Senate Republicans demurred last week at the chance to rein in President Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, despite indications that the slush fund is not as dead as the Justice Department has claimed. Even more troubling, the GOP opted not to touch the less blatantly corrupt part of Trump’s settlement with himself. Under the terms of an addendum from acting attorney general Todd Blanche, the Internal Revenue Service is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing the president, his companies, or the sons that joined him in attempting to shakedown the agency for $10 billion in a lawsuit against the government he leads.
Importantly, the one-page ban includes any ongoing audits that may have already begun. It also specifically applies to all tax returns filed before the settlement was put in place last month. This would cover those filed in April, which cover Trump’s first year back in office. And as even a cursory review of the Trump family’s alleged ongoing profiteering shows, any number of fraudulent claims could potentially slip through the cracks if the IRS is forbidden from reviewing any of those filings.
Any number of fraudulent claims could potentially slip through the cracks if the IRS is forbidden from reviewing any of those filings.
The slush fund itself is widely seen as a vessel for Trump to pass out cash to supporters who claimed they’d been unfairly targeted by federal investigations. Some tax experts recently told Politico that while Trump wouldn’t be getting money from the fund himself, he would potentially have still been responsible for a tax bill costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But the language of the broader settlement argued that the fund is “not taxable income as to Plaintiffs, who receive no economic benefit from this Settlement Agreement.”
In truth, there’s a potentially massive economic benefit from the settlement via the follow-up provision Blanche later added. As The New York Times has noted, an IRS audit launched in 2020 could have resulted in Trump owing $100 million or more for double-dipping on certain tax breaks. Simply causing that to go away would be a massive boon to the president and his businesses, let alone any other audits that may or may not have been underway behind closed doors. After all, the IRS has had a policy since the post-Watergate era began to automatically audit the president and vice president’s tax returns.
We already know some of what was likely in the most recent filings, thanks to a mix of mandatory disclosures and excellent journalism. Trump revealed in a federal disclosure form last month that he’s engaged in massive stock trades since January, including millions of dollars’ worth of shares in businesses that have benefited from his decisions as president. (White House spokesperson Kimberly Benza said last month in a statement to The Associated Press that “neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments” and that they “receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management.”)