AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

The Justice Department is considering settling President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. In January, the president and his sons filed suit seeking restitution from the federal government, alleging reputational and financial harm and public embarrassment as a result of the leaking of their tax returns by a government contractor in 2019. Now a possible settlement is on the table, where the president would drop his lawsuit in exchange for an agreement by the IRS to drop audits of the Trump family and their businesses, as well as the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate people Trump claims were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration. The fund would reportedly be called the President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission, would be led by a Trump-appointed commission. Trump allies who could potentially file claims and be compensated include the participants in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is also a constitutional law scholar, calls the proposal an illegal “political slush fund.” Last week, Congressmembers Raskin and Senator Adam Schiff introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act to curb the president’s profiteering and corruption.

For more, we go to Jamie Raskin, congressmember from Maryland.

Can you respond to, first, what is being proposed here, this $1.7 billion fund? Who would profit? And then talk about your bill.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Sure. Well, the $1.7 billion political slush fund in the Department of Justice may take the cake in terms of being the most thoroughly corrupt movement of the Trump administration, after the billions of dollars that they’ve been getting through the crypto schemes and the foreign governments.

But, so, let’s go back to the beginning. The $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS is completely bogus. It’s empty. It’s vacuous. There’s nothing to it. There was a private contractor who leaked reports of Donald Trump’s tax returns, that Trump had promised to make public. Like every other president had done, he said, “I’m going to release my tax returns.” Then he said he wouldn’t. The IRS didn’t do anything, but this private contractor released some of the details. And he’s in prison. He went to jail for it. There’s no private right of action under the statute, and it’s happened to lots of people.

So, the idea that it’s $10 billion that he’s going to order the secretary of the Treasury to order the IRS chief to give to him is ridiculous. There’s just nothing there. So, there’s nothing to trade, but then they traded that mythical $10 billion they claimed to be owed, for dropping real criminal investigations into all of the corruption, or some of the corruption, that the Trump family is engaged in, and then also for the creation of this $1.7 billion slush fund.

Well, there are 1,600 people that he’s pardoned, and they want a $1.7 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways. Congress never voted to appropriate that money. We control the power to spend. We never created that, and we never would. There’s no way you could ever get that out of Congress.

So, they’re using the judgment fund of the United States, which is for valid court verdicts against the United States or valid court settlements, to simply confer money on their private political militia, their street-fighting militia, which went to battle for them on January 6, 2021. And what do you know? Right before this election, they want to shower these people with a million dollars a head. I mean, it’s just a — it’s an outrage, and it’s a scandal. It’s also unconstitutional, because the 14th Amendment says in Section 4 that no money shall go to pay for insurrection or rebellion. That, of course, was in the wake of the Civil War, but it’s written in general terms. Basically, they’re paying his insurrectionary army.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were there, Congressman Jamie Raskin, on January 6th, right? Along with your daughter and your now son-in-law, taking shelter from the insurrectionists.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember it well. And this is all part of the whitewash and the attempt to sanitize what had happened. I mean, there were Republicans, like Ted Cruz, who were calling it terrorism. They lived through it. They saw exactly what happened. And they were basically saying, “Hey, guys, we went a little bit too far with this. This is dangerous. People died. Officers lost their lives.” And now, you know, they’re all with Donald Trump and saying it was a day of hugs and kisses and love. It sounds like Woodstock on Capitol Hill, to hear them describe it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, describe the bills that you have introduced.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, understand that opposing and dismantling the corruption of the Trump administration is going to be the work of a lifetime for a lot of people in politics. So this is a beginning.

