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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<br>Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced plans to settle Donald Trump’s personal lawsuit against the IRS over allegations that it had mishandled his tax information. The president, two of his sons, and their family business had been seeking at least $10 billion from the American government, all of which would have come directly from taxpayers. Now Trump is withdrawing the suit—but taxpayers are still footing the bill.<br>In exchange for Trump dropping this lawsuit and his two other pending claims against the government, the Justice Department will create a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund to compensate people who say they’ve been wrongfully targeted by the federal government. According to an addendum published this morning, the IRS is also “forever barred” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, and his companies over previously filed taxes. (A DOJ spokesperson told me that this applies “only with respect to existing audits, not future.”)<br>The money for the new project will come from the Judgment Fund, an uncapped source of taxpayer dollars that’s used to pay out judgments against the government. As precedent, a department memo cites a Barack Obama–era settlement that tapped those same reserves to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who’d been deprived of access to federal loans. Now that same fund might end up benefiting the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6.<br>Testifying before a Senate subcommittee today, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed that the Anti-Weaponization Fund could potentially funnel taxpayers’ money to people convicted of crimes connected to the Capitol riot—most of whom Trump pardoned early last year. Blanche also said that claimants could include GOP lawmakers whose phone records were seized by Special Counsel Jack Smith in 2023 during his January 6 investigation, and that Trump-campaign donors “are not excluded from seeking compensation.” (The IRS declined to comment.) Yesterday, when asked by a reporter why taxpayer dollars should be directed to J6ers, Trump said that the payments would be a way of “reimbursing” people who had been “horribly treated.” Recall that some of those people advocated for the vice president to be hanged, and violently attacked Capitol Police officers. If money does end up flowing their way, Trump’s settlement would function as a financial reward for participating in a violent insurrection.<br>The Anti-Weaponization Fund represents a massive commitment of federal resources to one of the president’s long-standing fixations. Trump, who has cast the four criminal prosecutions he faced during the Joe Biden era as examples of unfair targeting, routinely claims that he and his political allies were singled out by the previous administration. Early last year, Attorney General Pam Bondi created the Weaponization Working Group, intended to root out purported “abuses of the criminal justice process” under Biden. But Trump and his team have weaponized the Justice Department far more than past administrations did. Take, for example, the flimsy legal attacks against two of Trump’s perennial enemies, James Comey and Letitia James. The new fund likely won’t pay their legal fees, as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed this morning: “To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.”<br>Part of the issue with Trump’s claim against the IRS was that both sides of the lawsuit ultimately answer to him. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he told reporters at the time. The judge overseeing the case indicated last month that she was considering dismissing it for that reason. With this settlement, Trump has effectively turned his uphill legal battle into an allocation of funds for his own political and personal aims. Today’s revelation that the past tax filings of the president, his family, and his businesses are now shielded from IRS audits  underscores just how much this arrangement will benefit Trump’s inner circle. Danny Werfel, who led the IRS under Biden, told me that he couldn’t envision any scenario in which granting that kind of immunity “would be an appropriate settlement term or remedy.”<br>Trump has said that he was not involved in the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund—which is odd, given that his personal lawyers negotiated the settlement. The fund will be overseen by a committee of five members, all of whom will be appointed by the acting attorney general, and any of whom can be removed by Trump. In his testimony earlier today, Blanche said that information about claimants and their payouts “will for sure be made public along the...