AMY GOODMAN: In an extraordinary move, the Justice Department issued a memo Tuesday saying the IRS is, quote, “forever barred,” unquote, from investigating past tax returns of President Trump, his family, company and “related companies.” The memo was issued a day after the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to make payments to individuals, including January 6 insurrectionists, who say they were wrongly targeted. The so-called anti-weaponization fund would be overseen by five commissioners appointed by the attorney general, who is President Trump’s former personal attorney.

The two announcements come after President Trump dropped his unprecedented $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. Trump, his sons and their family business filed the suit over the leak of their tax returns by a former IRS contractor who was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking the documents.

Democrats and Republicans have expressed alarm over the agreements. On Monday, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned shortly after the fund was announced.

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before a Senate hearing about the fund. This is Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund that you set up. Simple question: will eligible — will individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this fund?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: Well, as it makes plain, anybody is —

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Will they be — just let me know if they’re eligible for the fund.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: As was made plain yesterday, anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they were a victim of weaponization.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Mr. Attorney General, let me ask you this: Are there going to be rules that say that if you’ve assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer or committed a violent crime, you will not be eligible? Why not make that a rule?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: I expect that the — well, because I’m not one of the commissioners setting up the rules. I expect that there will be rules set up.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: But you’re appointing four of five of the members, aren’t you, Mr. Attorney General?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: Pardon me?

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: You’re appointing four of the five members.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: I am appointing all five members.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: You can simply set up the rules. I would hope you will make a rule that anyone convicted of assaulting a police officer or violent crime is simply not eligible. They should not apply.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Van Hollen later questioned Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche about his personal role in the agreement.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: So, you’re not going to — you’re not going to submit this proposal to any federal judge or independent —

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: There is no judge.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Any independent authority that — 

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: An independent — what does that mean, an independent authority? What does that mean?

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: It means not somebody who’s getting to pick five of the members, who was the president’s former personal attorney. That would be somebody who would be independent.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: I’m the acting attorney general, OK?

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: And you were also —

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: The fact that I used to be President Trump’s lawyer is just a fact. But I’m the acting attorney general, so don’t say the president’s former personal lawyer will do something. The acting attorney general will do something.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president’s personal attorney, and that’s the whole problem. You’ve got his whole — you have a whole banner of his face hanging over the Department of Justice, and you and everybody else walks under it. And you are acting like you’re his current personal attorney. Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as CNN has revealed Todd Blanche was told last year to recuse himself from Justice Department matters involving Trump, citing ethics concerns.

We’re joined now by David Cay Johnston, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in law, journalism and criminal justice, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport. He’s the author of three books on Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.

David Cay Johnston, thanks for joining us again. Can you respond to these developments, the so-called anti-weaponization fund, and the Trump family and President Trump himself being protected from any future investigation into their finances and corruption?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, this is dictatorship in action. Donald Trump had declared himself to be our dictator shortly after resuming office last year. He has been acting like a dictator. Now, he hasn’t fully consolidated his power, and there are various places where people have pushed back on him, but he is conducting himself as a dictator.

And what he now has is a fund with an interesting number, $1.776 billion, to arm his goon squads, people like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, to carry out acts of violence or intimidation against people on his behalf, with no accountability for who receives this money, no rationale for it. And he’s able to do this because, at least for the moment, our Constitution doesn’t have adequate safeguards to address what happens when you have the third-generation head of a four-generation white-collar crime boss in the White House and his personal lawyer, who, by law, is still Donald Trump’s lawyer, Blanche, as the acting attorney general.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this fund, again, $1.776 billion. Of course, I emphasize that because it’s 1776.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, under this fund, a five-member board appointed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, would decide who gets the money. There would be no public notification of this and accounting for it, only a confidential report to Todd Blanche or whoever is attorney general at the time. There’s no rules that would prohibit, as Senator Van Hollen pointed out, those who assaulted police officers from receiving money. And this is simply a slush fund to pay a criminal enforcement arm, a violent arm of Trump supporters to intimidate people. And remember, Donald Trump always described his failed effort to overthrow our government in 2021 as a “day of love.” Only Donald Trump and people who believe that he should be our dictator would, of course, see it that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Tuesday’s Senate hearing. Acting Attorney Todd Blanche — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was questioned by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware.

SEN. CHRIS COONS: Has it ever happened that a sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion and then directed the settlement of the case and the establishment of a payout fund?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: Not that I’m aware of, but there’s a lot of things that President Trump’s the first of. No president had been indicted one, two, three, four, five, six — 

SEN. CHRIS COONS: Correct.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: — seven, eight times, either.

SEN. CHRIS COONS: Correct.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: And —

SEN. CHRIS COONS: No president’s been indicted. And will you commit that none of this money will go to President Trump’s campaign donors?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: I am not committing to anything beyond the settlement agreement itself. When you say “campaign donors,” that they are not excluded from seeking compensation if they were weaponized.

SEN. CHRIS COONS: Last question: During Police Week, I heard from a number of law enforcement friends who found it appalling that there was the possibility that folks like the Peace — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, who had assaulted Capitol Police officers, could receive multimillion-dollar payouts from this fund. Will you commit that no one who has been convicted of assaulting a police officer will receive a payout from this fund?

