Who gets the money in Trump‘s new ‘weaponization’ fund?

0:00Richard Painter:This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. WBUR Podcasts. Boston. If we allow this kind of recovery, it's going to happen with every administration setting up a slush fund for anyone who was prosecuted in the previous administration.

0:32Joseph Cox:Prosecuted by the government? President Trump says you may be entitled to compensation.

0:49Joseph Cox:It's Tuesday, May 19th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, what a proposed mega-merger of power companies means for ratepayers from Virginia to Florida and for a data center alley outside DC. Also, how big tech is helping immigration agents with surveillance. I think it's absolutely clear that Palantir is helping ICE process its investigative work faster, find which locations to raid efficiently. But first, what to make of the announcement that the Trump administration could pay more than 1.7 billion to people who claim they were unfairly investigated or prosecuted by the Department of Justice during the Biden years.

1:38Joseph Cox:The government is calling it the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Critics have called it a slush fund to reward Trump's allies and his supporters, including January 6th rioters. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said this today to Senator Susan Collins, who asked how the government will determine which claims are eligible.

1:57Richard Painter:If an individual wants to apply and assert that they were a victim of weaponization, and the commission can do anything according to what was set up yesterday, from issuing an apology to the claimant to awarding compensation and the monetary compensation. So it depends on the claim.

2:16Joseph Cox:Here are a couple things we know. This is taxpayer money. It was set up in exchange for Trump dropping a$10 billion lawsuit that he and his family filed against the IRS over his leaked tax returns from 2019. For more, we called up Richard Painter. He was chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. He told Indira Lakshmanan, this sets a bad precedent.

2:43Richard Painter:I've never seen anything like this. This is a slush fund for political supporters of the president. and we'll see who tries to make a claim on it. But these payments, if they're ever made, could probably be recovered under the False Claims Act because there's no justification that I understand for any of these claims against the government. If we set this precedent that we're going to allow people to recover for investigations and prosecutions, and a lot of these January 6th prosecutions were prosecutions where people were found guilty, if we allow this kind of recovery, it's going to happen with every administration setting up a slush fund for anyone who was prosecuted in the previous administration.

3:28Richard Painter:Massive amounts of taxpayer money going off the door. I mean, think about how much James Comey might be able to collect, or Attorney General Loretta James of New York for the malicious prosecutions. The chairman of the Federal Reserve was subjected to a criminal investigation by the Trump administration that It was politically motivated. And we'd be adding up billions of dollars of taxpayer money for all sorts of claims. This makes absolutely no sense. It's a slush fund. Well, the DOJ is pointing to an Obama-era case called Keeps Eagle as a precedent. That was a discrimination lawsuit by Native American farmers that resulted in a$680 million fund run by an administrator where over$300 million in unspent money ended up going to nonprofits that had never filed a claim.

4:17Richard Painter:The Trump Department of Justice says their so-called anti-weaponization fund has quarterly reporting and that any unspent money will go back to the Treasury. So let's strip away the politics. Is there any parallel here? Well, I don't know the details of the Obama-era farm buyer. There's obviously a long history of discrimination against Native Americans and Native American farmers and so forth. And the relationship between the United States and the tribes has been unique from the very beginning. And setting up funds may very well be something that the government could do. It really should only be done with permission from Congress.

5:01Richard Painter:So I don't know what the Obama administration did there. But here we're just talking about a slush fund that people can make claims against because they're prosecuted, for example, for invading the Capitol building in a violent riot to attempt to overturn an election. You know, that kind of thing. I don't know why those people should be prosecuted. It seems to me a whole bunch of them should be in prison. Hmm. So if this is, as you say, a slush fund going unfairly to compensate people who are allies of the president, what could possibly stop it? Will it be the courts or Congress or public pressure?

5:42Richard Painter:Is there any check and balance here or do you see this fund going forward? Well, if anyone makes a false claim against the government, for example, for a contractor or anyone else, and they're paid money pursuant to a false claim under the False Claims Act, the government can sue to recover. And so can individuals or whistleblowers sue on behalf of the government. False Claims Act cases might be very hard to bring during the rest of the Trump administration because the Justice Department would not cooperate. but a subsequent administration might go after this money and try and get it back to the American taxpayer if these claims are false.

