We live in such strange times, no? Our President sues the very government that we elected him to run because someone in the IRS during his first term leaked some of his tax information. Now the “case” is “settled,” according to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a way that puts $1.776 billion dollars in the discretionary hands of Blanche and Trump. Even long-time GOP pols on Capitol Hill don’t seem pleased.
Five former U.S. presidents are generally counted as having made their tax information public in some form as a matter of presidential transparency: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, with Nixon’s release in the 1970s helping establish the norm. By the time Donald Trump broke with that tradition, observers were describing him as the exception to a long-standing practice of voluntary disclosure by presidents and major-party nominees.
Trump refused to make his tax returns public; because some of them were leaked late in his first term of office, he sued the U.S. in federal court for ten billion dollars. It boggles the mind that Trump’s actual damages from such a leak would yield compensatory damages of even a million dollars, much less ten billion. After all, the leaks revealed that he paid less than $1,000 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017; for some, that only burnishes his “image” as a crafty, savvy guy. When Hillary Clinton said in a televised debate that her Republican rival Donald Trump had paid no federal income tax in some years, Trump didn’t deny it. In fact, he said: “That makes me smart.”
Second, his tax return leak was not the only one; Former IRS contractor Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn leaked the tax returns and sensitive agency forms of 405,427 individuals and businesses. Some of these have sued, as Trump did, but the Department of Justice has been fighting each of those in court. But Trump doesn’t even have a lawsuit to settle. In addition to being morally and legally questionable, the entire “settlement” rests on a precarious premise: that there was a genuine controversy with opposing parties, the only kind of conflict that our judicial system should recognize as worthy of hearing.
If a sitting U.S. President is effectively on both sides of the lawsuit, the federal courts would usually lack Article III “case or controversy” because the dispute is not genuinely adverse. The Constitution requires an actual dispute between adverse parties, and courts have long said they cannot decide collusive or feigned cases where one person controls both sides.
Article III gives federal courts power over real “cases” and “controversies,” and the Supreme Court has explained that the dispute must be concrete, definite, and between parties with adverse legal interests. If the President heads the executive branch and the defendant is the federal government or a component of it, the practical problem is that the same official controls both sides, which undermines adverseness.
The DOJ now resolutely opposes claims from any of the other 400,000 people and businesses whose returns were leaked by Littlejohn, but Trump somehow gets a lucrative settlement from the DOJ –– with no judicial oversight, an “apology,” and a statement that he and his family can never be audited.
What’s obviously wrong ––a massive scam on the U.S. taxpayer ––has somehow become legal; although few would dare call it perfectly legal. The $1.776 billion fund was cynically calibrated to signal Trump’s deep “patriotism” to 1776, when Thomas Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence declared a certain truth to be “self-evident” –– that all men are created equal.
Yet it seems for all of his patriotic flag-embracing that Trump does not believe all humans were created equal. He has shown remarkable hostility toward racial and civil-rights protections, attacks on diversity education, and rhetoric that frames some groups as more deserving or more “American” than others. He has repeatedly claimed that immigrants entering the United States will be “poisoning the blood” of the nation, drawing on eugenics-era language to imply that non-white individuals fundamentally corrupt the nation’s genetic and cultural purity. Examples of this kind of divisive rhetoric are legion. He has targeted women of color in Congress by telling them to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came” and has continually questioned the eligibility and background of prominent female political figures of color.
So, as for the “scam settlement” fund –– this “very patriotic like nothing you’ve seen before” ––will be administered by five people chosen by Trump’ former personal attorney and now acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche. The AG’s office and its attorneys have traditionally been kept at arms-length from the President but is now an agency that basically does Trump’s bidding. Trump’s personal vindictiveness is well known; Pam Bondi and now Todd Blanche are charged with prosecuting anyone the President doesn’t like, for whatever reason, and for paying “victims” of Biden-era DOJ prosecutions, like the January 6 rioter; victims of “weaponized prosecutions” by Trump’s DOJ could also apply, but much depends on how “weaponization” is defined.
Blanche, although he has the power to limit who gets paid, refused to rule out payments to people convicted for their participation in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Trump has lionized many of those who were tried and convicted for their actions on January 6, and has called them “great patriots.” Blanche himself cheered Trump’s pardons of the rioters during an appearance in May (2026) at CPAC.
Blanche was Trump’s lead defense attorney in the high-profile criminal prosecutions of the president, including the federal cases centered on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents, as well as the hush-money trial in New York City.
Throughout his tenure as the No. 2 at DOJ, Blanche has come under scrutiny for his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, including his private interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell — who is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors — was moved to a minimum-security prison following her meetings with Blanche.
In short, we have a “settlement” of a lawsuit that was not actually a “justiciable” case, which should mean that courts will enjoin any payouts under this fund. But until that happens, and sadly, it actually might not, this settlement scam looks “perfectly legal,” but only in the way that much of what Trump does is “legal.” Maybe MAGA should be re-named Making Americans Greedy Grifters Again (MAGGA), as Trump surely seems to show us the way.