The Department of Justice’s Civil Division claims to have no records of communication related to Trump v. IRS or the following settlement agreement or negotiations, according to a response to  CREW’s Freedom of Information Act request.

In January, President Donald Trump, his sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and Treasury Department, seeking $10 billion in damages arising from the unauthorized disclosure of his, his sons’ and his business’ tax returns by former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn. Trump brought this suit against the federal government “in his personal capacity,” while simultaneously overseeing the agencies he is suing, making him  free to “work out a settlement with myself.” It is the first time a sitting president has sued and settled a case with their own administration.

Adding to the blatant self-dealing, none of the lawyers who would ordinarily deal with a case like this—or at the very least be formally alerted or consulted on it—were involved in defending the United States or negotiating the settlement. Despite mounting vigorous defenses in another case arising from Littlejohn’s leaks, DOJ’s Civil Division claims to have no record of so much as being notified about Trump’s case, up to and including Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. No DOJ attorney even formally entered an appearance in the case before President Trump and his senior DOJ appointees executed a collusive settlement on May 18.

The settlement created an unprecedented and unlawful slush fund for the administration to hand out nearly $2 billion of taxpayer money to the president’s allies. CREW is currently challenging the lawsuit in court, and the court overseeing Trump v. IRS has since ordered the parties to brief whether it had jurisdiction to hear the case at all, whether Trump’s dismissal of the case “was premised on deception by the Parties” and whether the case should be reopened because the court was the “victim of a fraud.” 

Given the extraordinary way this case unfolded, a settlement of this magnitude leaving no trace in the files of the divisions typically responsible for it is yet another striking confirmation of the irregular, collusive process that produced an enormously corrupt result.

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