May 25 (UPI) — With the United States and Iran reportedly nearing a peace deal, oil prices fell slightly below $100 per barrel early Monday, suggesting optimism from traders to start the week.
Gas prices also declined slightly in the United States in the last week, but remain above $4.50 per gallon for regular on Memorial Day.
President Donald Trump has indicated that negotiations are “proceeding nicely,” and Iran acknowledged that talks have progressed but that a deal has not been reached, The BBC reported.
In European trading, Brent crude dropped to $95.04 per barrel and WTI futures dropped dropped to $91.02 per barrel — both declines of more than 5% — the Wall Street Journal reported.
Even with gas prices high, The Hill reported that more than 39 million people were projected to travel the roads during Memorial Day weekend, even as gas prices have remained consistently high since the start of the war in Iran.
Regular gas on Monday averaged $4.50 per gallon, which is down $0.01 from one week ago, but still $0.40 higher than one month ago, AAA reported.
Similar, diesel averaged $5.59 per gallon on Monday, which is down $0.03 from one week ago, and $0.40 more than one month ago.
“Memorial Day travel is still reaching record levels, but with the smallest year-over-year increase in more than a decade,” said Tiffany Wright, spokesperson for AAA’s The Auto Club.
“Although travel demand remains strong, higher fuel prices and persistent inflation may cause some travelers to shorten trips, delay plans or stay closer to home.”
The longer that the United States and Iran take to agree on a peace plan and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas prices are unlikely to decrease significantly and energy markets will take a while to get back to normal, Axios reported.
“Gas prices are currently falling, but until we see an agreement signed and a significant amount of ships transit the Strait, the national average prices of gasoline will likely remain well above $4.00 per gallon,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for Gas Buddy.
Members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, or “The Old Guard,” place some 250,000 American flags throughout Arlington National Cemetery in preparation for Memorial Day in Arlington, Va., on May 21, 2026. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
United States President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stemming from a leak of his tax returns and said his administration will create a $1.77bn anti-weaponisation fund that would compensate some of Trump’s political allies.
The court filing, released on Monday in Florida, did not disclose the terms of the deal, including whether either party settled.
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However, the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced the establishment of a $1.77bn fund called the Anti-Weaponisation Fund that would “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponisation and lawfare”.
The DOJ said in its press release that it was part of the settlement agreement.
ABC News first reported last week that the president was prepared to drop the lawsuit as part of a deal that would create the fund to pay Trump allies who were perceived as wrongly investigated and prosecuted.
Trump, his adult sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS in January, arguing the agency should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing their tax returns to media outlets during the president’s first term.
The case arose from former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn’s leak of Trump’s tax returns to media outlets, including the New York Times and ProPublica, in 2019 and 2020.
Those returns showed that Trump paid little or no income taxes in many years, the Times reported in 2020.
Prosecutors charged Littlejohn in 2023 with leaking tax records of Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans to the media, saying he was motivated by a political agenda. Littlejohn later pleaded guilty to improper disclosures, and a judge sentenced him to five years in prison.
Trump filed the lawsuit personally, not in his official capacity as president.
Political pushback
While the court filing did not mention the terms of any potential deal, news that the president would create a fund to protect his political allies sparked backlash.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, called the idea “unconstitutional”.
“This, of course, is a political grievance fund that Donald Trump can use to pay off his friends,” Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Sunday with the ABC News programme This Week.
“If these people have a valid cause of action, they should bring it to the court like every other American does, and use the system of due process, and prove things by clear and convincing evidence, or a preponderance of evidence. Go and prove it. But the idea that Donald Trump can just pass it out like a pardon is absurd,” he said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom also criticised the president amid reports of the deal.
“Donald Trump wants to settle his joke lawsuit against his own IRS department to hand out $1.7 BILLION of OUR TAX DOLLARS to Jan. 6th insurrectionists and his cronies,” Newsom said in a post on X.
“It is an outrage that the American taxpayers are having to pay for this and that we have a president who is exercising such open corruption in front of everyone and expecting us to go along with it,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, told the progressive MeidasTouch network.
Despite the criticisms, it is not clear who would specifically benefit from the funds.