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: So, I share the concerns that, apparently, members of law enforcement gave to you last week, although none of this was announced last week, so that’s surprising. But I’ll accept that.

SEN. CHRIS COONS: They had heard rumors there would be a settlement fund.

ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE: OK. But anybody can apply. The commission will set — the commissioners will set rules, I’m sure. That’s not for me to set; that’s for the commissioners. And whether — and whether an individual, an Oath Keeper, as you just mentioned, applies for compensation is — anybody in this country can apply.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it was pointed out that the administration, Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney, can fire any of the commissioners, as well. But your response, overall, David Cay Johnston?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I think this setup is completely contrary to law. The problem is: Who has standing — that is, the right to intervene and try to stop it? Now, the IRS makes settlements with people, and they promise that this is closed, we’re not going to continue this anymore. But the fact that this agreement includes this side agreement that the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, members of his family may not be examined on their past tax returns just screams that Donald Trump is, in fact, a criminal-level tax cheat.

Now, this is not the only avenue to address Donald Trump’s tax cheating. And this is a man who we know from the tax returns that have been made public because of the House Democrats, led by Richard Neal, and the leak, as well as the ones I found in the public record, that Donald Trump has been creating nonexistent companies, just made-up, fictitious companies, and taking tax losses that reduced his taxes for all the way back to at least 1984. That’s a pattern of criminal behavior that establishes what’s called mens rea, or criminal intent.

Now, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or the New York state Attorney General Letitia James, they can go after Trump over his state and city taxes. And twice in the past, judges have found that Donald Trump committed tax fraud. These were civil, not criminal, cases. They included Trump forging the signature of his tax preparer, his longtime tax lawyer and tax accountant, which could have been prosecuted as a crime. And I’ve written a piece — it ran in the New York Daily News three years ago — showing how Alvin Bragg could easily get Donald Trump convicted of criminal tax fraud if he would bring such a case. And, of course, they can also pursue it civilly.

But as it stands, Donald Trump basically will now not have to pay the — what The New York Times estimates is more than $100 million — and I think that’s a very conservative number — in taxes from the past, and he will get a walk on what are clearly, from the released tax returns, felony-level tax crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance held an unusual press conference at the White House. He was questioned about Trump’s stock trades by Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent at The Independent.

ANDREW FEINBERG: How can you and your administration argue to Americans that you’re cleaning up corruption, you’re preventing fraud, you’re fighting the sorts of things that harm people and people’s financial situations, when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them and enriching himself?

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: The president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer, on his, like, Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd. He has independent wealth advisers who manage his money. He is a wealthy person. He has had success in business. He’s not making these stock trades himself. And your question imputes that. It sort of — it doesn’t say it exactly, but a reasonable person listening to that question would assume the president is sitting around and doing that. He’s not.

Second of all, you’re right. I’m a big fan of banning members of Congress from trading stocks. So is the president of the United States. All of us believe that nobody should be taking proprietary information gained from public service and buying and selling stocks. We want to ban — we want to ban that. We want to ban that process.

AMY GOODMAN: He answered that question after attacking the questioner. But, David Cay Johnston, if you can talk about President Trump’s stock trades, how much he’s made, and responding to Vance saying it’s not as if he’s doing it himself on his own computer?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that’s a complete red herring that he’s not doing it on his computer. What we want to know is what kind of information did the purchasers on Trump’s behalf, the brokers and agents, have about events that were going to happen. Why is the Trump administration not looking into these enormous commodities and stock bets that were placed 15, 20 minutes before major White House announcements that influenced the market? We see no sign that that’s being pursued.

And, of course, if the Trump administration thinks members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks — and I think that’s what the law should be — why isn’t he following his own belief? And the reason is, of course, Donald, who I’ve known and covered for almost 40 years, doesn’t believe the rules apply to him. He believes he’s special. He believes that the rest of us are all idiots, unless we support him, and that no law applies to him because of his special status in the world. And when I said in 2011 Donald thinks that he should run not just America, but the whole world, there were various people who mocked me. What did Donald Trump say about a year ago? “I run the country and the whole world.” He sees himself as the world dictator. So, why would he be troubled by little things like trading in stocks when he’s in the White House, where those stock prices are influenced by his actions?

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written three books on Donald Trump, David Cay Johnston. You’ve won two Pulitzer Prizes. What shocked you most about what has just been revealed?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, the brazenness of closing the audit the way Todd Blanche did this. You notice Todd Blanche is the one who signed the letter. What that tells you is that no other lawyer in the Justice Department was going to put their reputation, if not their law license, at risk by signing this utterly corrupt agreement. Now, Todd Blanche remains Donald Trump’s lawyer since the criminal trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felonies. So he has a conflict of interest.

And one would hope that the New York State Bar would go after the law license of Todd Blanche, and a future administration — assuming we get past Trump’s dictatorship, which I no longer think is a guaranteed event — could go into court and basically say to a judge, “This agreement isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on,” and attack this agreement. I think it is inherently corrupt. There is no controversy, as the Constitution requires, because the parties here are Donald Trump, an individual, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. That’s not a controversy. This is theft of taxpayer money, plain and simple.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston, professor, Rochester Institute of Technology in law, journalism and criminal justice, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, author of three books on Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.

Coming up, we look at Cuba as the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to indict the former Cuban President Raúl Castro. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Orlando Paz, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.