San Francisco Reportedly, Trump and his administration have made a deal with themselves on his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for not preventing the release of his tax returns. You didn’t need to be an ethics expert to wonder how such a lawsuit, much less a settlement, could easily be reached when the parties were hardly at arm’s length or adversarial? Far from it. At one point, it even seemed like the judge had the same question. Nonetheless, the terms of such a possible settlement are becoming public now, so we’ll see how long they last.
Initially, one of the things on the table had been an agreement by the IRS not to audit Trump or his families’ returns for some number of years. They may not have survived, but even more controversially, the proposed settlement includes $1.8 billion dollars for a so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund that could be tapped by Trump allies who feel that the Biden-era Justice Department went after them unjustly. So many questions now exist without answers. For one, how can a suit against the Internal Revenue System be settled with a fund that targets abuse not by the IRS, but by the Justice Department?
Even if we can get past that threshold confusion that seems to underline the fact that the head of the government is simply willy-nilly suing the government and settling as if there is just one bank account and one employer, it’s still hard to believe that they are willing to create this fund. I say that not just because it’s clearly a giant slush fund, as many critics allege, because that’s not new. We don’t hear much about the multi-million dollar deals Trump made with some big law firms on his vengeance tour as his second term began, and whether they really delivered pro bono work, and for whom aside from Trump causes and buddies, so we’ve been here before.
What’s amazing to me is the precedent this sets, not just for a slush fund, but for coming administrations, especially if another party takes the White House at the end of Trump’s reign of terror. Is no one in government in the White House and especially the Justice Department not considering that the case for weaponization is much clearer now, than it was under Biden? Furthermore, this is different than when judges and juries held January 6th insurrectionists guilty or con artists like Stephen Bannon and others. The courts have dismissed cases against many of Trump’s targets, not just against individuals, but also institutions like universities and, yes, even law firms that didn’t fold like cheap suits.
That list is endless, and that anti-weaponization fund could double or triple the size of this $1.8 billion pile, partly because the damages incurred are so much larger. Universities alone lost billions in grant cancellations for spurious reasons. Companies targeted for equal opportunity programs, who were blacklisted or tainted because of an interest in diversity, lost hundreds of millions, if not billions. Individuals who were barred security clearances or fired because they had done work assignments for previous administrations could have claims. Certainly, individuals like Jack Smith and FBI’s Comey could saddle up and ride hard to try and collect.
What goes around, comes around. What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander. If Trump gets away with this, future governments with rubber stamp Congresses and compliant courts won’t forget this precedent, and, in fact, they shouldn’t. Payback is hell, but it’s part of politics and, frankly, would be warranted, given the harm that this Justice Department has done.