6:23Richard Painter:Now, if someone is really subjected to a wrongful prosecution and had occur large legal bills, for example, what's happened to James Comey, there might be a valid claim against the government in those circumstances. But this accusation of malicious prosecution in a lot of these instances is really quite spurious. And by the way, President Biden was making false accusations against the prosecutors who were going after Hunter Biden, who was rightfully prosecuted, convicted and pardoned by his father. But he had no right to sue the government for millions of dollars simply because his father thought that the prosecution was an addictive.

7:06Richard Painter:Well, we will be watching this case closely, and I'm sure we'll have you back on as it proceeds. Richard Painter was chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. Thank you so much. Thank you.

7:31Joseph Cox:We also spoke with an Obama-era U.S. attorney. You can get Barbara McQuaid's thoughts on all this right now at hereandnow.org. And while you're there, we need your help with a story that we're putting together next week about the job market for recent graduates. Are you a recent grad looking for work? Do you know one? What's been working for you or your family members who are looking for work? And what have you been struggling with? We'll be talking to a career coach about job interviews, the hunt for work, and how AI is complicating everything. What should we ask then? Let us know. Go to hereandnow.org slash jobs and record a short message for us.

8:13Joseph Cox:Kurt Roberts in Washington State already recorded one. He told us his daughter is graduating this year with a degree in computer science.

8:21Richard Painter:The prospects for her look so bleak. She has decided to go back and get a master's in electrical engineering, completely change the field of study. So things are looking kind of bleak all over the place, even as we celebrate her getting as far as she's got.

8:37Joseph Cox:Bleak. Does that resonate with you? What's it look like where you are? Do you have a friend or family member who graduated in the last few years and is looking for work? Tell us about it. Hereinnow.org slash jobs. And thanks. Coming up next, a rare glimpse into how federal agents are tracking immigrants using technology from Palantir. Indira Lakshmanan has more after the break.

9:14Richard Painter:This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from our NPR sponsor, Fort Myers. Islands, beaches, and neighborhoods. This summer, follow what feels right, like embracing your playful side on Fort Myers' white sand beaches. Direct flights arrive daily. Plan your trip at visitfortmyers.com. This message comes from Grainger. This is the story of the one. As a procurement manager for a hospital system, she keeps every facility in her network stocked and ready.

9:58Richard Painter:That's why she counts on Grainger to be her single source for thousands of products, from disinfectants to lighting, air filters, and more. And with fast, dependable delivery, Grainger helps her keep every facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are speeding up their pursuit and arrest of suspected undocumented migrants thanks to tools provided by the tech company Palantir. ICE agents now have a list of 20 million people on their phones, a senior ICE official said at a border security conference in Phoenix earlier this month.

10:42Richard Painter:Most people detained by ICE do not have a previous criminal conviction. Investigative journalist Joseph Cox is reporting on this story for 404 Media, and he joins us now. Joseph, welcome.

10:53Joseph Cox:Thank you so much for having me.

10:54Richard Painter:So this list of 20 million people, first of all, who are they? Are they all non-U.S. citizens, or could any of us be on this list?

11:02Joseph Cox:I think all we know is that these are people that ICE deems as a target. And I would immediately stress and caveat that 20 million is not the generally understood number of undocumented people inside the United States. So perhaps a senior ICE official believes there are more than the general consensus of undocumented people in the country and believes 20 million is all undocumented people, or the list is larger and includes more targets. But that is all we know is that ICE deems these people enough of a target to, first of all, bring it up in a security conference and also to provide this information to its agents in the field.

11:43Richard Painter:So this list gives ICE agents dossiers and likely addresses for potential targets. That kind of investigative work used to take hours, days or even longer. Now it can take as little as 10 to 15 minutes, according to the reporting you've done. But where did this data come from in the first place?

