Trump’s New $1.7 BILLION Slush Fund Boondoggle
INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Henry McMaster ... Chuck Edwards
The Corruption: IRS Edition
A corrupt agreement is in the works between President Trump and his underlings at the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service that would settle his pending personal claims against the U.S. government by creating an unchecked $1.7 billion discretionary slush fund to pay his allies who have been “victims” of the Deep State, including the pardoned Jan. 6 defendants, according to an ABC News report.
The “expected” settlement agreement — whose final terms are not yet set — would resolve (i) Trump’s $10 billion claim over the criminal leak of Trump’s tax returns by an IRS contractor who was convicted and sentenced to jail time; (ii) his $230 million claim arising from the 2016 Russian collusion investigation and the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
News of the potential settlement comes after the New York Times suggested this week the parties were racing to settle the IRS claim ahead of a May 20 deadline in federal court in Florida to file briefs showing that the case is legitimately adverse. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami has raised concerns that Trump and the IRS are essentially on the same side, which would mean there’s not a real legal dispute for her to adjudicate (more on this below).
A spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team did not deny the ABC News report on the terms of the agreement, which would include a public apology from the IRS.
The reported terms of the settlement agreement are mind-boggling in their corrupt resolution of the underlying claims, but the pending agreement, as described by ABC News, opens up a whole new avenue of corruption by placing $1.7 billion under Trump’s purview to dispense to his allies without any oversight, accountability, or recourse.
The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself. …
The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars, the sources said.
Trump would reportedly be barred from personally receiving compensation from the slush fund for the pending claims being resolved, but ABC News’ sources said “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”
All of the flaming red flags associated with this settlement “has led some administration officials to raise ethical concerns about the arrangement,” ABC News reports. Ya think?
Court-Appointed Lawyers Weigh In
Judge Williams appointed a panel of distinguished lawyers not involved in the case as friends of the court to brief her on the issue of adversity. They filed their memorandum last night: “This case is unprecedented: A sitting president seeks monetary damages for alleged harm to his personal interests from an executive agency that he controls.” Only 16 pages, it’s worth a read.
The amici don’t ultimately take a position on whether adversity exists but they compile a compelling case that it does not, concluding that “President Trump enjoys ample actual and practical authority to control the Defendants.”
In advising the judge on the particular circumstances of this case, they start with the extraordinary power Trump has exerted over the executive branch compared to past presidents. They cite, among other things:
Trump fired IRS commissioner Billy Long “without providing a reason.”
Trump “significantly expanded the President’s oversight and control over the Attorney General and DOJ, including in ways that blur the line between fidelity to the President’s policy priorities and fidelity to the President himself.”
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “expressed an expectation that DOJ attorneys demonstrate personal loyalty to President Trump.”
The Trump administration “has taken the position that it has unreviewable authority to terminate high-level officials deemed insufficiently aligned with the Executive. … Some terminations of DOJ attorneys have already occurred on this basis.”
Then they get to the heart of the matter, whether in fact Trump is controlling the defense of his own litigation. Their assessment is striking: “There is also reason to believe that the President is, in fact, exercising his control over the Defendants in this litigation. President Trump’s own statements suggest that he believes he has control over the Defendants and the DOJ lawyers charged with defending this case.”
They contrast the handling of Trump’s claim with the vigorous defense DOJ has mounted in related litigation, circumstances which “raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may … be operating at the President’s direction.”
They suggest to the judge that there are numerous factual inquiries she could potentially make into DOJ’s handling of the Trump case and related cases to help her nail down the issue of adversity.
It’s not clear if settling the case before Judge Williams rules would leave the judge with any authority to review the settlement, and it’s a tricky legal question whether any outside parties would have legal standing to challenge the settlement. All of which is why the parties seem to be rushing to settle the claims before the May 20 briefing deadline.
“There’s a certain irony here,” notes former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “The point of the lawsuit was to treat the federal court as a spot to launder a collusive deal and gain a judicial imprimatur. Now that a judge is actually doing her job, actually probing whether the whole enterprise is constitutionally void, they want to withdraw.”
Trump DOJ Watch
CNN: Todd Blanche was told last year when he was still deputy attorney general that he would have to recuse himself from DOJ matters involving President Trump in his personal capacity, an ethics requirement that the department says Blanche has complied with.
The Trump DOJ is planning to drop fraud charges against an Indian billionaire after his attorney — a former personal attorney to President Trump — made a Power Point presentation at Main Justice last month that included an “unusual offer,” the NYT reports: “If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.”
The DOJ told a federal judge in D.C. that citizenship lists compiled under a Trump executive order and to be shared with state election officials are likely to be incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility, the NYT reports.
Abortion Pill to Remain Available
TPM’s Kate Riga: Supreme Court Keeps Mifepristone Available For Now While Alito and Thomas Seethe in Dissent
The Great Whitening: S.C. Edition
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) did reverse course and call a special session of the legislature, but he stopped short of directly asking for a new congressional district map that eliminates the sole majority-Black district.
The tension here, as best as I can tell, is more over math than it is principle. Cramming the state’s Black voters into Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s district makes the other congressional seats safely Republican. Eliminating Clyburn’s district runs the risk of putting some of those seats more in jeopardy.
It’s not hard to imagine the governor and Republican Senate majority leader, who opposes redistricting before the midterms, having a better grasp of their state’s math than the Trump White House.
13 U.S. Boat Strike Victims Identified
A joint effort by 20 journalists, led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, has identified 13 of the more than 190 people killed in President Trump’s lawless campaign of high seas attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats.
Another One
The House Ethics Committee confirmed that it is investigating sexual harrassment and hostile workplace allegations against Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC).
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trump is displaying behavior that can only be described as pathological self-interest and self-enrichment. In his final term in office, he frankly doesn't give a shit about anything or anybody that isn't an immediate financial asset to him and his criminal family, preferring to give what fading energy remains to him for blatant self-aggrandizement; adding to this, his manifestly incompetent underlings scheme, scam, and position themselves to share in the spoils of a decaying regime, allowing and facilitating continuing unprecedented corruption in the Oval Office, ignoring actual governance and commitment to advancing the common weal.
And to top it off, the MAGA-fied GOP are going all out to put the fix into the midterm elections, in a desperate bid to stave off massive public rejection of all that this regime represents, in collusion with a corruptly partisan Scotus and repurposed federal agencies, to deny the will of the people. All of this, with the singular goal of enabling 24 months of more rapacious and self-dealing behavior by their Leader.
And that is the current state of play.
The French definitely had the right idea for dealing with the corruption in the late 1700s.
Why is he so intent on destroying our country? What do Putin, Xi, Netanyahu have on him? Perhaps unredacted copies of the Epstein files?