Trump’s $10 Billion Shakedown of IRS Takes Unnervingly Corrupt Turn

The president’s “settlement” with the IRS appears set to give him a slush fund of $1.7 billion to dole out to allies. How unconstitutional is it? Jamie Raskin counts the ways.

Would it be legal for President Donald Trump to effectively order a major U.S. government agency to hand over huge piles of taxpayer money to a group of his political allies? We may be about to find out.

ABC News reports that Trump is likely to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service as part of a new settlement that amounts to one of his most corrupt schemes yet. It would create a new $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies supposedly victimized by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system—potentially including the January 6 insurrectionists.

According to ABC, the settlement would create a “commission” with “total authority” to settle “claims” brought by those who allege such weaponization. Per ABC, this not only includes the insurrectionists; it could even settle purported claims by “entities associated with President Trump himself.” By all indications it would operate with little-to-no congressional oversight.

“This is a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me.

This saga captures something essential about how the political economy of Trumpism really functions. It helps explain why his supporters stick by him through one episode after another of the most corrupt self-dealing we’ve seen from any U.S. president in modern history.

To recap: In January, Trump sued the IRS over an unauthorized leak of his tax returns when he was president the first time, demanding $10 billion in damages. This lawsuit is absurd on the merits, as my colleague Timothy Noah demonstrates, functionally inviting Trump’s own government to settle a lawsuit massively in his favor, a ground-breaking innovation in........

© New Republic