President Donald Trump appears ready to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in exchange for a $1.7 billion settlement – an arrangement that left former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in disbelief on Friday.
“How is this not the biggest scandal in the United States right now?” Hasan asked in an analysis published Friday in Zeteo.
“How is a sitting president getting away with suing the government he is in charge of and then settling the case, effectively with himself, to gain access to more than a billion dollars of taxpayer cash, which could end up in the personal bank accounts of his cronies? Has there ever been a presidential scam quite like this?”
Trump sued the IRS in response to his tax returns being leaked in 2019, but according to an ABC News report published on Thursday, the president is willing to drop the suit in exchange for a $1.7 billion fund “to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system,” the outlet reported.
Even more shocking, Hasan argued, was the lack of oversight in the potential arrangement.
“Donald Trump is planning on using our tax dollars to (re)pay his friends – and his thugs,” Hasan wrote. “It’s a corrupt slush fund for MAGA. And I know some of you must be thinking, ‘But surely there must be some oversight of this money, some safeguards and protections for the American taxpayer? Nope. Nada. Zilch."
The fund would have “little oversight” and grant Trump the authority to “remove members of the commission running the fund without cause,” ABC News reported. The commission would also be “under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars,” the outlet’s report reads.