The nine-page settlement agreement of President Trump’s unwinnable lawsuit against the I.R.S,, which already included an illegal tax-free provision, had that one-page coda. I wrote about it yesterday, but this is sinking in.
I feel like an idiot. Since 2016, I have tried hard to be fair to Donald Trump, to give him the presumption of good will and legitimacy all Presidents deserve, and indeed must have to function. I am certain that the attitudes of the Trump Deranged have been destructive, undemocratic, biased and irrational, but this latest development raises the strong possibility that they happened to be right.
A Democratic, progressive criminal defense attorney who believes, with so may of my friends and colleagues, that the President “Trump “has two, and only two, motivations: Self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. He’s done nothing in his second term to suggest otherwise”—a starting point that I still believe is biased and based substantially on hate—writes today in part,
“Can Trump do this? Is any of this lawful and constitutional?….[T]his post hoc addendum to a “settlement agreement” that elevates the concept of collusion to its apex breaks ground never before molested. The idea of any past President doing something so audacious, so self-serving, so blatant, seems incredible. The public would never accept it. Perhaps the public still won’t, even if the MAGA faithful will. That remains to be seen, subject to the likelihood of the Democratic Party doing something to self-destruct and remind Americans why they elected Trump a second time despite knowing who he was. There is no ready answer as to what can be done about this…We are deep into virgin territory of graft, corruption and self-dealing, with little expectation of any governmental guardrail holding fast…And much as it’s hard to fathom what he could do that’s worse than this, it would be stunningly naive to believe that we’ve hit rock bottom.”
The rest of Scott Greenfield’s commentary is, as usual, marred by the typical hyperbole of a true-blue progressive and Trump hater, but in those words above I find nothing that I can reject. I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid.
Now what?
Ethics Alarms 
You weren’t wrong to be fair to Trump. That he demonstrates that he is indeed unethical sometimes is hardly a surprise, but it doesn’t mean fairness isn’t required when it is warranted.
No, this action is wrong and should be understood by everyone to be wrong. Most certainly, the Democrats will do the equivalent of “I told you so” and ignoring precedents on the part of their own party. Many Americans will keep going as normal because they, like our MSNow journalist in the last entry, don’t understand our history or system of government and because they have learned to advocate Sicilian ethics.
Therefore, Obama sics the IRS on conservative/Tea Party groups. His DOJ works to install Hillary Clinton as President. Trump endures an entire first administration of contrived impeachments and a break in administrations filled with lawfare designed to prevent him from running again, as well as his followers being targeted. The Biden administration claims that Trump will target Joe’s officials and relatives in retaliation, so Biden pardons everyone he can think of, including for actions not yet charged or known of.
Trump, remembering the last time he was in office, takes steps to prevent the IRS from being weaponized against him and his family in the future and sets up a fund to help those likewise targeted.
This is where we are now. I don’t excuse it…but it certainly explains Trump’s thinking behind it. Administrations are attempting to shield themselves, their supporters and their relatives from vindictive actions they are certain will be taken by their opponents. This culture of toxic divisiveness – for which I blame the Democrats for starting (yes, I know this looks like a childhood game of “He/She started it!!”) – has led to this. Trump’s natural inclination for self-promotion combined with his own petty vindictiveness and will to survive have resulted in this ridiculous deal.
And it would really cool if we had a responsible news media full of educated journalists who are willing to explain what American democracy is and what is or is not supposed to happen in it, but all we have are people who only have a vague notion of the existence of the Declaration of Independence and no notion of what’s actually in it.
Jack,
Is there any chance you’d be willing to parse out Section C? (And dummy that I am, I thought initially that Section C of the addendum was just a reiteration of III.B of the settlement until I read very closely.) I don’t know if I’m focusing on a pinhole leak in a pipe when there’s a massive break downstream, but as I’m trying to figure out what it really says, I’m wondering if it is really as broad as Scott Greenfield says it is. The restriction on the US from prosecuting or pursuing claims against Trump, his family, any joint filers, his corporations, etc, seem to be limited to only the matters raised by Trump’s lawsuit. Am I reading this completely wrong?
