The Trump Slush Fund Takes Self-Dealing to New Heights - Rob Horowitz

Apparently unbounded by any internal ethical compass or worry about the foreseeable political consequences, President Trump has essentially awarded himself a taxpayer-funded, nearly $ 1.8 billion slush fund to pay out as he sees fit to allies who claim that they were victims of Department of Justice overreach during the Biden years, refusing to rule out compensating January 6 rioters who violently attacked the police. 

As if this wasn’t bad enough by itself, the president added a nice personal sweetener: the agreement mandates the ceasing of any current audits and “forever” precludes the IRS from seeking back taxes or prosecuting the president or any of his family members for any tax filings up to the present.  Experts believe that what can be described charitably as Mr. Trump’s creative accounting on his tax filings means that he probably owed an additional $100 million or so to the IRS if fully audited.

The less-than-paper-thin pretext for the creation of the slush fund is a supposed settlement of Mr. Trump and his family’s private $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department for damages incurred when a contractor for the agency leaked Mr. Trump’s taxes during his first term.  Attorneys for the IRS believed it had a strong case for dismissal of the suit. The contractor has been prosecuted and is serving a 5- year prison sentence.    

In any event, even if Mr. Trump and his family were entitled to some relatively small amount of financial compensation, a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund and immunity from owing any back taxes gives the term sweetheart deal new meaning.  More troubling, this was not some lingering lawsuit left over from years ago. President Trump filed this lawsuit at the beginning of this year, knowing full well that he was putting himself in a position to unilaterally decide the outcome.

That is exactly what happened. The Trump Justice Department settled with Mr. Trump and his family, forging an agreement that was not blessed by a court.  This was all enabled by an acting attorney general who has repeatedly demonstrated he will say or do anything to take the acting away from his title.

This arrangement is so outrageous and politically toxic that it awakened a supine Republican majority in the United States Senate, one that had previously been all too willing to ignore the president's blatant leverage of his office in a cavalcade of self-enrichment actions that have added several billion dollars to his net worth. Todd Blanche’s attempt to defend the agreement at this past Thursday’s Senate Republican Caucus lunch was met with open anger and hostility, according to senators who were in attendance. As Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) described it on his podcast, “My guess is there’re probably 45 senators in the room, at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were pissed.”  The Texas senator added, “There were multiple senators yelling at the attorney general, saying this feels like self-dealing.” 

More telling is the mounting public criticism of the creation of the slush fund by Republican senators and other elected Republicans. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the former majority leader, for instance, put it this way, “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong-take your pick.”  Senator Tom Tillis R-NC) sounded a similar note, calling it “stupid on stilts.”

In the House of Representatives, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick(R-PA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) introduced legislation to block the federal government from paying any claims submitted to the so-called anti-weaponization fund. “Taxpayer dollars will not become a discretionary payout fund. Transparency is not optional. Accountability is not negotiable,” said Fitzpatrick.