Inside Trump's system that pays supporters for breaking the law

In theory, American public officials are supposed to uphold the law, but the editor-in-chief of a legal news website argued on Sunday that President Donald Trump has made breaking the law pay — that is, at least, if you support him.

“[Trump] was suing them for $10 billion for an agent that leaked his tax returns a few years back,” The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell told Lawfare’s Ben Wittes on Sunday. “And this was an incredible thing, because it meant that taxpayers would be on the hook for $10 billion, and the DOJ would be deciding on it. It would basically be like Trump is on both sides of the equation — right? He's putting pressure on the DOJ, and Trump was the person making the claim. Insane. Insane.”

Yet Longwell added that, as a way to skirt a judge who wanted both sides to give her until May 20 to review the legality of having a sitting president order his own Justice Department and IRS to pay him billions of dollars, Trump is reportedly considering a settlement of $1.7 billion to go to people he claims were victims of weaponization of the government — specifically, the terrorists who attempted a coup on January 6, 2021.

“The important thing to keep in mind is that there is nothing normal or okay or non-corrupt about any of this,” Wittes told Longwell. “This is infinite self-dealing. And it's worth winding the clock back a little to the beginning of the administration.”

Wittes added that one of Trump’s first acts as president was to pardon 1,500 felons, including many who had tried to help him overturn the 2020 presidential election and others who helped him politically in different ways.

“In the last several weeks, there has been an additional layer, which is starting to pay people off,” Wittes added. “And this, I think, started with Mike Flynn and Carter Page, both of whom got very big settlements. In Flynn's case, it's quite amazing — it's a case that he pled guilty to, but then was of course pardoned out of — and he sues the government and now gets a million-dollar payment. And so I think you have to see this in the context of that larger pattern of creating impunity for your friends, up to and including the shock troops who will do riots for you.”

Longwell added that “many of them have now gone on to commit additional crimes — many of them sex crimes or sexual assault crimes.” Wittes confirmed this, then added that “it looks bad for me to be demanding a $10 billion payout to myself, so what I'm going to do instead is create a pool with which to give money to the shock troops. And rather than have a $1 million settlement for Mike Flynn and a $1 million settlement for Carter Page at a time — because each one of those produces news stories that are ugly — I'm just going to have a large pool of government money to dish out to friends. And even while I prosecute political enemies, be they James Comey or Kilmar Abrego García or Letitia James, I'm going to have a pot of money to reward friends. And I'm only going to take the political hit for doing it once, because the amounts of money will be smaller, because these are not big names — they're just January 6th perps.”

Trump has promised that, if he receives the settlement, he will either give it to charity or to these supposed victims of government aggression, although he admits that at least some of the $1.7 billion will go to institutions directly connected with the president. He has promised not to pocket any of it, but has provided no documents to ensure this does not happen.

Trump’s lawsuit is based on the fact that a contractor working with the IRS leaked his tax returns in 2019, which showed he had paid very little in federal income taxes and suffered a string of undisclosed financial failures. Additionally, Trump sued the government for $230 million for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate to find the documents he illegally took with him after his presidency ended, as well as for the investigation into his ties to Russia.

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