Also, I’m wondering if this is anything akin to Julius Caesar and his Gallic Wars. Having made major political enemies in Rome, and being in gross debt from his earlier political endeavors, Caesar basically invaded Gaul for spoils, further military victories, and to keep his enemies at bay. When the Senate finally demanded he disband his army and return to Rome to face a trail, Caesar decided to toss the dice and bring his army to Rome.
Is this move on Trump’s part a salvo to protect himself once he’s out of office?
There are lots of interesting parallels between modern USA and the end of the Roman Republic. And also the modern USA and the end of the Roman Empire. And also the modern USA and all sorts of other analogs because history rhymes. History is a great advisory board.
However, while there are some pretty glaring similarities between the Senate and Julius Caesar and the Democrats and Trump, I think one very very key difference is that Julius Caesar *was* engaging in a war in Gaul not for any need of the SPQR but for his own personal glory, thus making *him* in the wrong and the Senate in the right (even though they were all pretty corrupt themselves).
Trump? We have no idea how he would have been as President if the Democrats hadn’t conducted themselves like juvenile delinquents at best and outright insurgents at worst.
“Julius Caesar *was* engaging in a war in Gaul not for any need of the SPQR but for his own personal glory, thus making *him* in the wrong and the Senate in the right“.
The Roman Senate ordered Julius Caesar to disband his army in 50 BC because conservative senators (e.g. Cato the Younger) feared his growing political influence, military power, and popularity. They viewed his ambition as a direct threat to the traditional authority of the Republic and aimed to strip him of his legal protections so they could prosecute him for alleged political abuses during his first consulship and triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus.
Following his highly successful campaigns in the Gallic Wars, Caesar had amassed vast wealth, immense personal loyalty from his troops, and the fervent support of the Roman lower classes. The Senate, and his former political ally Pompey the Great, worried that Caesar would leverage this power to march on Rome and establish a permanent dictatorship.
After Caesar’s consulship he became governor of Transalpine Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul, and Illyricum. Under Roman law, a governor could have an army and enjoy legal immunity while serving out his term. If Caesar surrendered his legions as the Senate demanded, he would become a private citizen. Once in Rome without military protection, the Senate intended to arrest and exile him for legal irregularities and acts of treason he committed during his previous consulship.
Caesar recognized that complying with the Senate’s order would be the end of his political career and likely his life. In defiance, he famously marched his army across the Rubicon river in 49 BC—the official boundary of Italy—which triggered the Great Roman Civil War.
After Caesar won this war, he became dictator for life, to be assassinated in 44 BC. The Roman Senate may have brought about what they feared.
The Romans had seen a dictatorship before, under Sulla, after a Civil War including another general named Marius. Thanks to all the military successes of the Roman Republic, the power and popularity of the generals made the Republic quite unstable.
I am not sure what lessons to draw for the USA, except that the Founders thought it well to introduces checks and balances in the way the USA is governed in order to prevent permanent and unaccountable power. Permanent on party rule, and an unaccountable and very powerful bureaucracy are to be regarded as horrors, and dangers to the Republic.
There’s no universe in which we can presume that Trump would have done something like this if it wasn’t for the conditions created entirely by the progressive side of the aisle. So no, they aren’t “possibly” ‘right’ about their hyperventilations of the past 12 years. Whether it’s the right outcome or not, Trump can reasonably be seen to be acting as someone who knows – based on the past 12 years of progressive behavior – that once he’s out of office, he and anyone associated with him will live a life constantly pursued, hounded, harassed and otherwise being sought for destruction.
It’s an ugly compromise – but I don’t see how any of this would have been necessary if the Democrats hadn’t, well, you know what all they’ve done.
This action is far tamer than what I had recommended.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2024/05/29/ethics-dunce-the-biden-campaign/#comment-867771
What I wonder is why Republican prosecutors have not been doing this since 2023. The road was already paved, all they had to do was travel it.
