New Orleans This is a one-finger clap at some good news. After pushback from his own party and almost everyone else in the US and across the world, the White House has been signaling for several days that Trump was backing off the $1.8 billion slush fund. The Department of Justice and its acting Attorney General have said the fund is dead. The federal judge in Florida and others had put a stake in the heart of this matter.
There continue to be questions though.
One posted by the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal is whether it’s dead-dead or just shelved for now in order to be picked up later or slipped through an open window when no one is looking. They argue correctly, and, yes, it hurts me to be agreeing with these scoundrels, that it won’t really be dead and put in its grave until Congress acts to bar these extraordinary funds from being repurposed as slush in the future.
Just a reminder for those able to avoid all of these details. The money was coming from Congressional appropriations that had been made to the Justice Department in the past as a contingency fund for settlements. Everyone who knows about this fund admits that it has been only loosely supervised and monitored by Congress or anyone else. Clearly, there needs to be lockbox on this thing with real accountability.
If you thought these announcements, put corruption and sleaze on the back burner and the dust has now settled on this matter, then think again. The acting Attorney General also offered that the rest of this deal is still intact, meaning the free “get out of jail” pass that Trump and his family would be given for any existing and, seemingly, future IRS audits of their activities, along with perhaps their businesses. One of the investigations that would be closed, if in fact this is allowed to stand, involves a whoopsie-do tax deduction of $100-million he had tried to claim some years ago that the IRS has red flagged and challenged. Remember as well, as we’ve pointed out, that this multi-million-dollar gift to Trump and his family would go towards settling a case against the IRS over his tax returns being leaked by a subcontractor who was prosecuted for that activity and is currently in jail on a five-year stint. There’s almost no reason to believe the IRS was at fault, yet Trump filed this frivolous suit, and given his position as president, is trying to make bank on it.
With the slush fund, it was unclear if Trump would personally be able to collect money. With this gift from Justice to halt IRS activity, he in fact personally gains at least $100-million that he may have dodged fraudulently or at least questionably, and no one can even imagine how many millions he and his family will gain knowing that they can pay or not pay taxes with impunity in the future, safe from any IRS investigations or interference. I hope the federal judge doesn’t close this case, but still looks at this mess with a jaundiced eye.
Right now, to me it feels like despite all the brouhaha about the fund, Trump didn’t so much blink, as wink at us all the way to the bank.