Amanda Carpenter

Hey, doing pretty well.

How about you?

All right.

Let's go.

Well, first, I do appreciate all the people brainstorming good names for this because if I hear people keep calling it the settlement or the slush fund, I'm going to scream, right?

Like there's lots of good things you could call it.

You can do riot rewards.

I was kind of toying around with henchmen bailout, but I have landed on thug fund.

I think Thug Fund really gets at the idea.

That's who is going to be getting these grants if they do come to fruition.

But aside from the branding, which actually is important, like let's please call it something that accurately describes it because it's absolutely not a settlement.

One of the ways that you have to think about how this came about, which isn't important to the discussion that we're going to have about why it's so unpopular and wrong.

But the reason this came about, if you even want to call it a reason, is

is that Donald Trump's tax returns were leaked, right?

That was bad.

Lots of people's tax returns were leaked.

Like, there's a whole, like, ProPublica investigation.

We remember that.

But the conclusion that Trump and the Department of Justice have come to is that because that bad thing happened, in which there is recourse, in which the leaker was prosecuted, is facing the consequences of that behavior, they've decided, I want two things—

This isn't a thing that you get to make a deal with the DOJ over this about what kind of reward that you want.