And paving that road did not start in 2023. It started with Ronnie Earle. It started with Lois Lerner. It started with Michael McCrum.
Surely you can’t believe that settlement is “necessary.” It’s corrosive at best, and at worst a ruinous precedent. Yes, it’s probably the case that Trump would not have done this had not he been treated so abysmally by the Axis, but Greenfield’s statement that it is hard imagining any other President doing this is correct, and that would hold true no matter how any of them were abused.It’s just not an excuse.
I think this is pretty rotten of Trump, even if i can understand possible motivations for doing it. But to say that it’s inconceivable that another president would do it just isn’t correct. Biden pardoned his whole family and Fauci preemptively for crimes not even charged. Sure, Trump put a cash value on it, because of course he did. He also knows that the way the system is currently set up, it can be used to financially ruin someone long before a verdict, one way or the other. I can see this being used as a bulwark against behavior like that.
I don’t know. We’re in a pretty crappy place in our Republic right now. We’re there *entirely* because of one side of the political aisle. Trump doing nothing – helps Democrats break the system more. Trump doing a little bit of something – helps Democrats break the system more. Trump opposing the Democrats in excessive ways – helps the Democrats break the system more.
I don’t know what the right answer here is, but I’m not losing sleep over what Trump did in circumstances *NOT OF HIS OR ANY CONSERVATIVE’S* making.
Not sure if this helps (?)
The AUC hasbeen rabidly antiTrump for over 10 years. Kkck a man enough and he will eventually do something less than ethical. I think giving some time to see how this fund is used is not an unreasonable position in the current environment.
I think some of the comments here are evidence of the deterioration of values over the last decade.
If you’d all been asked 10 years ago if it was appropriate for a generic President to appropriate almost 2 billion dollars of government funds settling a lawsuit that he had brought against his own government and which we had absolutely no legal basis to think would be successful even on summary judgement, you’d have said no. It’s just theft. It’s really not that hard.
But the last 10 years happened, and we’re talking about Trump. So now we’re talking about how we’re going to shrug, because Trump is obviously wrong, but his opponents are worse, and he’s the Avatar of their Consequence.
Could he go out and shoot that guy on 5th avenue? Would you care? Do you have any shame left?
Bingo.
Humble Talent wrote:
I think some of the comments here are evidence of the deterioration of values over the last decade.
I’m not sure if it’s just that, although I can’t argue against the possibility. I think what we are seeing is the result of many on the right giving up on what I refer to as toxic principles, where you effectively surrender the fight in advance because you are unwilling to adapt to the opponent’s disregard of the old rules. We have seen time and time again the Left break all the old rules in the service of power, and the Right roll over and lose in the name of their principles. I believe the term of art among the Right Twitteratti is “beautiful losers.”
This looks to me like Trump doing a form of Biden’s blanket pardon. Why he would do this now instead of later is a mystery to me, and it is unquestionably unethical and probably not legal. Hopefully, someone will find standing to sue and undo this travesty.
But the impulse behind it is the Left’s embrace of unrestrained lawfare, and while I won’t attempt to defend this (and in fact, reject it utterly and hope it is undone either by public outrage or judicial finding), I also reject Greenfield’s unabashedly false implication that the settlement slush fund is something unique to Trump — that’s nonsense, of course. Obama and Biden both used “sue and settle” slush funds to funnel money to NGOs that they favored. What is new is the last paragraph of the addendum, and leave it to Trump to take an already unethical situation and escalate it to galactic proportions.
But that is whataboutism. All of this is evil, and an abuse of position and trust. Both parties should be falling all over themselves disavowing this, and passing legislation (previously proposed by Republicans and killed by Democrats) to stop this kind of abuse of public funds.
I mean…. No. I’m not going to give an inch.
If Trump had merely written him and his family blanket pardons a la President Autopen, I’d still be annoyed, but how outraged could we be?
There is a difference in scope and kind between being held captive by rules the other side breaks, and plundering the purse of the American taxpayer to the tune of two billion dollars while simultaneously finding newly corrupt ways to abuse the pardon power.
