Are We Stuck With Trump’s Outrageous IRS Immunity Deal? |
Donald Trump and his Justice Department have begrudgingly accepted that their tragicomically ill-conceived $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund is toast. The only real question was whether political or legal resistance would snuff it out first. Turns out we’ll never know because Todd Blanche — the acting attorney general nominated by Trump for the permanent job in the midst of this unholy mess — pulled the plug on his own concoction after full-scale Republican revolt in Congress. Trump eventually accepted reality and publicly mourned the loss of his “beautiful thing.”
But the other part of the deal between Trump and his own executive branch — sweeping IRS immunity for Trump, his family, and their businesses — remains in place. And as outrageous as this particular giveaway is, it likely will survive.
Let’s first understand exactly what the tax immunity deal — bizarrely tacked onto the anti-weaponization fund and announced a day later — does and does not do. Contrary to erroneous initial reports, the IRS agreement does not provide the Trump family and businesses with immunity for anything they might do for all of time, past, present, and future. It immunizes the beneficiaries only for their past conduct. (MS NOW, for example, ran an embarrassing correction that a “previous version of this article misstated the IRS immunity terms … The immunity would apply to past IRS issues, not future........