President Donald Trump may drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service(IRS) in exchange for the government creating a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved.
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If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to publicly apologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.
The White House and the Justice Department did not respond to TIME’s requests for comment.
“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” a member of President Trump’s legal team said to ABC.
The reports have sparked backlash from government officials concerned about the ethics of Trump receiving funds from a government he runs and his ability to dole them out at will to his allies.
Democratic leaders have called the move “corruption.”
“An insane level of corruption—even for Trump,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X on Thursday. “A $1.7 BILLION slush fund for Trump’s hand-picked stooges to hand money to January 6th insurrectionists and his political allies. Here’s the President’s priority as Americans sell their plasma to afford gas and groceries.”
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