After Donald Trump withdrew his outlandish $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS two weeks ago, the president soon after received two scandalous rewards from his own administration. The first was the creation of a $1.766 billion compensation fund, while the other was an IRS audit shield, unveiled by his Justice Department, granting Trump, his family and his controversial businesses immunity from all existing IRS tax audits.
Of the two rewards, the former appears to have been discarded in the face of overwhelming bipartisan opposition, while the latter remains intact.
When pressed to justify the need for any kind of presidential recompence, Republicans tend to emphasize a straightforward point: During Trump’s first term, a former IRS contractor gained access to the president’s tax returns and shared the documents he’d been desperate to hide from the public. (Under the Biden administration, the contractor was caught, charged, convicted and sent to prison.)
As the argument goes, that Trump was wronged — not just in his imagination, but in reality — necessarily validates the need for remuneration either in the form of a “slush fund,” IRS immunity or both.
But during a Senate Finance Committee hearing this week, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on an underappreciated detail. CNBC reported: