MEMORIAL DAY 2026 — NOT THIS
On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In that testimony, Blanche attempted to defend DOJ's settlement of President Trump's suit against the IRS for allegedly disclosing a portion of Trump's tax returns.
In the past, Trump has pledged to disclose those returns but said he could not because of pending audits. In 2019 and 2020, portions of those returns were leaked, not by the IRS but instead by a government contractor who has since been prosecuted and sentenced to five years in jail for doing so. Nonetheless, and as is his wont as a forever victim, this past January -- more than six years after the disclosure -- Trump sued for $10 billion, claiming the IRS was negligent in not protecting his returns from the illegal leak.
The suit was likely to be dismissed as barred by the two-year statute of limitations. The Court itself was troubled by the absence of true adversity given Trump's control of the defendant he was suing, and had ordered briefing by Wednesday on whether there was a real case in controversy. Without that, the Court had no jurisdiction and the suit could not proceed. Trump and the DOJ, however, short circuited this entire process by agreeing to settle.
And what a settlement it was.
In return for Trump dropping his stale claims, the government agreed to take $1.776 billion from the DOJ's judgment fund, a permanent, indefinite appropriation that covers judgments against the United States, and set up a separate account run by five people appointed by the Attorney General (one in "consultation" with Congress) who will then decide claims made by any who think they were victims of, as Blanche put it, "lawfare and weaponization".
Those supposed victims are likely to include the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by Trump on the first day of his second term, and may even include the president himself, who (falsely) believes he was also a victim of lawfare and who will now appoint people beholden to him to rule on any such claims and distribute pay-outs on them.
This separate account will last until December 2028 and then end just as Trump's term is set to end. No other president will appoint any Attorney General who in turn would appoint the five people to manage the account and rule on any claims.
Not coincidentally, therefore, critics are calling the account a slush fund Trump will control and use to reward and pay off his previously pardoned insurrectionist allies . . .
And himself.
Separately, the agreement also precludes the government from auditing Trump's, his family's or any of his affiliates' tax returns, and from prosecuting any actions for tax fraud or back taxes against them. This part of the deal relieves Trump of what experts estimated was a potential $100 million liability, and was so offensive that DOJ did not even disclose it until after Blanche had testified.
Whether DOJ had any right to enter into this settlement is not remotely clear.
Under applicable regulations, DOJ can only settle "actual or imminent litigation" and -- as opponents have argued -- "a feigned or collusive suit over which no court has jurisdiction -- to say nothing about one that has been voluntarily dismissed to avoid a jurisdictional ruling -- is not 'actual or imminent litigation.'" The settlement itself was not made a part of the record or reviewed by the judge supervising Trump's suit against the IRS, and in dropping it, Trump asserts that judge now has no further authority.
So . . .
To recap . . .
A collusive and dismissible law suit was settled in return for the creation of a $1.776 billion fund Trump's appointees will control to decide whether pay outs should be made to, among others, J6 insurrectionists who were alleged victims of lawfare . . .
The Trumps writ large have been granted immunity from and no longer have to worry about past tax liabilities . . .
No court will approve of the settlement . . .
And no court will review any payments made from that $1.776 billion fund.
This is corruption on steroids.
But it is also typical Trump.
The Republican defense of the deal is that it is a version of what President Obama did in Keepseagle v. Vilsack in 2011. In that case, a court-approved settlement of a class action alleging discrimination against Native American farmers and ranchers created a $680 million settlement claims fund. After all the claims had been paid, however, $380 million remained undistributed.
As CNN's Tierney Sneed and Devon Cole explained yesterday, because the Keepseagle settlement said nothing about how to handle undistributed amounts, the parties negotiated a separate deal to distribute those unpaid funds to other groups -- none of which had filed lawsuits or were parties to the original one -- that served Native American farming and ranching communities.
That separate agreement was court-approved.
The subsequent pay outs were also court-monitored.
And, as the attorney who represented the plaintiffs noted in distinguishing that case from Trump's IRS deal, "The really . . . critical issue [is you] have to serve the same community whose interests were at stake in the litigation that was brought."
Here, the claimants eligible to be paid from Trump's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" are not limited to those whose tax returns were improperly publicized.
On last Sunday's edition of ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos asked SCOTUS-blog editor Sarah Isgur if she expected the administration to "go through with" the Anti-Weaponization Fund deal, which at that point had not been announced. Noting "they certainly expect to", she explained that "this started during the Obama administration with third party settlements. This idea that a friendly group would sue, they would settle it. And [as] part of the settlement you would pay to a third party that was friendly to the administration."
"People were decrying that at the time," she continued, but "like everything else, whether it's executive orders, sue and settle, third party settlements, Donald Trump just turns it up to eleven."
So . . .
Now we know.
FDR gave us the "New Deal".
Truman, the "Fair Deal".
Kennedy, the "New Frontier".
Johnson, the "Great Society".
With Trump, we get the "Turns It Up To Eleven Deal".
In 2000, Vice President Gore thought he won the presidential election, sued to have the vote in Florida recounted, lost in the Supreme Court, and then went home.
In 2020, President Trump thought he won the presidential election, sued and lost sixty cases trying to reverse the result, asked state officials to find votes for him in Georgia, created false electoral college slates in seven states he lost, demanded that Vice President Pence either send the election back to those states for a certification on Trump's behalf or send it to the House of Representatives where he would have won, told his followers on January 6 that Pence could do this and they should to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to make him, and then happily watched as those followers ransacked the place, attacked and seriously injured Capitol police, threatened to kill Pence and Speaker Pelosi, and stopped the certification of Joe Biden's unquestionable victory.
In 2016, after Justice Scalia died on February 13 and the Senate refused for nine months to even hold a hearing on and consider President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, candidate Trump supported this unprecedented delay on the grounds that the next president should make the appointment.
In 2020, after Justice Ginsburg died on September 18, President Trump demanded that the Senate immediately confirm Amy Coney-Barrett, even though early voting in that year's presidential election had already begun.
In 2003, President Bush claimed (as it turned out, inaccurately) that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, sought Congressional authorization to eliminate that threat, and then went to war against Iraq.
In 2026, President Trump claimed (falsely) that either an Iranian attack against the US was imminent, or (again falsely) Iran was imminently able to create a nuclear weapon, or (which was false and may have presented an opportunity to the US but certainly no imminent danger) Iran's fascist theocrats would fall if he attacked, did not seek any authorization from Congress but went to war against Iran anyway.
In 2011, President Obama settled a class action and used the unspent portions of the settlement to fund, subject to court approval, non-party organizations whose missions closely tracked those with whom the government had settled.
In 2026, President Trump "turn[ed] it up to eleven" and settled his own dismissible claims against the IRS by extorting immunity on any tax liability and creating a fund to pay on third-party, non-tax lawfare claims his appointees will rule on, no court will supervise, and for which no disclosure is required.
Memo to AAG Blanche: Ask your boss if he intends to disclose his tax returns now that an audit no longer exists.
Looking forward to your response.
Not holding my breath.
We celebrate Memorial Day next Monday, May 25.
In 1994, Michael Anania wrote a poem called "Memorial Day".
Here it is:
In 2026, America has "forgotten . . . where the plot is".
And "since . . . the way is lost . . . we have no practiced step . . . and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us."
Though not ever thus in our lifetime as a nation, it has been for a while. The sway and balance of normal politics has been lost, replaced by violent losers, corrupt winners, and a coven of enablers in robes or courtiers in Cabinet and Congress pretending to clothe an otherwise naked emperor.
Those who died in all our wars and on all those battlefields fought for many things.
But not this.
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