During Donald Trump’s first term, a former IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn gained access to the president’s tax returns and shared the documents that the Republican had been desperate to hide. Littlejohn was caught, charged, convicted and sent to prison.
More than five years later, Trump has decided that the criminal penalty wasn’t enough: He believes the disclosure of the truth entitles him to a $10 billion payout from the federal tax agency, which the president sued last week.
The payout, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent conceded to senators, would come from American taxpayers.
There’s no shortage of questions surrounding the civil case, including the fact that Trump appears to be on both sides of the litigation, suing his own administration in the hopes that it will hand him a giant check.
The president, however, continues to argue that this shouldn’t be controversial because he doesn’t intend to keep the taxpayer money he’s suing to get. “Any money that I win, I’ll give it to charity,” the Republican told NBC News’ Tom Llamas, referring to funds he would effectively approve for himself. He added, “100% to charities, charities that will be approved by government or whatever.”
All of the familiar problems still apply. There are no guarantees that he’d direct all of the money to charitable causes; there’s still no guarantee that that Trump presidential library wouldn’t be among the “charities”; and given his track record on similar promises, the president hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.
Just as notably, the underlying lawsuit is still absurd, and vague assurances about where some or all of the money might go at some future date don’t turn a baseless case into a good one.
But there is another part of Trump’s pitch that stands out for me. From the transcript:
I have another lawsuit with the United States. I sued because they broke into Mar-a-Lago. … And I’ve won that case. I mean, I virtually, they broke, the FBI illegally, Biden and his group. It wasn’t Biden. He didn’t know what he was doing. It was a group of very smart radical left people. They’re very smart. They just, they’ve lost their way.
And they broke into Mar-a-Lago. They broke into my home. They went through my wife’s drawers. They went through, you know — it’s a double meaning. They went through Barron’s, my son’s, everything. They went through the whole house. Hundreds of people, they went in with guns. They went in guns, would’ve been a-blazing. I brought a lawsuit. Essentially, the lawsuit’s been won. I guess I won a lot of money.
Most of this is familiar nonsense (no one, for example, “broke into” his glorified country club, and there was no secret cabal orchestrating the law enforcement process), but one element to this deserves additional scrutiny: He said he’s “essentially” won a lawsuit that resulted in him getting “a lot of money.”
Here’s my question: Which lawsuit?
Trump announced in the fall that he expects his own Justice Department to give him $230 million for the trouble he faced after committing a variety of alleged felonies, but he submitted his complaints through an administrative claim process, not civil litigation. So why does the president keep bragging about “virtually” having won a case he doesn’t appear to have filed?
As for congressional reactions to all of this, Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee’s panel on tax policy, introduced legislation this week called the Prevent Presidential Profiteering Act, which would prevent a sitting president from profiting from lawsuits against the United States government.
On the other side of Capitol Hill, two leading Democratic senators, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden and Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, launched a new investigation this week into Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
“While the Internal Revenue Code permits a taxpayer to seek redress for unauthorized disclosures, Congress designed this provision to provide compensation for proven harm — not to confer $10 billion dollar windfalls to a President seeking to line his own pockets at taxpayer expense,” the Oregon and Massachusetts senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
They added, “The leaks occurred from May 2019 through September 2020, when President Trump was in office and his hand-picked nominees, Steven Mnuchin and Charles Rettig, controlled the Treasury and IRS respectively. Trump is in essence now suing the government for his own failures during his first term. This lawsuit is a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin. We fear that instead of fighting this frivolous attempt by President Trump to profit off the failures of his own administration, cabinet officials intend not only to capitulate to Trump but coordinate with him in this brazen theft from the American people.”
Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