Well, I’m not asking you to give at all. I think we are more in agreement than disagreement, and I am not attempting to justify plundering Americans. To the contrary.
I’m just pointing out that what we are seeing is “sauce for the goose.” Biden and Obama plundered the taxpayers to pay off political allies using “sue and settle” and other extra-judicial settlement agreements, so Trump doing it is hardly more of a scandal. In fact, if you consider the values in question, Obama and Biden gave away tens of billions to their friends this way. Trump is well behind that curve.
The only difference is the absurd section C the above, which is outrageous, wrong, and unprecedented. Better for Trump just to abuse the pardon power. That, at least, is not unprecedented.
Poor wittle Donny. Those mean Democrats treated him so bad.
This isn’t X
Alright, let’s break down why Trump might want to prevent the IRS from investigating him:
Depending on his motivations, I think some of these goals have better ways of accomplishing them.
I’m a bit confused though; is this motion supposed to make Trump and his family immune from audits pertaining to future activities, or just ones pertaining to past years? I read the motion as the former (and originally read one of the phrases quoted in the previous related post as “Acting Attorney General Carte Blanche”, which might still become his nickname).
While I understand taking steps to prevent the IRS from being used as a weapon of spite, I think that making Trump (and his family) completely immune to future IRS audits would be a spectacularly unethical move, not to mention foolish. Trump does have some powerful enemies who cannot be trusted or reasoned with, but if he were to build trust with the people who are still reasonable, his enemies would lose a great deal of support. That would require him to develop a sense of humility.
A better option for binding the IRS might be to have a third party audit the IRS’s auditing process and make them pay a penalty to Trump if they find no substantial wrongdoing. That would serve as a deterrent without preventing the IRS from doing their job if there was a legitimate infraction.
The bigger problem here is that if we can’t trust the IRS to be impartial to politics, what steps can we take to fix that?
I recall Big T being found guilty of “substantial wrongdoing” for something accused to have happened 30 years ago. Then there was a guilty verdict for defrauding lenders by making them money with regards to Mar-a-lago’s value.
What stops the IRS under a Democrat president from finding substantial wrong doing that never happened?
That’s why I suggested a third party audit the audit.
If Trump is worried about that, he can just pardon himself and his family and associates covered by the above. Biden set that precedent.
So I see no reason at all to do this. It looks horrible because frankly, it is, and just looks like some kind of “Bite me, how do you like me now?” to his critics and opponents, or possible prior presidents who have done different but equally unethical things using “sue and settle.”
I am at a loss for any other reason.
I have a hard time getting my head around all this, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that Trump is acting unethically here in the sense of not separating his own personal interest from the national interest, in other words he is engaged in corrupt self-dealing. How much shall we care about this?
I have looked to see if there is anything in the conservative blogosphere, Townhall, Federalist, Fox News, Instapundit, and I see nothing at all about this topic. National Review includes it in a podcast by Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy titled “Trump’s IRS Mess”.
In the 1991 gubernatorial election the former governor Edwin Edwards (D) ran against David Duke who ran as a Republican, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Edwin Edwards was a corrupt governor, somebody who belonged in jail instead of in the governor’s mansion. His crookedness was acknowledged during the election campaign, as the slogan was “Vote for the crook, it is important!”. Edwin Edwards won from David Duke with 61 against 39 percent of the vote.
The moral of the Louisiana story is that sometimes the ethical thing to do is to put a clothespin on your nose to ignore the stench, in order to prevent a worse alternative; a crooked governor who is not your political color is preferable to the KKK.
Republicans and conservatives are in the same position today as the voters of Louisiana in 1991. Do you prefer Donald Trump with all his flaws, or do you prefer the Democrats? Are you willing to assist the Democrats in their zeal for one party rule, out of because a sense of ethical purity that requires consequences for Trump for his bad behavior? Do you want to be the next David French or Mitt Romney in their moral perfectionism?
