Taylor: Trump's Latest Grift, a $1.7 Billion Slush Fund Paid by Taxpayers, is Brazen Beyond Belief

It's not enough that he's scamming the government for himself and his cronies. He alwayus wants more of our money.

By Miles Taylor /Defiance.News

Donald Trump is preparing to carry out one of the largest heists in U.S. history.

He is reportedly preparing to use nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to pay off the criminals he pardoned, the allies who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, and — through a constellation of family-adjacent vehicles — quite possibly himself. The mechanism, reported last night by ABC News, is brazen beyond belief.

According to the report, the president is preparing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion slush fund to compensate his political allies, specifically, those who were prosecuted during the Biden administration for crimes. By design, Trump will personally control this fund. And the money will come straight out of the U.S. Treasury.

The beneficiaries are said to include Trump’s former staff and operatives who sought to help him overturn the 2020 election and were prosecuted for doing so, as well as the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

These are, of course, the men and women who beat police officers with flagpoles, smeared feces on the walls of the building, and hunted the Vice President of the United States through the halls of Congress while chanting for his execution. Trump pardoned them on his first day back in office. Now he proposes to make some of these people into millionaires.

While the settlement language is expected to bar the president from receiving payments personally on three of his existing claims, it doesn’t bar the constellation of companies, trusts, and family vehicles that orbit the Trump name from filing their own.

But we may never know how he spends the cash. Because, by the explicit design of the arrangement, there will be almost no public accounting of where $1.7 billion in American taxpayer money goes.

No transparency. Under the proposed terms, the commission would not be required to disclose its procedures, its deliberations, or the identities of those it chooses to enrich.

While a five-member group will reportedly be appointed to distribute the money, Trump will have the authority to remove those commissioners without cause, making him the de facto overseer. Any leftover cash will be “returned” to the Treasury shortly before Trump leaves office (a detail that tells you everything about who this fund is for and how long the window stays open).

I need to do little editorializing here. This is — by its size, scope, and sheer audacity — one of the most corrupt acts in American history. Full stop.

Trump himself acknowledged the obvious problem in October of last year.

“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision, right, and, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

Do we need more of a confession than that?

Even Trump himself, a man with a famously elastic relationship to the concept of conflict of interest, could see that suing his own government and collecting from his own Treasury looked, in his own words, “sort of looks bad.”

So his lawyers found a workaround. He will not collect personally, at least not at first. He’ll simply control the spigot; the spigot will pour onto whomever he chooses; and those people will know, forever, who gave them the money and to whom they owe it.

Break the law - get paid. Without a doubt, this will be a foundation for impeachment articles against Donald Trump. But the scale of the corruption is so much bigger than just one man. By doing this, he’s creating a sort of “break-the-law, get-paid” system the likes of which we’ve only seen in the worst, self-serving autocracies.

The American Founders feared this, deeply.

The entire architecture of the appropriations power in Article I (the requirement that Congress, not the executive, decide how public money is spent) exists precisely to prevent a president from doing what Donald Trump is about to do. It was to prevent the president from becoming a profligate king and using taxpayer funds to build ballrooms and self deal and direct federal contracts into friendly pockets.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 58 that the power of the purse was “the most complete and effectual weapon” against executive tyranny.

Trump is now taking that weapon, pointing it at the Treasury, and telling the guards to open the vault. He’s taking the bags of cash and planning to give them to his fellow criminals. He is — in Madison’s construct — creating tyranny right before our eyes.

As part of this scheme, the people who will get rich from our taxpayer dollars are not whistleblowers, jailed journalists, or Americans whose civil liberties were trampled. They are not protesters who were shot in the streets by DHS agents.

No, no. They are people who were prosecuted because they committed crimes. The Jan. 6 defendants were not victims of a “politicized” Department of Justice. They were defendants because they assaulted police officers on live television in front of the entire world.

And now, you, me — anyone who pays taxes — will be paying them for it.

A blueprint for stealing. Consider the precedent that this sets. A future president of either party will now have a blueprint to steal billions from the Treasury. Sue the government, settle the suit on your own terms, and stand up a “commission” whose members you can fire at will.

But it’s even worse than that.

This deal reportedly allows billions of dollars to be handed out in untraceable, undisclosed transactions! Once the U.S. government vaults have been opened for this purpose, they can be opened again and again. The constitutional dam will have been breached.

Put another way, this is the moral architecture of a protection racket. You pay tribute to the boss. The boss makes your problems go away and signs a check. If you cross him, the money stops. But if you stay loyal, the money flows. Every Jan. 6 defendant who pockets a check from this fund will know who signed it, as will every former Trump official he rewards for having been willing to break the law for him and torch the U.S. Constitution in a quixotic quest to remain in power.

Might Trump also use this fund to persuade people to keep breaking the law for him? We’ll see. I know what these offers sound like, because I’ve gotten one. In early 2019, in a meeting at the U.S. Southern Border, Trump turned to me and other officials and told us to take actions that would have been illegal. We reminded him that we couldn’t do what he was asking. He told us to break the law anyway.

“If you go to jail for it, I’ll pardon you.”

That’s what Trump said to us. We declined. But now he’s adding an incentive plan to such offers. Break the law for me, and I won’t just pardon you — I’ll make you filthy rich!

The Founders gave us a republic, and they warned us, repeatedly, what would end it. Once again, I’ll take us back to the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described the impeachment power as the remedy for “the abuse or violation of some public trust” for offenses “which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

There is no clearer abuse of public trust than the conversion of the Treasury into a personal patronage fund in order to enrich his allies and potentially himself.

Why this line is different. We’ve crossed a great many lines in the last seventeen months, friends. This one is different.

This one is the line between a republic that still pretends to operate on rules and a republic that has openly accepted that the rules are whatever the hell the man at the top says they are. The slush fund is the proof.

We didn’t need any more reasons to throw the bums out this November in the midterm elections. But now we have the biggest one yet, at least in dollars.

If Congress does not stop this — which the cowardly and spineless moral contortionists of the MAGA right almost certainly will not — then we need a brand new Congress. The U.S. Treasury is not the president’s personal wallet. And if he makes it one, our representatives should be ready to impeach and remove him.

In the meantime, pay attention to who takes the money. Pay attention to whether anyone declines Trump’s payoffs. History keeps a ledger, and so do we.

Miles Taylor is former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, the author of “A Warning” and “Blowback” and the founder of Defiance.org. Subscribe to their newsletter here.