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WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” a judge said Monday in a scathing decision that referred one of his lawyers for discipline and characterized the $10-billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams accused Trump of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests and laying the groundwork for a settlement last spring that granted him immunity from tax audits and created a fund to compensate allies of the president who say they were unjustly persecuted.

Though the practical impacts of the ruling may be limited given the administration’s public pronouncements that the so-called $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund has been abandoned, the judge’s ruling nonetheless amounts to a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration and resurfaces a politically damaging storyline for acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche just as he prepares to face the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing Wednesday.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote in her ruling.

She added: “The President may be the functional ‘dominus litus’ of the Executive Branch, but as a party to a civil suit, he, as well as all the parties and lawyers before a court, are bound by the rules. Ensuring that our courts are used only for the express purpose created by the Constitution is the obligation of every judge and an obligation that this Court must discharge in light of the matter before it. ”

The judge pointed to Blanche’s congressional testimony in early June in which he revealed that the “anti-weaponization” fund was no longer moving forward amid intense bipartisan backlash. Though nothing had been filed in court, Blanche appeared confident in his testimony that he “could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter,” the judge wrote.

“Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case,” the judge wrote.

Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP writers Fatima Hussein and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

July 13 (UPI) — A federal judge in Florida said Monday that President Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service for an “improper purpose” to reach a settlement with the Justice Department earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida added that the settlement Trump reached with the Justice Department protecting him and his family from tax audits is no longer valid.

Williams said Trump’s settlement with a Cabinet-level agency that he presides over is an attempt to “manipulate the judicial process.”

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote.

“In abdicating its responsibility to zealously defend the interests of the United States, the Government entered into a ‘settlement’ that deviated from its litigation posture in similar actions, disregarded DOJ policies, and accomplished objectives beyond those authorized, as well as those specifically prohibited, by law.”

Trump reached a settlement with the government after suing the IRS for $10 billion over a contractor leaking his tax information. Trump is the first president or nominee from the two major political parties in more than 40 years to not disclose his tax information.

Williams has referred Trump’s attorney in the lawsuit, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar. The bar will consider whether Brito should be disciplined based on Williams’ finding in her order. She is also sending a copy of her order to the State Bar of New York, where Acting Attorney Todd Blanche is a member.

The Trump Department of Justice going after people who make the president mad or even sad is nothing new, in this dangerous age when the presidency is increasingly about placating the desires of the old man in the Oval Office.

Leticia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff. Most recently, E. Jean Carroll, who sued President Trump personally and won a huge settlement on her claim that he sexually assaulted her. Now, the Department of Justice is investigating her for potential perjury.

It would be easy to think of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Monday that the U.S. Department of Justice is now targeting his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, as just another addition to that list.

But this attack on Siebel Newsom (alleged attack, anyway — the Department of Justice has not confirmed she is a target) is something much darker in our slide into authoritarianism. While the details of what is being investigated are murky and the president hasn’t chimed in yet, it has all the appearances of the Trump administration seeking to stop a political rival who has a real shot at knocking MAGA out of the top office.

“It’s not just random or accidental that the wife of a major presidential candidate is being investigated,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of politics at Harvard University, told me Monday. “That’s the nature of selective prosecution and that is a pillar of authoritarian rule.”

Levitsky is an expert on authoritarian regimes, and how they take and keep power. His point that Newsom is a viable challenger may seem obvious — Newsom himself is already fundraising off of it. But this particular alleged investigation bears a moment of pause because it is not the regular decline of justice we have been witnessing to this moment.

“This is different,” he said. “This is forward-looking persecution.”

Until now, Levistky points out, Trump has screamed and hollered for the prosecution of those who have wronged him in the past, sometimes even the distant past. Yes, he’s disgraced the Department of Justice with the demand it function as his own personal hammer of retribution, even putting his own personal attorney, Todd Blanche, in charge when Pam Bondi wasn’t accommodating or successful enough at stomping perceived enemies and quashing the Epstein files.

But those prosecutions have largely been grievance-based, not aimed at keeping power.

Going after Siebel Newsom seems more like a forward-looking, preemptive strike targeting Newsom ahead of the 2028 election through every decent man’s Achilles’ heel, his family.