The Democrats have defined right and wrong based on what benefits Team Democrat. That led to massive lawfare against Trump (Laetitia James in NY, Fani Willis in GA, Jack Smith) including two false impeachments, and they will resume that lawfare as soon as they are back in power no matter what; this will tear apart the nation. The Republicans prime task is to prevent that team from winning, for the good of the nation. That may mean that you have to be “forgiving” to the flaws of members and reps of your own party as required by political reality and needs.
Where’s the part where we set things up so that in the future we don’t have to choose between two terrible candidates? Should we not be working to define a policy platform that attracts enough reasonable people that it can defeat extremists candidates from either side?
Who is “we” and what is “reasonable”? I do not think the American people can be regarded as a “we” anymore.
The purpose of a political party is to win elections. The problem in the USA is that there are two political parties, and there is no middle ground between the party platforms; the center has given away. In the past we had statesmen who were politically successful in reaching across the isle; e.g. Democrats and Republicans worked together in the 1960s to pass Civil Rights Legislation and Voting Right Legislation. Both parties were robustly pro-American.
Today we have a primary system in which candidates for office are nominated; this is different from the smoke-filled rooms back not so long ago. The primary system rewards candidates that play to the base. That is one reason for the polarization between both parties, base as well as politicians.
The other reason for polarization has been the demonization and culture war by one of the parties, plus an insatiable lust for power and win at all costs, and I am talking about the Democrats. As long as that party behave the way it does today, I do not see a reasons for the Republicans to give them an inch. Trying to drive this party off an electoral cliff sound to be the most “reasonable” option.
I think the party system can and would be largely disrupted if we expanded the House not by a little bit but by ALOT. While the major parties would still exist and would likely dominate the Presidential conversation – my gut instinct as that with a greater number of tinier more discreet districts will have, amogn other benefits, two noticable benefits:
I think this would go a long way towards the goal of a “future [where] we don’t have to choose between two terrible candidates”. It wouldn’t solve it overnight however – it would take a handful of election cycles for the parties to start “breaking down” and incoming candidates to start breaking molds.
Word press didn’t break the formatting this time. Computer programs are supposed to be predictable.
Aren’t districts a relict of the past, when people identified more with the region than with the state of the nation as a whole?
Instead of districts, let the political parties have slates of candidates; the ones at the top of the slate will be elected as representative. The number of representatives elected on each slate is proportional to the number of votes each slate gets. This will also give third parties a chance to have representatives.
My guess is that this will require a constitutional amendment, with opposition of states that are gerrymandered into a one-party state.
Which means it can’t possibly happen and it’s not worth speculating about.
I think one of the quickest roads to a genuine civil war is to start running the vast and wildly diverse United States like some wretched unitary government of a culturally homogenous European country the size of my backyard.
Wait: “for the sake of argument”? What’s the argument that this isn’t what’s going on? I see none.
I still have a hard time understanding what this IRS kerfuffle is about, and I have doubts about the news reporting. So my “for the sake of argument” is a form of hedging against news that may come out in the next days or so, and put a whole different light on the matter. That is the problem, we do not trust the news anymore, as it is so biased.
This is the only conservative commentary I found, a podcast with Andrew McCarthy and Nick Lowry, starting at 27:40.
https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-mccarthy-report/trumps-irs-mess/
This whole thing started with somebody at the IRS leaking Trump’s tax returns. This was a criminal act, but the Biden department gave the leaker a slap on the wrist. Trump sued the IRS, and both parties agreed to settle this for billions of dollars.
The part C is interesting as an administration cannot force the IRS to start or drop audits, except the Attorney General. The Attorney General (Todd Blanche) is a former attorney of Donald Trump; according to legal ethics rules he has to recuse himself from any matter that are personally related to a former client such as Donald Trump. This means that Todd Blanche cannot involve himself in any tax related issues of Donald Trump.
I am curious to see how this evolves, maybe it is as simple as a Federal judge stepping in and ruling that this settlement cannot stand.
Some may argue that one bad turn deserves another.
Some would be unethical.