Trump has long claimed that the DOJ under his predecessor, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, was weaponised against him, pointing to the criminal charges where he faced allegations that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost by more than seven million votes, and that he retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Merrick Garland, the attorney general during the Biden administration, denied allegations of politicisation. The Justice Department also investigated prominent Democrats, including Biden’s son Hunter Biden and former US Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey.
“The machinery of government should never be weaponised against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a release.
However, the Trump administration has actively pursued cases against perceived political enemies, including former FBI director James Comey and former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Fed Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, and California Senator Adam Schiff.
The DOJ said that there is legal precedent for the fund, pointing to a programme called “Keepseagle” under the administration of former US President Barack Obama, a Democrat. That created a fund to address allegations of racism against the federal government.
The White House referred Al Jazeera to the DOJ for a request for comment. The DOJ did not respond.
The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) announced on X that it would be investigating how the funds would be used.
“While Americans are struggling with an affordability crisis, President Trump plans to use nearly $1.8bn in taxpayer money to pay off his friends and allies—including potentially the violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th,” CREW’s president, Donald K Sherman, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.
“By settling his absurd $10bn lawsuit against his own administration, Trump and the Justice Department just engaged in the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency, and did so quickly in order to avoid the scrutiny of the judicial process, while quite likely violating the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause in the process. This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”
A long time coming
Lawyers for the president asked a federal judge in April to pause the case for 90 days while the two sides worked to reach a settlement or resolution.
“This limited pause will neither prejudice the parties nor delay ultimate resolution,” the filing in April said. “Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
When asked in February how he would handle any potential damages from the case, Trump said, “I think what we’ll do is do something for charity.”
“We could make it a substantial amount,” he said at the time. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
The litigation against the IRS raised novel legal questions, including conflicts of interest, about whether a president can sue his own government. It is not clear if the judge will accept Trump’s withdrawal of the case.
Under the US Constitution, federal courts may only hear genuine disputes between litigants with opposing stakes in the outcome.
US District Court Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami, who oversees Trump’s lawsuit, wrote last month that it was unclear whether the parties to the lawsuit were “truly antagonistic to each other”.
Williams had set a court hearing for May 27 to hear arguments on whether she should dismiss the case on those grounds.
Reporting from Columbus, Ohio — Donald Trump romped to victory Tuesday in Florida, chasing Marco Rubio from the race, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state, raising hopes for those seeking to stop Trump and settle the presidential contest on the floor of the Republican National Convention.
Trump also won North Carolina and Illinois and was locked in a close fight with Sen. Ted Cruz in Missouri.
“I’m getting ready to rent a covered wagon, we’re going to have a big sail and have the wind blow us to the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to California,” Kasich said at a jubilant rally outside Cleveland.
That is just the sort of extended nominating fight the GOP establishment sought to avoid by stacking the political calendar with big early contests, capped by Tuesday night’s winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio. California votes on June 7, near the close of the primary season.
Now, many of those same party types see an inconclusive nominating contest as the best and perhaps only chance of thwarting Trump, even if it threatens to shred the GOP in the process.
The setback in Ohio, where Trump campaigned hard, was his most disappointing performance since he finished second to Cruz in February’s Iowa caucuses.
His unhappiness was evident as he addressed reporters at his posh Mar-a-Lago private club in Palm Beach, Fla., and complained about the miseries of running for president.
“Lies, deceit, viciousness. Disgusting reporters. Horrible people,” the Manhattan businessman and reality TV star said. “Some are nice.”
Cruz, speaking with 99% of the Missouri votes counted, once more insisted he was the only candidate who could defeat Trump.
“Starting tomorrow morning, every Republican has a clear choice. Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination — ours and Donald Trump’s,” the Texas senator told supporters in Houston. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever. Only one campaign has beaten Donald Trump over and over again.”
With Trump’s unmatched string of victories, no other candidate is nearly as well positioned to win the nomination ahead of the July convention in Cleveland. He padded his overall delegate lead with Tuesday’s victories, putting him ahead of Cruz and Kasich, who had not won a state before Ohio.
But there were signs Tuesday that not just the establishment but rank-and-file Republicans have yet to rally around the party’s polarizing front-runner.
Nearly 3 in 10 Republican voters across the five states said they would not vote for Trump if he wins the party’s nomination, according to exit poll interviews. Four in 10 said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate if the choice came down to Trump or the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.