In fact, the right-wing media — which is closely tied to the whims of the White House — has been targeting Siebel Newsom for months.

In particular, Siebel Newsom has been attacked for her work as a documentary filmmaker who focuses on female empowerment and parsing how and why we have the gender norms that we do when it comes to masculinity and femininity. I’ll let you figure out how popular that is in MAGA world, where real women make sandwiches.

Conservative commentator Sean Hannity has gone after Siebel Newsom for saying she sometimes changes the gender of a book’s character from “he” to “she” when she’s reading to her children. Fox News has attacked her for daring to give her boys dolls to play with, leading some MAGA influencers to label her “psychotic” or “abusive.” Right-wing icon Megyn Kelly called her a “nutcase” for sharing the tragic story of her sister’s death when Siebel Newsom was 6.

And other media have focused on the fact that some of the films she has been involved with have been approved for use in California schools, leading to conspiracies that Newsom used his influence to force his wife’s “woke” agenda on kids, by which we are apparently talking about the liberal plagues of decency and inclusion.

Newsom’s office said that in recent weeks, relatives, friends and business associates of the family have been contacted by investigators from the FBI and IRS. Siebel Newsom also does work around online safety for children, but it seems likely that any attention would focus on these films, and related nonprofits, and the perennially popular MAGA boogeyman of schools forcing ideologies on kids. Throw in Siebel Newsom’s company making even a dollar, and the way the IRS can find problems with any tax return, and you’ve got about 10,000 hours of right-wing propaganda.

So whether the pressure to target Siebel Newsom came from the White House or not, Newsom’s announcement raises the troubling specter that this administration is getting more serious about remaining in control by kneecapping potential replacements before they grow too strong.

In his Monday video, Newsom urged Trump with mano a mano bravado to come after him as much as he wanted, but to leave his wife and family out of it. But I would not underestimate Siebel Newsom, who showed her strength when she testified against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, laying out publicly a private, painful tale.

Siebel Newsom’s office told me she’s fine being part of any fight against Trump.

“There are clearly no boundaries to what Donald Trump will do to get his way or to challenge those who get in his way,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement.

The “governor and I will continue to speak truth to power because the American people deserve so much more.”

By coming out in advance of any official announcement of an investigation by the Department of Justice, Siebel Newsom and her husband may be able to take control of the narrative, something Trump detests.

That pushback, Levitsky said, is critical, not just for them, but more importantly for all of us. After last year, when so many institutions and individuals crumbled in the face of Trump’s power, the strength of our democracy increasingly depends on those with political capital standing up to him.

Coming out punching first does just that.

WASHINGTON — A Treasury inspector general report raises concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ability to safeguard taxpayer information after ICE and the Internal Revenue Service agreed in 2025 to share taxpayer data for the purpose of immigration investigations.

The recently released report provides the first official accounting of the scale of the IRS-ICE information transfer and documents security concerns surrounding an arrangement that has been the subject of multiple lawsuits and significant controversy inside both agencies.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the 2025 data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Treasury Department — which allowed ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records — resulted in inconsistent formatting in ICE’s data and the IRS’ matching criteria, which led to errors.

The deal led the then-acting commissioner of the IRS to resign.

The report says that after the agreement was signed, ICE requested address information on more than 1.2 million people, and that the IRS ultimately provided last-known addresses for about 47,000 people.

The inspector general concluded that the IRS’ automated matching process was flawed. Inconsistent formatting in ICE’s data led to questionable matches, including in cases in which incomplete or inaccurate addresses were labeled as valid, the report says.

Representatives from the Treasury Department and the IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

The plan to cross-verify tax and immigration data is part of President Trump’s agenda to secure U.S. borders and his nationwide immigration crackdown, which has resulted in deportations, workplace raids and the use of an 18th century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants.

However, this is not the first time it’s been revealed that tens of thousands of taxpayers’ information was revealed to ICE.

In February, a federal judge said the IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information to ICE, referring to the same 47,000 disclosures that the inspector general points out.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS had erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the 2025 agreement.

No recommendations were made in the new inspector general report, according to a letter by Nancy A. LaManna, deputy inspector general for inspections and evaluations.

“However, we plan to share some concerns we identified during our review with the DHS Office of Inspector General,” her letter says.

