Last Wednesday, with large swaths of the American workforce winding down and looking ahead to a long weekend, an unusual deal was struck. The University of North Carolina’s board of governors, the group that sits atop the state’s public college system, announced that it had reached a $2.5 million agreement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). The lawsuit filed by SCV concerned the decision by the state’s flagship university, UNC-Chapel Hill, not to remount its controversial Confederate statue, known popularly as Silent Sam, after students tore it down last August. Rather than take the case to court, the UNC board settled with SCV, with the terms of the agreement stipulating both that SCV would receive custody of the statue and that the $2.5 million trust had to be spent on “certain limited expenses related to the care and preservation of the monument, including potentially a facility to house and display the monument.”

In effect, the board, using money pulled from interest accrued by the system’s endowment investments, had paid in full for a new home for Silent Sam, the location of which would be decided by a group that can comfortably be called Confederate sympathizers, at the very least. The announcement came as a shock to many who had been following the case—prior to the board’s press release, it wasn’t public knowledge that a lawsuit had ever been filed by SCV, nor was it clear why the UNC board would settle with them at all. Commanding a weighty endowment and public funding as well as a cadre of legal experts, it seemed clear to even the untrained eye that the board could have taken the case to court and won, either through an initial ruling or by bleeding out SCV’s coffers.

Then, on Saturday, North Carolina lawyer T. Greg Doucette noted a curious line in The New York Times’ write-up of the settlement: Speaking with the head of SCV, the Times noted that “he did not know specifically when his group had sued the university but said that negotiations had been going on for months.”* In a thread that would quickly go viral, Doucette wrote that it was odd that one would not even have a ballpark figure on hand for when a lawsuit was filed, especially when fielding a press interview about said lawsuit.

After digging through North Carolina’s digital legal filings database, Doucette discovered that in fact everything happened in the span of a few hours—SCV filed the lawsuit, the UNC board offered an overly hefty settlement agreement with very specific stipulations, both parties signed it, and a press release was sent out from both parties. All on the eve of a national holiday. It’s a sequence of events that inevitably raises questions. “The whole damn thing is ludicrous,” Doucette wrote in a message to The New Republic, pointing out, as he had on Twitter, that $2.5 million amounts to an “annuity” for Confederate apologists.

In North Carolina, Silent Sam is a big deal. An online survey released last week by Elon University found that 65 percent of North Carolinians prefer the Confederate statues that litter the state to remain in their current place, while 35 percent of respondents said that they’d rather see them come down. (Compare this to 73 percent of black respondents favoring removal.)