Há 2 dias
domingo, 31 de maio de 2026
Matthieu Valet consistently condemns all forms of rioting, framing urban unrest as the work of "thugs" and calling for a severe judicial and financial response against delinquents. As a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), spokesperson for the National Rally (RN), and a former police captain, his remarks strongly emphasize total support for law enforcement and strict public order.
.jpeg)
Matthieu
Valet remarks about the riots
Matthieu
Valet consistently
condemns all forms of rioting, framing urban unrest as the work of
"thugs" and calling for a severe judicial and financial response
against delinquents. As a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), spokesperson
for the National Rally (RN), and a former police captain, his remarks strongly
emphasize total support for law enforcement and strict public order.
His notable
public positions and statements regarding riots and urban violence include:
Tactical
Shift for Law Enforcement []
- Proactive Policing: Following recent unrest, Valet
argued that security forces must shift from defensive to offensive tactics.
- Dynamic Deployment: He explicitly stated that
authorities "need proactive police officers, not static riot police
deployed to guard perimeters".
- Protecting the Protectors: He frequently fights back
against anti-police rhetoric, emphasizing that "the police should not
be the mops of the Republic".
Financial
and Judicial Retribution
- Hitting the Wallet: Valet demands that rioters and
delinquents face immediate financial consequences, arguing that
authorities "must hit the delinquent in the wallet".
- Condemning Left-Wing Enablers: He claims that ordinary
working citizens are left to "pay for the crazy actions of
leftists" who tolerate or excuse rioting.
- No Excuses: He criticizes the French
justice system for what he calls "lax security," asserting that
the state too often "excuses everything to thugs and forgets the
victims".
Media
Reactions to Specific Incidents
- Paris Influencer Riot: When a promotional restaurant
event descended into street clashes in central Paris, Valet took to social
media to applaud the police for apprehending "thugs determined to
pick a fight, throw projectiles, and sow chaos".
- Condemnation of "Les
Soulèvements de la Terre": He labeled the environmental activist group violent
and dangerous, comparing their radical demonstrations to unlawful rioting.
- Political Exploitation: Valet routinely accuses
far-left parties, particularly La France Insoumise (LFI), of using
anti-police sentiment and urban riots as "electoral fuel" while
ignoring the safety of the public
French police arrest 780 after violent clashes as PSG fans celebrate Champions League win
.jpeg)
French police arrest 780 after violent clashes as PSG fans
celebrate Champions League win
Interior
minister says 57 officers injured as rioters set fires and vandalise shops in
about 15 cities
Nadeem
Badshah
Sun 31
May 2026 17.31 BST
French
police have detained 780 people involved in violent clashes in Paris and other
French cities that erupted on Saturday night after Paris Saint-Germain defeated
Arsenal to win the Champions League.
The
interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said 57 officers were wounded, with most
suffering minor injuries, as football fans set off fires and vandalised shops.
One small group even tried to storm a Paris police station.
At a news
conference on Sunday he said the situation had largely been brought under
control.
“Most of
the celebrations took place peacefully” across the French capital, he said,
noting most incidents happened in the Champs Élysées neighbourhood and close to
PSG’s Parc des Princes in western Paris, where fans had gathered to watch the
match.
Police
also intervened five times overnight to prevent people from blocking traffic on
the main ring road around Paris, he said.
Nuñez
said incidents took place in about 15 cities in France, describing “one to two”
shops vandalised in those other than Paris. He said 780 people were detained in
all, with 480 in the Paris area alone.
The Paris
prosecutors’ office said 277 people had been formally placed in police custody,
including 82 minors, for alleged offences. Most were for assaulting police
officers while other allegations included theft, vandalism and disturbing
public order.
One
serious accident involved a driver losing control of a car that rammed into a
restaurant’s terrace, leaving two people wounded including one seriously, Nuñez
said.
However,
Nuñez said planned celebrations for the team’s win on Sunday afternoon at the
Champ de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower, would go ahead as scheduled. The PSG team
will then be hosted by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the Élysée
Palace.