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the Trump administration was scrapping plans to create a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate allies of the Republican president after widespread political backlash and setbacks in the courts.

“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche said in response to questions at a House hearing on the Justice Department budget.

““Not moving forward, ever?” asked Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat.

The blunt declaration marked an extraordinary turnabout for a Trump Justice Department that just two weeks ago had pronounced the fund as essential to make up for what officials insist was weaponized law enforcement during President Biden’s Democratic administration. Since then, though, the idea has faced mounting pressure from Republicans who demanded reassurances that plans for the fund were off the table before they would move forward with legislation funding President Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies.

Blanche said the Justice Department was not abandoning an element of a settlement with the IRS that gave Trump and his family immunity from tax audits.

The hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee was scheduled for discussion of the Justice Department’s budget, but lawmakers quickly focused their questioning on the creation of a fund that has provoked outrage over the mere possibility that violent pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, could be eligible for payouts.

Signs for the retreat surfaced Monday when a person familiar with the matter said the Republican president was now reconsidering whether to move forward with the fund established to resolve his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The Justice Department also said Monday it would comply with a Virginia court temporarily blocking the administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” effectively agreeing to pause the plan for at least two weeks.

Another judge in Florida raised the prospect of reopening the IRS lawsuit because of “grievous allegations” of improper dealing made against the administration by settlement critics.

The Trump administration has defended the fund as an appropriate measure to make up for what officials insist was a weaponized Justice Department during President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, a claim the Biden administration strongly denied. Though some Trump supporters, including participants in the Capitol riot, have celebrated the announcement, the reaction among Republicans in Congress has been decidedly more hostile, forcing Blanche to try to assuage a GOP constituency that generally operates in close alignment with the administration.

The furor has especially complicated matters in the Senate, where Republicans defiantly left town 10 days ago without passing legislation to fund Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies. Republicans who returned to Washington on Monday said they won’t have the votes to pass the Homeland Security spending bill until the White House works with them to place parameters on the fund. Many have pushed the administration to impose limits or scrap the idea altogether.

At a Senate budget hearing last month, Blanche refused to rule out the possibility that those who carried out violence on Jan. 6 could be eligible for payouts and has repeatedly said in interviews that anyone who feels persecuted by the criminal justice system is free to apply. Payouts will be decided by a five-member commission appointed by Blanche.

But he has apparently struck a more conciliatory tone in private when confronted by Republican anger.

Blanche encountered a groundswell of opposition last month at a tense private meeting with GOP senators, with more than half raising concerns, including by shouting at the Justice Department’s top official, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in a recent episode of his podcast.

“There were fireworks at an epic level — and I’ve got to say, it’s one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate,” Cruz said.

Behind closed doors, Blanche was “adamant” that no one who assaulted police at the Capitol would receive compensation, according to Cruz.

“He said not just ‘no,’ but ‘hell no,’” the senator recalled.

Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is backing away from plans to create a $1.8-billion fund to compensate people who claim the government was weaponized against them, a retreat that comes amid a cascade of legal setbacks and a revolt within members of the Republican Party.

But Senate Democrats say the concession is not enough, and are pushing legislation to ensure no president can ever attempt the creation of such a fund again.

“If Republicans are serious about ending this brazenly corrupt scheme, they should have no problem voting for legislation banning any president from creating such a slush fund in the future,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote Monday in a post on X.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) added that Democrats plan to force a vote on a measure to ensure that Trump and Republicans are “truly abandoning this corrupt scheme.”

“Trump’s word is nowhere near enough,” Schumer wrote on X. Earlier in the day, Schumer vowed to force a floor vote to make Republican lawmakers take a public stance on the issue.

Schiff, along with Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, introduced the “Drain the Slush Fund Act” on Monday. The bill, if approved, would bar any payout arising from a lawsuit filed by a president or vice president, language that is designed to permanently foreclose the fund, or anything like it, from being put in place by a future administration.

The White House did not comment on the president’s thinking. But in a statement, the Department of Justice said the decision to scrap the fund was in response to a federal judge’s ruling last week that temporarily blocked payouts from the fund while legal challenges remain pending. The department said it “disagrees strongly” with the move, but stopped short of saying it would challenge the decision.

