10 billion demand was so extreme that it threatened to expose the underlying lack of genuine adverseness and invite judicial scrutiny, which indeed it did.
- Once the court began probing exactly those constitutional concerns, the arrangement appears to have been restructured into something smaller and more defensible-looking.
- But reducing the headline payout reduced the practical value to Trump.
- So value was added back in through non-cash concessions that were personally and politically valuable to him, most notably the permanent cessation of IRS scrutiny.
It's further worth noting that this aligns very well with Trump's long demonstrated style: Lead with extreme demands to force reactions from counterparts (and markets), and then narrows those demands while claiming success. This fits the pattern to a tee. His initial $10 Billion figure was always ridiculous on its face, chosen specifically to make the inevitable lesser result seem more reasonable. It's the same pattern he's used and bragged about for decades.
Never mind that your question rather misses the forest for the trees: If DOJ leadership (Blanche) could effectively dictate the outcome to Treasury after the lawsuit was withdrawn, that strongly suggests the parties were never meaningfully adverse in the first place, validating the Article III issue flagged by the judge.
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Shall we consider the actual series of events?
Littlejohn disclosures and the IRS response: What should a taxpayer do? | Our Insights | Plante Moran
Wondering what you should consider doing regarding the Littlejohn IRS court case? Read more from our tax controversy team.
A contractor working for the IRS named Charles Littlejohn stole and potentially leaked the tax information of thousands of individuals, targeting specific people, and starting with Donald Trump personally. The IRS sent notification to thousands of people that they had been targeted, making them aware they had standing to sue. They meant to have Littlejohn sued, but when one of the victims sued the IRS directly, the court did not dismiss his claims, and instead they settled in the form of a formal public apology and a commitment to better security in 2024 under Biden.
Donald Trump, the first and primary target of the same leaks they settled with an apology previously, sued in the same way that a judge previously had declined to dismiss, and they settled again without financial compensation, but with a formal apology and the establishment of a fund to streamline compensation of those other thousands who had been personally targeted using government resources over the prior decade.
It's entirely in line with actions taken by the IRS and Justice Department prior, under Biden they actively notified people to tell them they could sue, and now they are establishing a process by which they can bypass all the extraneous court cases and lawyer fees, and probably end up paying out less. And at the same time, they have Trump dropping this case and his other pending litigation over other things, all without paying him a dime.
Is it crazy that I'm the one here thinking maybe the career bureaucrats did something smart on their own?
Right, so the AG-- whose own appointees are doling out the awards-- can mark his own homework!
Regular settlements made by the Judgement Fund are reported to Congress. Do you think replacing the oversight role of Congress with a single political appointee of the President might ring some alarm bells?
None of what you're raising actually engages the Article III question.Shall we consider the actual series of events?
Littlejohn disclosures and the IRS response: What should a taxpayer do? | Our Insights | Plante Moran
Wondering what you should consider doing regarding the Littlejohn IRS court case? Read more from our tax controversy team.www.plantemoran.com
A contractor working for the IRS named Charles Littlejohn stole and potentially leaked the tax information of thousands of individuals, targeting specific people, and starting with Donald Trump personally. The IRS sent notification to thousands of people that they had been targeted, making them aware they had standing to sue. They meant to have Littlejohn sued, but when one of the victims sued the IRS directly, the court did not dismiss his claims, and instead they settled in the form of a formal public apology and a commitment to better security in 2024 under Biden.
Donald Trump, the first and primary target of the same leaks they settled with an apology previously, sued in the same way that a judge previously had declined to dismiss, and they settled again without financial compensation, but with a formal apology and the establishment of a fund to streamline compensation of those other thousands who had been personally targeted using government resources over the prior decade.
It's entirely in line with actions taken by the IRS and Justice Department prior, under Biden they actively notified people to tell them they could sue, and now they are establishing a process by which they can bypass all the extraneous court cases and lawyer fees, and probably end up paying out less. And at the same time, they have Trump dropping this case and his other pending litigation over other things, all without paying him a dime.
Is it crazy that I'm the one here thinking maybe the career bureaucrats did something smart on their own?
Whether the government has created some form of compensation for data breach victims is irrelevant to whether this case was genuinely adversarial in the constitutional sense.
The adverseness concern turns on litigation conduct and structure: whether the DOJ meaningfully litigated the claims, asserted standard dispositive defenses (again, such as it being beyond the statute of limitations, whether the government is liable when a contractor - not a government employee - was responsible for the disclosure, and the proposed remedy far exceeding the actual damages and statuory limit for the damages), and maintained an adversarial posture consistent with a real case or controversy.
Here, the concern is that obvious defenses reportedly went unasserted, that the case was withdrawn shortly after the court signaled scrutiny of jurisdictional and adverseness issues, and that the practical outcome appears to have been replicated through executive action outside the litigation process.
Those facts go to whether this functioned as a bona fide adversarial proceeding or something closer to a structured mechanism for producing a preselected institutional outcome. That question is independent of whether the underlying data breach also generated ordinary administrative remediation processes in other contexts.
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The Judiciary Committee in Congress can request information from the Attorney General on any case of settlement. There is no immediate reason to assume this is an exception.
That question is also independent of what you and Silvanus are asserting about the purpose of it. You treat it as Donald Trump began this lawsuit with the intention of using it to pay off his allies using the Justice Department, and that still doesn't make any sense. Someone else could have been the plaintiff, they could have class-actioned this and then made the settlement with the same outcome but no complaints from the judge and even less oversight. And Trump could have gotten paid from that himself after it was already settled.
This end result just makes no sense from that starting position.