Footage
aired on the news channel BFM showed brief skirmishes around PSG’s Parc des
Princes in western Paris, where more than 40,000 people watched the club win
its second consecutive title on penalties at the Puskas Arena in Budapest on
giant screens.
By 11pm
(10pm UK time), police had already made more than 130 arrests, Paris police
said.
Some PSG
fans aimed fireworks at police officers, who responded with teargas during the
celebrations, according to reports in France, while some were seen wearing
T-shirts emblazoned with “FU*K ARSENAL 2026” as they stood next to burning Lime
bikes on the city’s streets.
Smoke
rose from several areas during the clashes. Police were seen sprinting after
groups of fans with riot gear and stamping out flares discarded on the road.
France
had deployed 22,000 police to uphold order in the capital. Last year, two
people died and close to 200 were injured after PSG won the Champions League
for the first time by beating Inter.
The
Champs-Élysées, which authorities had partly cordoned off, was filling with
mostly peaceful PSG fans, TV footage showed. Police estimated the crowd size at
20,000. Some supporters let off fireworks and lit flares.
The Paris
police prefecture said smaller groups caused disturbances in various locations,
with some vandalising shops and setting fires. Cars were also set ablaze. Those
who attempted to storm a police station in the upmarket 8th arrondissement
neighbourhood were dispersed, police said.
Associated
Press and Reuters contributed to this report
The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained
David
French
The Fire
of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained
May 31,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/opinion/communism-fascism-authoritarianism-democracy.html
By David French
Opinion
Columnist
It’s the
year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we’re taking a nice leisurely walk
through a Museum of Wretched Ideas.
Consider
what’s happening at home. Tariffs raise prices and restrain economic growth,
while the federal government embraces both Gilded Age corruption and a version
of the spoils system.
A
disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated
with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express
a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are
far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political
violence is “sometimes OK.”
And
hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism on both the left and the right.
Once again, ancient slanders are circulating through the culture.
Or
consider what is happening abroad. Germany rearms to confront the Russian threat. Japan rearms to deter China. War rages in Europe and
in the Middle East. Threats of territorial expansion haunt the world. Russia is
trying to grab Ukraine. China continues to covet Taiwan. And the Trump
administration, incredibly enough, has cast its expansionist eyes on Greenland.
When you
step back and actually think about it, these trends are confounding. I mean, I
can understand the temptation to return to some of the discredited ideas of the
recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon
after those wretched ideas ravaged the world?
What is
going on?
The
answer lies in part in the interplay between two political sayings
that are so oft-repeated that they have become clichés. When they should be top
of mind, though, they seem to have lost their impact.
Here’s
the first (and you can probably say it along with me), from George Santayana in
1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We can
argue about the precise historical parallels, but the echoes of the past are
everywhere.
Here’s
the second, from Winston Churchill in 1947: “It has been said that
democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that
have been tried.”
It is no
coincidence that authoritarianism is once again appealing to people at a time
when two things are happening at once. Liberal democracies are struggling to
meet the needs of a substantial portion of their citizens, and entire
generations have come of age with no living memory of the totalitarian horrors
of the 20th Century.
In other
words, millions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst
form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens
in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except
all those other forms that have been tried.”
So even
fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of
atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their
frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of
authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to
understand its actual and inevitable defects.
They do
not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies
and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.
In this
ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even
a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that
swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent,
deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.
The
compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful
concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool’s errand, unless you’ve
witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.
I’m
reluctant to draw exact matches between current and past events. Should we
compare Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine with Hitler’s partition of
Czechoslovakia in 1938? Or with Stalin’s Winter War against Finland at the
outset of World War II? Or maybe it’s more reminiscent of the instability of
the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.
As for
the rise of antisemitism, are we approaching a dangerous spectrum that ranges
from the Dreyfus Affair to Kristallnacht?
