And now, he’s paving the way for you and me and all taxpayers to foot the bill for the enemies of democracy.
You know how the “president” filed that lawsuit in January seeking $10 billion in damages from the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department for the purported damage inflicted by his tax returns getting leaked? Well, as ABC News reported on Friday, Donald Trump is fully prepared to settle it by creating a $1.7 billion slush fund to pay off his allies, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol whom he already pardoned.
This money would come from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, a pool of taxpayer assets that serves to pay out legitimate court judgments against the country. Instead, it would remunerate Trump’s allies, essentially those who purportedly were harmed by what he calls the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system.
Of course, it’s the president himself who is doing all of the weaponization. And it’s beyond deplorable. In this scenario, every recipient’s name would be hidden from the public record, so none of that pesky shame need be revealed as people pocket their blood money.
Who controls this “Judgment Fund”? That’s another thing. It’s a five-member commission that would have complete authority to distribute the money as they see fit. And if any of those five defy Trump? He can simply replace them. There is no oversight or transparency or accountability.
This is of course the stuff of authoritarian regimes. And that’s entirely the point.
How can this happen in the United States of America? That will perhaps be for the history books to clarify. For now, it’s inexplicable.
But let’s back up a moment.
The original $10 billion suit was filed by Trump along with sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and the Trump Organization against a former IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty in federal court of leaking the Trump tax returns. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Trump claimed the $10 billion figure to be a fair number to account for his damage to business and person over the leak. But considering it is the president’s own Department of Justice that is supposedly representing the “other side,” it’s been completely ludicrous.
Trump has been, in fact, suing himself.
It was officials in the DOJ are currently negotiating the potential settlement cited above. According to The New York Times, it could also include an agreement that the I.R.S. would drop any audits of Trump, his family members, or businesses.
Sticking with the money part, Trump has obviously been using that $10 billion figure as a bargaining chip, seemingly never imagining he’d ever be able to get away with enriching himself at such a massive figure. If he could, it would potentially more than triple his net worth – an amount that was said to be less than $3 billion when he took office in January 2025.
It is basically a government version of a no-bid contract, because sitting at the negotiating table is none other than Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s lackey who essentially does whatever the boss demands. And right now, the client’s thinking seems to be, “Hey, I’m only asking for less than $2 billion, and none of it’s directly for me.”
In TrumpWorld, this is what passes for reasoned thinking.
The federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams – an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida – has requested briefs from both sides by this coming Wednesday. By “both sides,” however, we are talking about Trump and his Justice Department that is anything but non-partisan.
So, what’s the conflict? This is evidently something Williams would like to know, too. She wonders how the president can sue an agency he controls. Quite simply, it’s insane.
To put this into something approaching perspective, the largest administrative settlement the Justice Department has ever paid under the Federal Tort Claims Act was $138.7 million, split among 139 women, over the FBI’s failure to properly handle sexual assault allegations in 2015-16 in the Larry Nassar sexual abuse case involving USA Gymnastics.
Now we have a sitting U.S. President demanding more than 70 times that much – over leaked tax info. Even the payouts to the 9/11 victims’ families were rarely more than $10 million. But $10 billion would be a thousand times that much.
It happens that Littlejohn leaked the returns of thousands of high rollers and billionaires, not just the Trumps. One of those, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, also sued the I.R.S., settling in 2024 for zero in damages. Instead, he received a public apology from the agency, the I.R.S. having successfully argued that the government can’t be held liable for the actions of a contractor.
Somehow, though, it’s different when the plaintiff is the president. Why? There’s the 10 billion-dollar question. It shouldn’t be, of course, unless he’s outside the rule of law – which we all know Trump to be.
Expect a settlement to come by early this week, before Judge Williams officially decides the case is utterly without merit and can toss it in the trashcan.
It would be the height of irony were Trump to fleece the populace via the I.R.S., an agency he’s fought with his entire life to avoid paying his fair share. On the other hand, it would be entirely on brand for the man who claims not to think about Americans’ financial situation to negotiate himself a monstrous payoff for positively no reason whatsoever.
But again, given how the man has so effectively transformed this presidency thing into the greatest kleptocracy con going – and how the human guardrails that once hindered his greediest instincts are long gone – it would make equal sense that he’d want to create a fund where his cronies can share in the booty.
It remains flat-out astonishing that this criminal is using the legal system to extract so much wealth from a country that’s rendered itself powerless to stop him. Can anyone? In the short-term, unfortunately, it’s doubtful.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.