Last week, Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general, told Congress that he was abandoning plans to establish a $1.8bn fund to compensate Donald Trump’s political allies. The administration’s attempt to use taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government – possibly including those convicted of violence during the January 6 Capitol riot that Trump incited – was too much for Senate Republicans.
But Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer before joining his administration, made another announcement that got far less attention than scrapping Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund”: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be barred from continuing audits into the president, his family and their “affiliates”. In other words, Trump secured something most Americans can only dream of: immunity from IRS audits of his past tax returns.