But
debating the precise analogues can obscure the underlying truth — we are
heading backward, toward the great crimes and mistakes of the past. We know
what happens when militarily aggressive great powers seek more territory. We
know what happens when a culture indulges — and promotes — conspiracy theories
about Jews. We know that even the most utopian forms of authoritarianism
devolve into regimes of grinding oppression and profound corruption. Some are
always more equal than others.
In 2024,
I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics
Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the
devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to
radicalization.
When the
Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity
and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert
Védrine, the “hyperpower.”
I began
with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s
misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:
If men
cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was
victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the
just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in
other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a
world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live
is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will
struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against
democracy.
That is
exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are
struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25
comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow
citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party
primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in
American politics.
This
drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party
states or so-called blowout counties, where one side or the other wins
presidential elections by 50 points or more.
And what
happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization, first applied to political
decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches
us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.
Create a
monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two
sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even
the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.
If I
taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The
problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning
to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.
It’s no
coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders
has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no
experience with real fascism and actual communism.
When
experience ends, education has to begin. You can’t just know what the Holocaust
was; you also have to understand the Holodomor. The phrase “the guns of August”
should mean something to you, and when you see every great power press on the
military gas — with no one pumping the brakes — that should trigger the most
urgent concern.
Few
things are demonstrating that what’s old is new again more than the rising tide
of antisemitism. How many times must ancient lies be debunked? Must it happen
every generation, for thousands of years?
So now we face
a test. Can we educate ourselves away from disaster? Is there enough knowledge
left to penetrate not just the minds, but also the hearts, of people who are
deeply discontented?
A few
weeks ago, a clip from the remarkable HBO series “Band of Brothers”
went viral online. It was from the episode in which the boys of Easy Company
discover a concentration camp. The impact is visceral. It’s impossible for a
decent person to watch it without vowing to himself or herself, “Never again.”
I’m also
reminded of a horrific scene at the opening of Netflix’s science
fiction drama, “3 Body Problem,” featuring a struggle session during China’s
Cultural Revolution. Once again, the impact is visceral. The brutality is hard
to watch.
Television
isn’t enough. Books aren’t enough. The stories of fathers and mothers,
grandmothers and grandfathers, aren’t enough. It will take everything —
watching, reading, listening — to make us remember.
We have
to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is
better than the world that was. I pray that we can learn that lesson before
bitter experience teaches us once again that this imperfect
democracy and this frustrating liberal world order are
infinitely better than the violence and oppression — the deliberate starvation
and slaughter of millions of men, women and children — of the none-too-distant
past.
Is $1.8 Billion slush fund for supporters of President Trump, possibly including Jan. 6 rioters a way to create a private army directed to an insurrection?
Is $1.8
Billion slush fund for supporters of President Trump, possibly including Jan. 6
rioters a way to create a private army directed to an insurrection?
The newly
established $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is officially
structured as a legal compensation mechanism, though critics heavily argue it
acts as a political reward system.
The
Official Purpose vs. Political Criticism
- The Administration’s Stance: The U.S. Department of Justice announced the fund as part
of a settlement agreement where President Trump dropped his personal $10
billion lawsuit against the IRS over leaked tax records. Acting Attorney
General Todd Blanche stated the fund creates a lawful process to
compensate victims of "lawfare and weaponization" who were
allegedly targeted by the Biden administration for political reasons.
- The "Private Army"
Accusation: The
characterization of the fund as a means to build a "private
army" or finance a future insurrection stems primarily from sharp
rhetoric used by congressional Democrats. For instance, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer stated on the
Senate floor that "Trump is shaking hands with himself in order to
fund his insurrectionist army to the tune of two billion dollars."
Similarly, Representative Jamie Raskin described the deal as a racket to
pour money into a "slush fund... to hand out to his private militia
of insurrectionists." [1,
2,
3,
4,
5]
Eligibility
and January 6th Defendants
The fund is
designed to review claims from individuals and entities who faced federal
investigations or prosecutions during the Biden administration.