12:02Joseph Cox:ICE is getting this data from all sorts of different agencies and other parties. That can include the Department of Health and Human Services. They're feeding data into this. It's not mentioned in the leaked material, but listeners will know that the IRS is now sharing data with ICE as well. And a very important one is something called Clear as well. Now, to be clear, this is not the program that people may use to quickly go through airports. This is a separate product from a company called Thompson Reuters. Many people know the Reuters wire service. Thompson Reuters also sells data to private industry and to government.

12:40Joseph Cox:And the clear product here is that. It's people's names, people's addresses, people's phone numbers. And for a long, long time, Reuters has sold that data to the government. And now it is being incorporated into these Palantir tools. And it seems to be that is a big part of the efficiency upgrade for ISA.

12:58Richard Painter:All right. You reported a few months ago that Palantir made a tool for ICE specifically called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. What else besides this list of 20 million people is in that tool?

13:14Joseph Cox:So what it allows ICE to do is they will open up a map interface. They will then navigate to a city or an area they may be interested in, and it will bring up a dossier on each target in that location, sort of like a Google Maps interface. It then provides a quote-unquote confidence score for each of those people's current address. So they'll click on somebody and it will say, we have a 44 % confidence in them being here, or maybe a 98 % confidence in them being here. And that's by taking all of that data I mentioned, comparing where it came from, the reliability of that source, the recency of the data, and that's really to cut down on this investigative time, whereas ICE would before have to go and validate those addresses, go verify them.

14:03Joseph Cox:It's now the technology doing it for them, essentially.

14:06Richard Painter:Well, we reached out for comment to the Department of Homeland Security, which ICE is part of but did not hear back. A spokesperson for Palantir told us that its software helps make ICE operations more efficient and have, in fact, reduced mistakes. Is that true?

14:22Joseph Cox:That's hard to say, but I would stress that when I received leaked material from inside Palantir itself, the company acknowledged that mistakes will happen during a mass deportation operation. they believe if they provide the technology to ICE for this purpose they could make deportations fairer, more accurate that sort of thing, but then I would look at the numbers which say that more than 70 % of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction, that is the hard data we don't have to take ICE's words for that or Palantir's and I think when you have that data it's hard to square with the idea that this technology is being used only to go after the worst of the worst, as DHS would call it.

15:06Richard Painter:Well, the ACLU and other critics have stepped up government surveillance and immigration crackdowns under the Trump administration worried that ICE may be sidestepping the Constitution, in fact, by buying data that it would normally need a warrant to access. Is that a fair concern?

15:24Joseph Cox:Yes, absolutely. It's almost become normal now for these agencies to simply buy data that ordinarily you would have to get a subpoena for or a search warrant or some sort of other legal mechanism. But because they're buying it from a third party, they don't need to follow that. This concern started really with mobile phone location data a few years ago, but now it encompasses all sorts of things, including the sort of stuff that is being fed into these Palantir systems for ICE.

15:52Richard Painter:Well, you've been working for months looking at the sort of overlay between the surveillance state, tech companies, and how the government is using this data. What's your big takeaway for listeners?

16:06Joseph Cox:Now, for me, it's how they're marrying all of this data together. I've been covering surveillance for more than 10 years, and often my articles or area of focus would be very siloed. It would be just the license plate readers over here. It would be the location data over there. With Palantir's involvement, and just generally the mission of ICE and DHS during this mass deportation campaign, they're bringing data together in such a way that they never ever did before and it's fundamentally changing the context of some of that data. So when undocumented people used to pay taxes and provide information to the IRS, there was no expectation that that information could then be used to deport them.

16:47Joseph Cox:That firewall has been shattered, the context of that data has entirely changed And now essentially any piece of data is on the table for ICE to use is the way I'm seeing it.

16:59Richard Painter:Joseph Cox is an investigative journalist with 404 Media, an independent journalist-owned digital media company and technology newsroom. Thanks so much, Joseph.

17:08Joseph Cox:Thank you so much.

17:19Joseph Cox:We've got one more story for you on the show today. Coming up, Scott Tong looks under the hood of a major merger in the power sector and asks what it means for rising electric bills. Stick around.

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