OPCW admits it suppressed key dissenter in Douma chemical cover-up - The Grayzone
In its defeat at an international tribunal, the OPCW has acknowledged that it shunned an inspector who challenged the Douma chemical cover-up. OPCW whistleblower Dr. Brendan Whelan details the closing chapter of his bid for justice. The wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine...
thegrayzone.com
And yet you cite it and spread it all the time.
You co-signed false atrocity propaganda about a people subject to genocidal violence; by all means continue throwing stones from that glass house you live in.
Oh yes, lets do a little Holocaust denial while we are at itOPCW admits it suppressed key dissenter in Douma chemical cover-up - The Grayzone
In its defeat at an international tribunal, the OPCW has acknowledged that it shunned an inspector who challenged the Douma chemical cover-up. OPCW whistleblower Dr. Brendan Whelan details the closing chapter of his bid for justice. The wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine...
And yet you cite it and spread it all the time.
You co-signed false atrocity propaganda about a people subject to genocidal violence; by all means continue throwing stones from that glass house you live in.
This is like Bad Empanada saying that Stalin did not target Ukraines specifically and killed many other nationalities during the Holodomir means it wasnt genocidal
Trump... who was impeached for covering up treason and convincing people to head to congress to stop a election certification .... should be treated same random dude that has done nothing illegal?
Just so we are clear, judges in the US have removed the general practice of the presumption of regularity as the Trump Adminstration has defrauded and lied to so many courts.
Trump has done acts in the past. He gets treated like it
Cool, "can request". So unlike regular settlements from the judgement fund which are all reported to Congress as a matter of course, the JC will need to already have identified potential wrongdoing somehow, to know what they're looking for. And then its still up to the AG, the guy whose direct appointees control the entire process.
Do you truly not see what a nightmare this is for accountability and transparency?
Well, i cite media outlets you claim constitute state propaganda, usually with no greater reason than what they said contradicted the Russian narrative.
Whereas you routinely cite people who've been directly paid by Russian state organs.
What bullshit are you on about here?
No, I'm pretty sure they just say "hey, send us the list of payouts", and the AG's got 15 days to comply.
And I love how the AG is now the bad guy when previously he was an important safeguard.
Really? Can't find anything about that in the settlement agreement. Open to be proven wrong.
That's how political appointees work, and why America is supposed to have a system of checks-and-balances that involves the other branch(es) of government for things like huge extractions from the public purse!
So, on a quarterly basis Trump's lawyer gets a confidential report as to how the funds were dispersed. That's...not exactly transparency.
The blackout mentioned in the video was caused by a faulty solar inverter...We know plenty that do work. Once again: dozens of countries already successfully use inverters to integrate renewables into their grids.
It is already in place. Working. Functional.
Right. And d'you know how many times our overreliance on fossil fuels has thrown us into dire straits? Have you heard of OPEC? The winter of discontent? The 3-day week? The 70s energy crisis? The Texan grid failure? The present energy crisis?
Nope. This may have been the case between ~2008 and 2016. Since 2017 fossil fuel subsidies skyrocketed, and eclipse all else.
Fossil-fuel firms receive US subsidies worth $31bn each year, study finds
Figure calculated by Oil Change International has more than doubled since 2017 but is likely a vast understatementwww.theguardian.com
Do you not realize civilization as we know it exists because of fossil fuels?
According to a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, government support for fossil fuels still reigned as of 2017: they garnered 70 percent of energy subsidies that year worldwide, with only 20 percent for renewables. In the United States, though, the numbers are flipped. The Energy Information Administration says half of the federal money spent to subsidize energy from 2016 to 2022 went to renewables, while less than 15 percent went to oil, gas, and coal. And that doesn’t include tens of billions of dollars per year in clean energy tax credits from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Does that mean we’re fucked when the finite resource runs out? Sounds grim.
Besides worlds change. In 1800 civilization as Europe knew it existed because of wooden ships. Didn’t stop them from changing to steam.
I don't even know what the Russian narrative is. I do not pay attention to Russian media. Is Chris Hedges the Russian narrative? He was a Pulitzer-winning journalist and foreign correspondent fired from the New York Times for speaking out against the Iraq war, then sometime later RT America gave him a show. And he has had a variety of insightful takes on world events. So what?
Anyway, you needn't switch "imperialist propaganda" to "state propaganda". We both have seen what our mostly private Western media ecosystem has done for 'israel'. We both have seen how they manufactured consent for the war in Iraq. I vaguely recall you (I think it was you) citing Noam Chomsky to support voting for Democrats; this is what he's said about Western media: "the purpose of the media is to keep people uninformed and obedient". But you seem never to miss an opportunity to amplify a narrative by that media that justifies hostility toward targets of US aggression-- despite sometimes claiming to oppose that aggression. For example, claims about "authoritarianism" in Venezuela. Or by the left in Bolivia. Or...
You argued in favor of israeli atrocity propaganda published in a variety of Western newsrooms concerning rape that was supposed to have occurred on October 7, 2023.
Cool. Chalk it up alongside all the blackouts caused by issues with every other fuel source.
Obviously! What, and this means we should blindly continue to use them, even as they poison our air, water, and children?
Right, so for context, that article is using the US Energy Information Agency for its data (so, the official source). And we can see the EIA data covers four categories: Direct expenditure; Tax expenditure (which makes up the vast majority of the subsidies on all their reported fuel types); Research & Development; and the DOE loan guarantee program.
Oil Change International, on the other hand, is using the broader definition standardised by the WTO. This includes things like land and resources awarded at a discounted rate, cleanup costs and services, & loans and guarantees given at a discount. They inflate the bill enormously.
Much of the point of their research is that official reports are opaque and incomplete.
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