- Who is eligible: This pool includes the nearly
1,600 individuals charged or convicted in connection with the January 6th
Capitol attack.
- How it is managed: A five-member commission
appointed by the Attorney General will determine who receives payouts.
When asked if those who committed violence against police on January 6th
would receive money, President Trump stated that allocations would be
entirely up to that committee.
- Future legal liability: A notable disclaimer in the fund's term sheet states the U.S. government holds
"no liability whatsoever" for how the money is safeguarded or if
it is misused after disbursement, which watchdogs warn removes oversight
on how the cash is ultimately spent.
Current
Status and Pushback
The fund
avoids immediate congressional approval because it is drawn from the Treasury's
Judgment Fund to settle a civil dispute. However, it is facing immense
pushback:
1.
Legal Challenges: The House Democrats' Litigation Task Force has filed motions in court
attempting to block the settlement on the grounds that it is an
unconstitutional payout.
2.
Legislative Action: Lawmakers have introduced measures like the Ban Presidential Plunder
of Taxpayer Funds Act to prevent sitting executives from orchestrating
federal settlement funds for political allies.
3.
Internal Dissent: The unconventional settlement bypassed normal judicial oversight,
prompting high-profile pushback—including the sudden resignation of the Treasury
Department's General Counsel.
How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political Anxieties
How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political
Anxieties
“Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national
angst. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the
country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.
By Lisa Lerer
April 21, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/politics/civil-war-movie-politics.html?searchResultPosition=1
One subject
seems to be unifying the right and the left today: Disunion.
From the
multiplex to social media, the prospect of America collapsing into armed
conflict has moved from being an idea on the tinfoil-hat fringes to an active
undercurrent of the country’s political conversation.
Voters at
campaign events bring up their worries that political division could lead to
large-scale political violence. Pollsters regularly ask about the idea in
opinion surveys. A cottage industry has arisen for speculative fiction, serious
assessments and forums about whether the country could be on the verge of a
modern-day version of the bloodiest war in American history.
And “Civil
War,” a dystopian action film about an alternative America plunged into a
bloody domestic conflict, has topped box office sales for two consecutive
weekends. The movie has outperformed expectations at theaters from Brownsville,
Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold
after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.
Of course,
the notion of a future civil war remains a mere notion. But, as another
presidential election approaches, it has suddenly become a hotly debated one,
reflecting the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics.
In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters have said they fear that the
country’s divides have grown so deep that they may lead not just to rhetorical
battles but actual ones.
“I
personally do not believe we will descend into a formal armed civil war,” said
Maya Wiley, who ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 and now serves as the
president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil
rights group that has fielded several polls on the topic. “But it’s in the air.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re seeing a very explicit fear of where
things could go.”
Such fear
has been stirred by the violence and chaos that subtly and overtly pervades
American politics. Violent threats against members of Congress have reached
record levels, as have reports of hate crimes in the country’s largest cities.
The husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, was beaten with a hammer
in his home. The criminal trial of a former president unfolded in a courthouse
while a man nearby doused himself with an accelerant and set his body on fire.
In his
first campaign speech of the year, President Biden warned of threats to the
country’s democracy and suggested that former President Donald J. Trump could
stoke future political violence.
“I make
this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American
democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency,” he
said in an address near Valley Forge, Pa., the site of one of the darkest
periods of the American Revolution.
Mr. Trump
has glorified the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots and maintained his false claims
that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When the former president was asked
last August by Tucker Carlson whether the country was headed to open conflict,
he declined to directly answer.
“I don’t
know,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen.
There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen, and that’s probably a bad
combination.”
The film
has no grounding in such partisan politics. The sides are unclear and the
ideology — a “Western Alliance” of secessionists from California and Texas — is
impossible to imagine given the stark partisan divides between the states. No
details are given about the cause of the conflict or the different visions each
side has for the future of the country. There’s no mention of Congress, the
courts or other civic institutions other than the presidency and references to
the F.B.I.
