Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant?

Last edited Wed May 20, 2026, 04:07 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/opinion/trump-doj-slush-fund-criminals-corruption.html



Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Will Benefit Criminals and the President Himself
May 20, 2026, 11:00 a.m. ET
By The Editorial Board

Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.

The fund manages to combine three of Mr. Trump’s most alarming behaviors. One, it is an obvious form of corruption, coming from a president who has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies. Two, the fund continues his pattern of using the Justice Department as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies. Three, the fund is his latest attempt to rewrite history about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

The fund’s existence is a story of political self-dealing. It is nominally the product of a flimsy personal lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed this year against the Internal Revenue Service, which he oversees, over the leaking of his tax returns during his first term. That lawsuit led to an absurd negotiation, in which the lawyers on one side worked for Mr. Trump the citizen and those on the other side worked for Mr. Trump the president.

Adding to absurdity, the government lawyers reported to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, who previously worked as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. A federal judge in Miami helping to oversee the case, Kathleen Williams, pointed out that the two sides were not adversaries, which called into question the process. Even Mr. Trump acknowledged the situation shortly after filing the suit by saying, “I am supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

Yet the talks proceeded because Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was in charge. Unsurprisingly, they led to a deal that was extremely favorable to him.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/us/politics/trump-fund-legal-questions.html

Trump’s $1.8 Billion Fund Tests Constitutional Limits
The deal the president reached with his own subordinates relies on a mechanism created by Congress that legal experts had warned was subject to manipulation.
By Adam Liptak
May 20, 2026 Updated 1:25 p.m. ET

In January, on a flight to his Florida club Mar-a-Lago, President Trump mused about his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said.

Mr. Trump is a tough negotiator, and, looking in the mirror, he faced an equally tenacious adversary. But the president managed to work out a deal with himself on Monday, one as novel and brazen as the process that spawned it.

He dropped his lawsuit, extracting from his own government a promise to create a $1.8 billion fund to dole out to his political allies. A day later, in a curious addendum, Todd Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and the acting attorney general, purported to immunize him from lawsuits arising from a great many things, not least his tax liabilities.

The government of the United States, Mr. Blanche wrote, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing claims against Mr. Trump involving “lawfare and/or weaponization” or tax returns.

The whole enterprise was a jarring shock to the conventional understanding of the constitutional system, raising what legal experts said were profound questions about presidential power. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, they said, Mr. Trump will have managed simultaneously to thwart Congress’s power of the purse and the ability of the courts to police the separation of powers.

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