A plaintiff went against a defendant that he himself controlled, and came away with a $1.7bn slush fund for political allies. Its one of the most spectacularly brazen examples of corruption, and I expect that even you're a little embarrassed by it. Reportedly even congressional Republicans are.
It's actually a fair bit worse than that.
Trump sued the IRS, and the court signaled concern about whether the case satisfied Article III adverseness requirements. (TLDR, Trump was suing the government he leads and whose justice department has explicitly been ordered to act as if Trump was their primary client)
The judge issued a
sua sponte order and had scheduled a hearing to determine whether it even could meet the basic requirement of the existence of adverseness - which is to say "a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding" - given both the aforementioned circumstances and that even the plaintiff had all but bragged that (in his own words) it amounted to trying to "work out a settlement
with myself."
Rather than facing that, Trump almost immediately
withdrew the lawsuit. And then after it was withdrawn, Todd Blanche simply directed the Department of the Treasury to transfer $1,776,000,000 to a separate account. Trump et al have been mischaracterizing that as a settlement by the IRS when in fact it appears to have instead been directed to the Treasury department
by DOJ leadership on behalf of Trump rather than an actual arm's length-settlement by the IRS.
And let's lay that out directly because it bears repetition:
1) The executive branch effectively controlled both sides of the dispute,
2) The Department of Justice was called out as pointedly failing to so much as raise even obvious and dispositive defenses that it typically used such as the claims being barred by the statute of limitations, and the suit naming the wrong defendants, increasing the suspicion that the case was effectively collusive in nature.
3) The case was withdrawn almost immediately after the judge signaled attention to a very real concern of threshold scrutiny.
4) After the case was withdrawn, the DOJ leadership appears to have simply directed the outcome (in a way that uncomfortably brings to mind Habba's infamous Bedminster incident), and that outcome came about before the court could even resolve foundational jurisdictional concerns about whether there could constitutionally be a genuine case or controversy at all.
Combine that with the conspicuous $
1.776 billion figure? That looks
very much like the arrangement was politically choreographed. And that's without even accounting for the apparent double speak in painting it as a governmental fund for 'victims of politicized investigations' but also explicitly stating that it is not subject to governmental oversight, liability, or responsibility and covers things like paying administrative assistants. Never mind that it's conspicuously designed with a "use it or lose it" deadline of December 1, 2028, just one month before Trump's term of office ends.
Moreover, part of the dictated terms is that the IRS drop any and all investigations into Trump, which...well, it runs headfirst into
26 U.S. Code § 7217, which makes it a federal crime for anyone in the executive to request, directly or indirectly, that the IRS conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.
Regardless of the nitpicking we can make about whether or not it applies due to being directed by the Attorney General (which under the circumstances would arguably still be a brazen corruption of the letter of the law and in no means reflective of its spirit, especially not when said acting Attorney General is acting more like a personal attorney), the fact would still remain that by any reasonable definition, the dropping of audits was improperly included as a deal-sweetener, very clearly not reflective of legal merit.
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