That
political vagueness was an intentional choice by the British writer and
director, Alex Garland, who began working on the film in 2020 before the Jan. 6
riot at the Capitol. “I’d say this film is about checks and balances:
polarization, division, the way populist politics leads toward extremism, where
extremism itself will end up and where the press is in all of that,” Mr.
Garland told The New York Times.
His goal
was to create a movie that could illustrate the risks of polarization — not
just in the United States but globally — and reach the widest audience
possible, said Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist who met with Mr. Garland
in the fall of 2021 and worked as a consultant for the film.
The opaque
politics have helped the movie attract an audience that bridges political
divides. Exit interviews conducted for A24, the studio that produced the movie,
found that half of moviegoers identified as “liberal” and half as
“conservative,” according to a person with knowledge of the film’s performance
in various markets.
The film
outperformed expectations in traditionally conservative markets like Oklahoma
City and Colorado Springs, as well as more liberal ones like Portland, Ore. In
Phoenix and Dallas, a majority of filmgoers identified as moderate or
conservative. The top reason viewers cited for seeing the movie was not an
interest in independent cinema or action films but the “political dystopian
story line.”
The
interest in political chaos tracks with a growing body of research showing a
dramatic uptick in public fears of violence.
The polling
by Ms. Wiley’s organization found that 53 percent of likely voters believed the
country was on the path to a second Civil War.
Other
surveys show related concerns. Forty-nine percent of adults said they expected
violence from the losing side in future elections, in a poll conducted by
CBS/YouGov this year. And a survey by The Associated Press/NORC Center for
Public Affairs Research found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican
adults said American democracy could be at risk depending on who won the next
election.
Jess
Morales Rocketto, a leader of Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, said
discussion of a civil war could stem from more of a feeling of insecurity than
a reality for voters.
“I think
that people believe we are on the brink of civil war,” she said. “When people
say stuff like civil war, World War III, what they mean is volatility and
instability. They are saying, ‘I feel unsafe.’”
But Barbara
F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego,
who studies civil wars, says the prospect of such a conflict isn’t just
metaphorical. She believes the country is facing a decade or two of political
instability and violence that could include assassinations of politicians or
judges and the rise of militia groups.
The movie’s
realistic portrayal of such violence taking place in deeply American settings —
a golf course, a roadside gas station, the Lincoln Memorial — put the scenes of
violence Americans associate more with foreign conflicts into sharper relief,
she said.
“This
notion that America could never have a civil war; we’ve already had a really,
really big one,” said Ms. Walter, the author of “How Civil Wars Start.”
“There’s a sense of naiveté, of innocence, that we’re too good for that sort of
stuff. We’re not.”
David
Mandel, a producer and writer on the television show “Veep,” said the most
successful movies and shows about American political life had a “reciprocal
relationship” with public opinion about politics. His show, a comedy about a
bumbling vice president that began during the Obama administration, was based
on the idea that politicians behaved differently in private, and that a
miscalculated public remark could lead to their political destruction. As
president, Mr. Trump routinely defied that norm, and “Veep” ended before he
left the White House.
“By a
couple of weeks into the Trump administration, there was no ‘behind closed
doors’ and there was no such thing as comeuppance,” Mr. Mandel said. “The show
became impossible to do.”
David W.
Blight, a historian at Yale University who specializes in the Civil War period,
said he did not believe the country stood on the precipice of another one. But
if the country were to reach that point, he said, the conflict could share more
with the movie version than the historical one.
The Civil
War was a regional and ideological crisis that featured some of the largest
armies ever formed, he said. A second one would most likely be far more local
and vigilante, and stirred by increasing polarization and institutional
mistrust.
“For the
last couple of years, there’s been all this chatter and a few books out about
whether the U.S. is on the brink of a new civil war, and you have to keep
telling people, ‘Well no, not in the way you may think about it,’” he said.
“Our real Civil War blinds us in that sense.”
Lisa Lerer
is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has
covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer
Inside the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S.
Inside
the Deal to Drop Trump’s $10 Billion Suit Against the I.R.S.
