Trump’s slush fund is gone – but his IRS agreement is a new level of self-dealing | Mohamad Bazzi

The president’s immunity from continuing audits made fewer headlines than the ‘anti-weaponization fund’, but it’s no less egregiousLast week, Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general, told Congress that he was abandoning plans to establish a $1.8bn fund to compensate Donald Trump’s political allies. The administration’s attempt to use taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government – possibly including those convicted of violence during the January 6 Capitol riot that Trump incited – was too much for Senate Republicans.But Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer before joining his administration, made another announcement that got far less attention than scrapping Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund”: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) wi