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Imagine a meeting of Democratic consultants, batting around their thoughts about what might be the most self-damaging action Donald Trump could conceivably take. One consultant—let’s call her Jane—suggests that Trump might order the government to simply give him some billions of the dollars that law-abiding Americans have paid in taxes to their government.
The other consultants respond skeptically. “He couldn’t be that stupid,” one says. To which Jane replies, “He could be that self-absorbed.”
He could indeed. Last Thursday, Trump and his two elder sons sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion in damages for the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020, which showed that in two recent years, he had paid just $750 in federal taxes.
It was Charles Littlejohn, a contractor employed by the firm of Booz Allen to assist the IRS, who provided the returns to the Times, for which he was convicted and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence. Taxpayers whose returns are made public can sue the IRS, which billionaire financier Ken Griffin did when Littlejohn leaked his returns to ProPublica. The IRS argued that, since Littlejohn was not its employee, it bore no responsibility for his leaks, then issued an apology and settled the case with Griffin.
Were Trump a private citizen, his suit wouldn’t be blatantly outrageous, though the dollar amount would surely look ridiculous. And were Trump a president in the mold of every one of his presidential predecessors, who understood that they couldn’t turn the federal government into their private piggy bank, at least not in a way that would be visible to all, his idea to sue the government would doubtless be shot down by every one of his counselors.
But Trump has turned the entire executive branch of our government into the instrument of his every whim. Which of his appointees will oppose his suit? In the one year since he again took office, he’s already run through six (6) IRS directors; currently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is serving as acting director. The administration has not provided a plausible explanation for this high-speed revolving door; perhaps Trump has been frustrated in his quest to find a director who wouldn’t oppose his filing this lawsuit. (Last Thursday was the last day before the statute of limitations on filing that suit kicked in.)
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