Discussions
among a group of lawyers with allegiance to the president were closely held.
Some senior White House officials were said to have felt blindsided as the
agreement took shape.
An
agreement to set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people deemed to have been
harmed by government “weaponization” and to grant tax benefits to President
Trump, his family and businesses was brokered by a tight-knit group of lawyers.
Alan
Feuer Andrew
Duehren Glenn
Thrush Ben
Protess Maggie
Haberman
By Alan
FeuerAndrew DuehrenGlenn ThrushBen Protess and Maggie Haberman
May 30,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-deal.html
Time was
running out.
President
Trump had sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion, and a federal judge was pressing the
Justice Department to explain how it could muster an independent defense of the
agency against the man who ultimately controlled it.
Behind
the scenes, the job of addressing the vexing problem of how to settle the suit
fell to a tight-knit group of lawyers, all of whom had allegiance to Mr. Trump.
On one
side of the talks was a Justice Department run by Todd Blanche, the acting
attorney general who once served as Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.
On the
other were the president’s private lawyers, among them Boris Epshteyn, who was
a former client of Mr. Blanche’s. Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in
moving forward the deal to end the suit, coordinating and holding discussions
with all of the sides involved: Mr. Trump, the president’s personal lawyers and
Justice Department officials, according to multiple people familiar with the
matter.
The
discussions were so closely held that some senior White House officials told
others that they were blindsided, learning of them only once the agreement was
nearly complete.
In the
end, the lawyers’ solution did not give Mr. Trump what his lawsuit had
demanded, which was simply to move funds from the Treasury Department into his
own pocket. But the agreement that was reached was still a big victory for the
president and his allies: It set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people deemed to
have been harmed by so-called government “weaponization” — possibly including
hundreds of rioters charged with storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and
released Mr. Trump and his businesses from potentially costly I.R.S. audits.
This
article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who discussed
internal deliberations about the I.R.S. suit on the condition of anonymity.
The White
House did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Epshteyn declined to
comment.
A
spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that anyone who believed they were
a victim of government weaponization could apply for money from the fund,
claiming that many people had been victimized by the Biden administration.
Much is
still unknown about how the arrangement came about. But the plan drafted by a
group of Trump allies posed conflicts of interest that are remarkable, even for
an administration riddled with them.
As
questions have mounted about the nature of the deal, the federal judge who
oversaw the lawsuit, Kathleen M. Williams, took the extraordinary step on
Friday of revisiting the case, asking whether the parties had deceived her.
When the
details of the agreement were first revealed two weeks ago, Democrats and
former government officials lodged accusations of corruption and self-dealing,
and even some Republicans reacted with scornful disbelief. Some G.O.P. senators
were so angry they abandoned plans to approve a measure to finance the
administration’s immigration crackdown.
Within
days of the agreement becoming public, and before the judge raised questions
about it, senior administration officials began preparing to get rid of the
fund amid the intense blowback. Those discussions were reported earlier by The
Wall Street Journal.
But while
the agreement appeared to have emerged abruptly, it fused two ideas that had
been kicking around in Mr. Trump’s circle for years: a desire by him and his
family to avoid extensive tax audits, and a longing by his allies to obtain
financial restitution for legal wrongs they claimed to have suffered during the
Biden administration.
In its
broad strokes, the plan was in keeping with other maneuvers by Mr. Trump. As
president, he has often used the levers of power at his command to serve
himself at a moment when he still maintains control over the government,
including having the United States accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar
that he could fly as president and intend to take later. But in establishing a
fund that would involve billions in taxpayer money, the deal stands alone.
The
president himself has said little about how the agreement came together or who
played a role in resolving the suit, which faulted the I.R.S. for the leak of
his tax information to The New York Times during his first term. The closest he
has come in recent days was a post on social media in which he declared that he
had given up “a lot of money” by “allowing” the fund to be created.
“I could
have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the
equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” Mr. Trump
wrote. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil,
corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”
Trump v.
Trump
Mr.
Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. landed at the Justice Department with a thud
in late January.
By early
spring, lawyers there were already wrestling with the legal dilemma the
president’s pleading had created.
After
all, to defend the I.R.S. against Mr. Trump, the department would have to fight
a sitting president who was technically in charge of the agency and who
demanded total loyalty from his subordinates.
Department
lawyers were not the only ones who had identified this problem. Judge Williams,
an Obama appointee who sits in Miami, had also homed in on it, wondering
whether there was actually a conflict to adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was
effectively on both sides of the suit.
The suit
contended that the I.R.S. had not done enough to prevent a contractor for the
agency, Charles Littlejohn, from leaking to the news media reams of Mr. Trump’s
tax information, along with the returns of hundreds of other very wealthy
Americans during the president’s first term in office. Even though Mr.
Littlejohn was prosecuted by the Biden administration and sentenced to five
years in prison, Mr. Trump argued he was owed $10 billion by the I.R.S.
At first,
there was a hope inside the Justice Department that lawyers would respond to
the suit with a procedural maneuver to side step or delay the case. One option
department lawyers quietly discussed was to ask Judge Williams to put the suit
on hold until after Mr. Trump left office.
But that
never happened. And it left Mr. Blanche and his team in a tight spot: They did
not want the Justice Department to go into court and fight the suit, as it
normally would, but also did not want to settle it by paying Mr. Trump
directly, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Ending
the case by funneling taxpayer money straight to the president struck them as
politically untenable. Some department officials even worried that doing so
could, under a future Democratic administration, expose them to a criminal
investigation of conspiracy to defraud the government.
Inside
the I.R.S., the suit was treated more or less as business as usual, even though
the plaintiff was the president. Lawyers at the agency followed normal
procedures for responding to claims and prepared a 25-page memo for the Justice
Department, outlining their views of the case.
In the
memo, the I.R.S. recommended that the department move to dismiss the suit,
pointing to two main problems: It had been filed too late and had wrongly
blamed the I.R.S. for the actions of Mr. Littlejohn.
I.R.S.
officials sent the memo to colleagues in the Treasury Department but it remains
unclear whether those Treasury officials ever passed it on to the Justice
Department. In fact, no Trump administration lawyer responded to the
president’s suit at all — or even made an appearance on the court docket.
What
finally pushed Judge Williams into action was a request on April 17 from one of
Mr. Trump’s private lawyers, Alejandro Brito — not from a government lawyer —
to delay all proceedings in the case for three months. A week later, the judge
effectively ordered the Justice Department to tell her whether it intended to
defend the I.R.S., giving the department until May 20 to provide an answer.
The
pressure of that deadline set off a scramble, as lawyers on both sides of the
suit started looking for a way to resolve the case and avoid further scrutiny
from the judge.
Central
in the negotiations was Trent McCotter, Mr. Blanche’s senior deputy and a
rising star in the department, according to people familiar with the talks. He
served as one of the administration’s chief interlocutors with personal lawyers
in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including Daniel Epstein, who often works with Mr.
Epshteyn and once served as a special assistant to Mr. Trump during his first
term in the White House.
Ultimately,
the discussions about settling the I.R.S. suit were combined with talks about
ending two other unusual claims previously filed by Mr. Epstein, who works for
America First Legal, the outside group co-founded in 2021 by Stephen Miller,
Mr. Trump’s powerful White House adviser. Those claims demanded that the
Justice Department pay the president about $230 million in compensation for the
investigation into possible ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign, as well
as the well-publicized F.B.I. search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for
classified documents in 2022.
The idea
that emerged was a global settlement of all of the claims that would push Mr.
Trump away from the politically damaging effort to take money for himself.
Instead it would create a fund for his allies and supporters — including the
pardoned Jan. 6 rioters — who believed they had been wronged in the courts by
previous Democratic administrations.
Mr.
McCotter proposed a patriotic marketing gimmick, setting the fund’s amount at
the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, according to people familiar with the idea.
Still, it
was not entirely a new idea.