Defections of that magnitude could badly undermine Trump in the general election, and that prospect will probably be stressed by his opponents going forward into next week’s contests in Arizona and Utah.
Rubio spoke to the controversy surrounding the GOP front-runner as he departed the race.
In a Miami concession speech delivered less than half an hour after the polls closed in Florida, the freshman senator congratulated Trump, wagging a finger and shushing members of the audience who booed his kind words.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich votes Tuesday in Westerville, Ohio.
(Matt Rourke / Associated Press)
Rubio then devoted the bulk of his lengthy remarks to warn against succumbing to the anger and frustration that have fueled Trump’s improbable rise.
“The politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party,” Rubio said, as disconsolate family members stood by onstage. “They’re going to leave us a fractured nation” where people hate each other for their political views.
“Do not give in to the fear,” Rubio said. “Do not give in to the frustration.”
The son of Cuban immigrants and, at age 44, the youngest candidate in the field, Rubio was seen as one of the GOP’s rising stars, with a capacity to broaden the party’s support among millennial voters and the nation’s fast-growing Latino population.
But he failed to win more than a few contests and was never seriously competitive in his home state. Trump captured 99 delegates in Florida’s winner take-all-primary, more than a quarter of those at stake in Tuesday’s balloting.
The victory in winner-take-all Ohio gave Kasich 66 delegates, more than doubling his total but still leaving him well behind Trump. His goal is to build momentum with a series of wins positioning him as the strongest candidate heading into the Cleveland convention even if, as seems inevitable, Kasich is shy of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright.
Pennsylvania, where Kasich was born, is the next big target on April 26.
The results Tuesday followed one of the oddest, most contentious weeks in a campaign that has been filled with strange and surreal moments.
The precipitating event was a racially charged near-riot at a Trump rally Friday night in Chicago, which was canceled out of security concerns.
Trump’s opponents quickly seized on the moment and the violent imagery that played around the world to once more challenge his temperament and fitness to be president. They accused him of fomenting the unrest through belligerent remarks that seemed to egg on his audiences into physically confronting dissenters.
Trump denied any responsibility, blaming the violence on what he called professional agitators linked to Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders. He said the protesters provoked his supporters and were stifling their rights to free speech and assembly.
“I don’t condone violence,” Trump said repeatedly, though he sympathized with backers who chose to “be effective” with protesters in the audience. (Previously he used more pugilistic language.)
Trump said he might even pay the legal fees for a supporter who sucker-punched a demonstrator at a North Carolina rally, drawing widespread condemnation. He won the state anyway.
Indeed, for weeks increasingly desperate Republican opponents have mounted an effort to stop Trump, to seemingly little effect.
More than $10 million in negative ads blazed across the Florida airwaves in just the last week alone, attacking Trump for his ethics, the failings of his business empire and his all-over-the-map political ideology.
Those meant nothing to Mark Owens, who stepped into the Miami Beach sunshine Tuesday and lighted a cigar after casting a ballot for the political neophyte.
“We’ve trusted politicians for 200 years to run our country,” Owens said. “It’s time to give someone else a shot.”
With polls suggesting Florida was firmly in Trump’s grasp, much of the campaign focused on Ohio, another traditional fall battleground.
Trump laid on extra events, including an election-eve rally outside Youngstown in place of a planned Florida appearance, and he turned his attention to attacking Kasich after long ignoring the Ohio governor.
He assailed him for his support as a congressman for the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact with Canada and Mexico that, Trump said, devastated the state’s economy. He also laid on personal insults in a bid to snatch a victory in Kasich’s home state and clear the governor from the race.
Kasich, whose strategy centered on staying above the salvos flying among other candidates, accused Trump of creating a “toxic” political atmosphere and, wrapping himself in the establishment mantle, spent Monday stumping alongside Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee.
With Kasich suddenly a factor in the GOP contest, the skirmishing here in Ohio seems a likely preview of what is to come.
While he pledged to take the high road at his victory party Tuesday night, Kasich sent a different message speaking to reporters earlier in the day.
He said, “I will be … forced going forward to talk about some of the deep concerns I have about the way this campaign has been run by some others — by one other in particular.”
