Trump’s IRS Immunity Deal Survives
The slush fund collapsed, but the real giveaway may remain intact
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 only immunizes the beneficiaries for their past conduct. (MSNOW, 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 issues.”)
That’s a big difference, but the deal is still a whopper of a windfall. Never again can the IRS (or the federal government more broadly) audit, investigate, question, sue, or indict Trump, his children, and their businesses over any tax issue from the beginning of time until May 19, 2026.
It’s impossible to assign a precise numerical value to this grant of immunity. But we know Trump has been involved in a longstanding tax dispute with the IRS potentially worth over $100 million. And if, hypothetically, the IRS should determine someday that Eric Trump’s crypto business, or the “Trump Mobile” golden cellphone operation, might not have fully complied with all tax laws up until May 2026, the government would have no recourse.
Legally, the immunity deal is fundamentally different from the slush fund, which would have involved payouts of taxpayer dollars from a larger pot of money called the “Judgment Fund” allocated broadly by Congress to compensate plaintiffs harmed by a federal agency. But Trump’s IRS immunity deal involves no payouts at all. Rather, it’s an unquantifiably generous (and quite absurd) exercise of discretion by the government not to look further into any potential wrongdoing by a defined group of individuals and businesses.
The federal government grants variations of immunity all the time – but not like this. Ordinarily, prosecutors or investigators give immunity in exchange for some concomitant benefit: a defendant pleads guilty to one count of an indictment and receives broad coverage against further charges for related conduct; a corporation pays some disputed portion of a tax liability and the parties agree not to further battle over some other outstanding sum. The trick here, of course, is that Trump effectively struck a deal with his own Executive Branch. And he gives up only his ability to sue for damages over the leak of his tax records in 2019 and 2020 – which likely had some value, but nothing remotely close to the tens of millions (or more) he and his family stand to benefit from the immunity deal.
This is an indefensible deal on the merits. But it’ll be virtually impossible for anybody to enter the fray and challenge it legally. No outsider will have “standing” – concrete injury caused directly by the challenged action – to bring a lawsuit. No taxpayer or advocacy group or politician can realistically demonstrate that they’ve suffered the type of direct loss or injury required to get into the courtroom. Outrage doesn’t count, even if it’s justified.
There’s the possibility that U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams, who presided over the original Trump v. Trump (essentially) lawsuit, could re-open the case and cancel out the resulting settlement, including the tax immunity deal. But even if that happens, there’s no way to stop the federal government and the Trumps from re-entering the same deal outside of any courtroom context. While the slush fund requires the existence of a valid lawsuit before taxpayer money can be paid out from the Judgment Fund, the IRS immunity deal can be refashioned as a simple contract between the government and private parties – no cash changing hands, no judicial approval or involvement required.
While the rare Republican uprising against Trump ultimately doomed the slush fund, intra-party fury over the IRS deal has been muted. And, since the slush fund unraveled last week, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been diverted to an even more egregious fiasco – the nomination of Bill Pulte, the former housing finance regulator with zero national security experience, as Director of National Intelligence. Even as they’ve shown more willingness to resist the President’s excesses in recent weeks, there are only so many stands Republicans will take at once against their party’s undisputed (and politically vindictive) leader.
In the end, Trump and his family likely will keep their IRS immunity deal, even as the “anti-weaponization” slush fund falls to the wayside. It’s an old huckster trick: ask for two outrageous things, let the other side tucker itself out fighting against the more ridiculous one, and settle for the other.
Of course every tax payer in the U.S. is harmed. Because that money is not in the country’s coffers, we each have to pay our piece of what the Trump family owes. We need to find a way to fight this travesty!
A president strikes a deal with his own Justice Department to immunize himself and his family from all past tax liability.
The legal system’s response: nobody has standing to challenge it. The political system’s response: Republicans are busy with something else.
Honig writes that outrage doesn’t count. He’s right. In this system, at this moment, it genuinely doesn’t.
The United States has exported rule-of-law lectures to the rest of the world for generations. The rest of the world is watching this. They know exactly what to call it. They’ve had different names for it in different languages for a long time.
Here’s a campaign idea: everybody stops paying. All at once. Let’s find out very quickly how committed this government is to the principle that taxes are optional, and for whom.
Johan