And we start with the Emoluments Clauses, which have been completely, you know, thrown into the gutter here. But what we’re trying to do is codify the Emoluments Clauses to saying the president must report any money he’s getting from foreign governments, like take the $400 million jet from Qatar. That’s got to be reported within 72 hours, and then Congress must get together and vote whether or not to allow him to accept it or to turn it over to the U.S. government or to return it, because the Constitution says that nobody in federal government, much less the president, can receive a present, an emolument — which means a payment — an office or title “of any kind whatever,” the Constitution says, from a king, a prince or a foreign state, without the consent of Congress. And he has never come once to Congress for the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that he’s been pocketing from foreign states, our “America first” president, who is the biggest globalist who’s ever served in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: New financial disclosure forms released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show President Trump made between $220 million and $750 million in trades in the first months of this year, including purchases and sales of securities in companies like Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, Goldman Sachs. Trump bought, according to NOTUS, between half a million and a million dollars’ worth of Nvidia stock a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China, the Trump Organization claiming the investments are managed exclusively by third-party financial institutions, and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in the investment decisions. Can you talk about this and stock trading by Trump himself?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Yeah, look, what we know now is that corruption is the whole purpose of the Trump administration. It’s not like some eccentric, peripheral thing. It’s a vast money-making operation. And the cover story is what you were talking about before with Bishop Barber. I mean, you know, they’ve tried to conscript all of these religious figures to come in to give cover to the fact that they are looting the federal government.

The $1.7 billion slush fund that they want to install at the Department of Justice, $1.776 billion, showing you exactly how arbitrary and random it is — they’re just naming it after 1776; it’s not related to anything that’s actually owed to anybody. But that political slush fund is just one of many political slush funds. They’re turning the entire budget of the United States, that was authorized and appropriated by Congress, into a collection of slush funds. So, the Board of Peace, for example, take that one. We still don’t know whether it’s public or private, profit or not for profit, registered in the United States, registered in another country. We don’t know. But they gave $1.5 billion from the State Department, money that was set aside for disaster relief, to this Board of Peace. And they got a billion from Qatar, a billion from the United Arab Emirates, a billion from Saudi Arabia. It’s the same thing with the Venezuelan oil. After that hit on Venezuela, then they created a political slush fund, operated — I believe it’s out of Qatar, as well. Donald Trump is controlling that.

So, the whole idea is to seize as much of the federal budget as possible to put directly under his control. The whole thing is corruption. And nobody should be surprised that he’s engaged in thousands of day trades. We’ve got to ban individual stock trades by members of Congress, by the president, by the vice president, the whole thing, because they have turned the government of the United States into a money-making operation. You may as well put a Wall Street ticker tape up around the Senate and the House of Representatives and the White House, because that’s what they’ve turned it into. It’s all about insider information, exploiting insider information to make as much money as possible. Put your money either in a blind trust or in a mutual fund and leave it there, not single-stock day trading by people who have all kinds of political inside information.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, because I know you have to go, Eric Trump being on that trip to China, if you could respond? He’s now saying he’s going to sue Jen Psaki and MS NOW over a report on a China trip based on a Financial Times report that said that he, while on the state visit in China, Eric Trump, is linked to a company, and the U.S. president’s family, exploring a deal with a Chinese chip maker that American lawmakers have warned is connected to the ruling party in China. Las Vegas-based fintech ALT5 Sigma, which has financial links to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto business, last month signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese firm to build data centers in the U.S. Any knowledge about this?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: I don’t know anything about this one, other than to say that the response of President Trump and the Trump family and all of their enterprises to reports of their staggering, phenomenal corruption is to attack the media and sue the media. And they lose all of these cases. It’s a form of distraction and a form of harassment. But they’ve brought suits against, you know, New York Times, Atlantic magazine, ABC, CBS, you name it. And when they’ve got some kind of political control over them through the Federal Communications Commission, they’re able to shake them down for millions of dollars. But for the media that can actually stand up to them, they win all these cases, and Trump and his family lose all these cases. But it makes it seem as if, you know, it’s just some kind of contested dispute between two sides, when it’s perfectly clear that they have corrupted the entire government. They’ve turned the presidency into an instrument of private profit making every day. It’s like watching The Sopranos. You turn on just to see: Well, what is the scam going to be today?

AMY GOODMAN: Maryland Congressmember Jamie Raskin, we have to leave it there, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a package of anti-corruption bills aimed at putting new checks on the White House.

That does it for our show. I’ll be speaking at the IFC in New York City as it plays the new film about Democracy Now!, Steal This Story, Please!, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Tuesday with V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, she’ll be moderating the Q&A after the 6:00 film, along with the director, Tia Lessin, and on Wednesday, Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now! co-host, will be moderating the post-film discussion at the IFC at West 4th and 6th Avenue. I’ll be there again with the film’s director, Steal This Story, Please! Go to democracynow.org for details. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.