Blanche’s Biggest Boondoggle
The IRS amnesty deal he is calling “typical” is unprecedented.
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The man whom Trump has decided to nominate for Attorney General, Todd Blanche, told the House Tuesday that the administration is “not moving forward” with the $1.776 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and other pals. But his statement, which was not given under oath, only muddies the already inky waters. The retreat takes the whole scheme from dodgy to incoherent—while leaving it every bit as lawless.
Blanche executed the retreat in testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee, where he was characteristically combative even in surrender. When Congresswoman Grace Meng pressed him, twice, to put that commitment in writing, he declined. When she asked again, Blanche gestured at the hearing transcript itself: that record, he suggested, was documentation enough.
No, he would not file anything with any court. No, he would not formally rescind the settlement agreement that was never placed before Judge Kathleen Williams’s court—she noted in her dismissal order that “there is no settlement of record”—and Blanche has now refused to file anything to formally rescind even that extra-judicial document.
So what we have is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States making an oral promise to Congress that he will stop doing something illegal, while refusing to formalize even that much. The country, which overwhelmingly rejected the payout to insurrectionists, can only rely on the words of Todd Blanche, who has described himself, without embarrassment, as the president’s man in all things.
The big boss, in fact, undermined Blanche’s assurances even more. On Wednesday, asked by a reporter whether the fund was dead or merely on hold, Trump said: “I’d have to ask the lawyers. I don’t know.” He called the fund “a beautiful thing” and said, “I love it. I think it’s so important.” He described the January 6th rioters as “great people” whose “lives have been destroyed” and had “went there with love.” “We’ll see how that all works out,” the president added.
How’s that for reassurance?
But the far more urgent point is not what Blanche said he was abandoning. It is what he said would remain: the separate order Blanche signed the day after the agreement on AG letterhead purporting to release, waive, and forever discharge Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization from any tax liability for returns filed before the settlement’s effective date.
At the same hearing Tuesday, Blanche declared that “nothing has changed” in that provision. But he talked out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, he characterized the provision as a freestanding “Attorney General order,” independent of the settlement. In virtually the same breath, however, he defended it as part of “that settlement.” He told the subcommittee, “Anytime the IRS settles with an individual taxpayer or another company as part of the settlement, it’s standard, it’s typical…to get rid of past ongoing audits.”
“Typical.” I’ll return to that word.