“This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized, targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise,” the statement read. “The Department will abide by the Court’s ruling.”

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was nominated to the bench by President Clinton, a Democrat, has scheduled a June 12 hearing for argument on whether to extend the order blocking the fund.

While the court ruling is not permanent, the unraveling over the fund is a notable defeat for Trump, who has cast it as a long-overdue reckoning for Americans he says were targeted by “an evil, corrupt and weaponized Biden administration.” For Republicans who publicly criticized the fund, it may come as a relief as the concept had been widely seen as a political liability heading into the midterm elections.

The Department of Justice created the fund to settle a lawsuit Trump personally brought against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The settlement also includes a clause permanently barring the IRS from pursuing any tax claims against Trump and his businesses that were filed before May 19 — a provision that, according to an analysis by Forbes, would save Trump and his family more than $600 million.

The White House declined to comment on whether the administration would also make changes to the tax immunity clause. The Democrats’ bill does not address that provision.

“Congress doesn’t need to pass a law to remind the Acting Attorney General [Todd Blanche] that he doesn’t have the authority to grant a blanket pardon for tax crimes by the president, much less when the AG is his personal attorney,” a Schiff spokesperson said in a statement. “The attempt at IRS immunity is corrupt and undoubtedly illegal — and we look forward to seeing it exposed as a fraud.”

Beyond Trump’s own legal disputes with the IRS, the fund was structured to accept claims from anyone who said they had been targeted by the government, a category the administration made clear could include those who were convicted for attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump pardoned and commuted the prison sentences of 1,500 people who were charged in connection with the attack, and neither he nor Vice President JD Vance ruled out the possibility that those individuals would be able to receive money from the fund.

That possibility immediately ran into trouble with lawmakers. Senate Republicans, many of whom were caught off guard by the arrangement, publicly revolted against the fund and derailed plans to vote on legislation to fund Trump’s immigration crackdown amid the deep disagreement.

A closed-door meeting last month between Blanche and GOP senators grew heated, with lawmakers demanding answers the administration was seemingly not prepared to give.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who attended the meeting, described it as “angry” in an episode of his podcast last month. Cruz said that roughly 45 Senate Republicans had attended and estimated that “at least half of them were blasting the attorney general.” Based on those reactions, Cruz predicted the administration would need to amend its position on the fund.

“We will see the administration announcing at a minimum a modification of this, because if they don’t they’ve got a full-on revolt in the Senate,” he said.

The fund also led to criticism outside of Congress. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who served in Trump’s first administration, told NBC News in an interview Sunday that it was a “bad idea from the start.”

“I would encourage the administration just to drop it,” Pence said.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government will permanently drop tax claims against President Trump, according to a settlement document that is part of a deal to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax issues, according to a one-page document posted to the Justice Department’s website on Tuesday.

The settlement, which marks an extraordinary use of executive power, goes beyond resolving litigation and effectively helps shield the president from further examination of his finances and legal conduct.

The move comes after the Trump administration announced Monday the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate allies of the Republican president who believe they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, an arrangement that Democrats and government watchdogs derided as “corrupt” and unconstitutional.

The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” of $1.776 billion will allow people who believe they were targeted for prosecution for political purposes, including by the Biden administration Justice Department, to apply for payouts, creating what acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche called “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

Blanche, who was grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, would not rule out the possibility that people who carried out violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol will be considered for payouts from the new fund.

Democratic lawmakers and ethics watchdogs slammed the creation of the fund, saying it was corrupt, opaque and had the potential to become a “slush fund” for the president and his allies.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Democrats intend to “fight every element of this self-dealing settlement.”

“Not only is this another heinously corrupt act by the most corrupt administration in history, it’s clearly a violation of the law that prohibits interference by executive branch officials in IRS audits.”

The fund was announced after Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization agreed to drop their lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. The lawsuit alleged that a leak of confidential tax records caused them reputational and financial harm and negatively affected their public standing, among other allegations.

According to a separate settlement agreement posted to the Justice Department website Monday, Trump will receive a formal apology from the U.S. government but “will not receive any monetary payment or damages of any kind,” from the settlement.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that the fund is dedicated to “reimbursing people who were horribly treated.”

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.

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.

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.