Isn’t it great to live in an era where the president, in his personal capacity, and in conjunction with his Large Adult Sons and his private company, can sue the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he has authority over in his presidential capacity?
The Trump clan remains furious that their tax records were leaked, which kinda makes sense given how hard President Donald Trump worked to hide his financial status and tax returns. According to Trump, the release of the tax returns caused them $10 billion in damages. That’s a pretty hefty damages claim, especially given that every president except Trump has been voluntarily releasing their tax returns since the 1970s.
You’d think being on both sides of a lawsuit would be … problematic in any situation, but particularly when we’re talking about the president, a thing the amicus briefs in the case keep pointing out.
But it gets worse. Last February, Trump issued an executive order declaring that, essentially, he is the law: “No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law.”
So not only is Trump functionally suing himself, his ostensible defendant is not allowed, by a decree from Trump in his presidential role, to take any position contrary to Trump. What are we even doing here?
Trump waited to file this lawsuit until he was president, which kinda gives the game away. The major reporting on his tax returns happened in September 2020, but somehow Trump just let that ride for close to six years.
Both parties then slow-walked this case, with the IRS never even getting around to filing an answer to Trump’s complaint from January. And why bother, really, when this is all a sham? We learned just how shammy when the parties filed a joint consent motion for a 90-day extension.
Why the extension? “Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.”
Well, yeah. Wouldn’t want to waste time with protracted litigation when Trump can just put on his presidential hat and give himself everything he wants. One does have to wonder, though, how the IRS would continue to function if it paid Trump $10 billion, since that is roughly two-thirds of the IRS’s annual budget.
The notion that the parties are just going to work this out and slide some cash across the table is, shall we say, a novel approach for the IRS. In other cases over the leak of tax returns from high-profile individuals, the IRS apologized, but paid no money whatsoever. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that Trump will be satisfied with the IRS just saying they are sorry.
Under Trump, the DOJ is just a cash machine for Trump and his cronies and followers. Not only are they engaging in this IRS fiction, but they have also just “settled” with Michael Flynn for $1.2 million, after giving Ashli Babbitt’s family a cool $5 million.
But the biggest piggy bank Trump wants to crack open—well, besides the $10 billion he wants from the IRS—is his completely fake and meritless Federal Torts Claim Act case. That’s the one where he says we, the taxpayers, owe him $230 million because investigating his myriad wrongdoings made him sad. And of course, the only person who can sign off on that deal is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s many former criminal defense attorneys.
Blanche has made no secret of the fact that he thinks it is cool and fine and good that Trump is functionally now running the DOJ, destroying the independence from the president that has been a hallmark of the Justice Department until now.
Since ascending to the acting role, he made sure to lickety-split do a media hit to let Trump know that he’s got his back and doesn’t mind at all if Trump directs him to prosecute his enemies. “First of all, we have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now, and it is true that some of them involve men women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and that believe should be investigated. That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”
He also told NBC News that Americans should be “happy” that Trump has warped the DOJ into his own personal law firm. So there’s no reason to expect that Blanche won’t sign off on handing the president nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Did we mention all FTCA settlements are secret, so we’ll just never know? Fun!
Your tax dollars, hard at work. Too bad the work is just filling Trump’s pockets again and again.
