During a press briefing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the White House on Thursday, he commented on President Donald Trump’s new anti-weaponization fund that was created as part of a settlement between Trump and the IRS.

“There’s a lot of people talking about the IRS settlement, which has been rolled over now into this anti-weaponization fund over at DOJ. Wanted to get your comment on the decision process on how that settlement process came to be, how it was rolled over to DOJ, and then the process for those funds now as it’s played out,” Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec asked Bessent.

Bessent said that he could not comment on legal matters, but added, “President Trump is a great American who has endured more than 10 years of non-stop harassment and weaponization from federal and state government actors. A bad actor at the IRS leaked more than 400,000 tax returns, including the Trump family, all the employees, that’s how we got here now.”

“No American should be targeted for political reasons, and every citizen deserves fair treatment and full protection of the law,” he continued.

He added that the DOJ is representing the IRS and Treasury on the issue, and that further questions on the topic would be referred to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The anti-weaponization fund was created out of a settlement between Trump and the IRS after Trump sued over the leaking of his tax returns. The fund is set up through the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which Congress set up decades ago to automatically pay federal settlements. The money in the fund will be used to compensate those who are found to have been wrongly targeted by the federal government.