In
mid-2025, Ed Martin, a longtime advocate for the Jan. 6 rioters who was leading
the Justice Department’s pardon office and a special working group intended to
counteract government weaponization, had proposed a plan to address what he
believed was mistreatment of Trump supporters by the legal system, according to
people familiar with the matter. Mr. Martin envisioned a “truth commission” of
sorts that would assess accusations of misconduct by the Justice Department and
possibly make payouts to worthy claimants.
He even
floated the idea to senior administration officials like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
the health and human services secretary who has long complained that Americans
were harmed by the government’s response to Covid-19, according to a person
with direct knowledge of the exchange.
Mr.
Blanche, who has often clashed with Mr. Martin, rejected the idea, the person
said. But with the May 20 deadline quickly approaching, the Justice Department,
at Mr. McCotter’s urging, came up with its own plan to redress the supposed
past wrongs suffered by the president’s supporters.
The plan
was closely based on an Obama-era case called Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a
class-action lawsuit that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Native
American farmers to settle accusations of government discrimination. Mr.
McCotter took the idea to the Office of Legal Counsel, which offers advice on
the law to Justice Department leaders. The office, run by T. Elliot Gaiser, a
former clerk for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., blessed the proposal, agreeing
that Keepseagle could serve as a model.
When the
plan was made public, it faced an avalanche of criticism. The Treasury
Department’s top lawyer, a Trump appointee, resigned.
Among the
loudest critics were former Justice Department lawyers who had worked on the
Keepseagle case, who pointed out that the Keepseagle settlement was overseen by
a federal judge after years of litigation and analysis of the claims and
evidence.
The
resolution to Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S., by contrast, was reached in
private by lawyers loyal to the president and without any judicial oversight.
Appearing
on CNN in recent days, Mr. Blanche was asked directly who came up with the
terms of the agreement and said that there had been negotiations between Mr.
Trump’s “outside counsel” and the Justice Department.
But he
quickly added, “Not me.”
Broad
Immunity From Audits
There was
more.
Even as
the two sides were hashing out the contours of the fund, there were also
discussions about a second agreement that would end the lawsuit: a plan to give
the Trump family and their businesses broad protection from I.R.S.
investigations of tax returns they had already filed.
The tax
immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal
settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of
all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the
tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million.
That
fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected —
starting in about 2010. He justified the refund by declaring huge business
losses, including on his tower in Chicago.
Early in
Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the matter was put on hold, but it
came back to life before he left office.
More
recently, the company had entered settlement talks with the agency, laying the
groundwork for a potential resolution, according to a person with knowledge of
the matter.
Now, it
seemed, the audit would vanish.
Acting as
a cheerleader for the overall plan, including the tax deal, was Mr. Epshteyn,
Mr. Trump’s top outside legal adviser who has been close to the president for
about a decade, both when he was in and out of office.
Mr.
Epshteyn played a significant role in moving the proposals forward, according
to multiple people familiar with the matter, discussing the issue with Mr.
Trump and circulating drafts of the tax agreement to Trump advisers.
While the
origins of the tax maneuver remain somewhat obscure, the Justice Department
began to assess the proposal about a week before Judge William’s May 20
deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the questions
raised was whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would
run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction
of the president or his aides.
The tax
proposal did not end up appearing in the initial document that declared the
lawsuit resolved and described the details of the compensation fund. That
document was signed by the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Stanley
Woodward Jr., who had worked with Mr. Blanche on Mr. Trump’s defense team and
represented several of the president’s close aides in various investigations.
In a
curious twist, the tax addendum was posted, without fanfare, on the Justice
Department’s website one day after the terms of the main agreement were
released. It was a murky piece of writing, full of long sentences stuffed with
subordinate clauses and the Trumpian use of words in capital letters. Only Mr.
Blanche, and no one from the I.R.S., signed it.
The
details of the fund were also somewhat inscrutable. Although the Justice
Department had explicitly stated that the Trump Organization and the Trump
family were ineligible for the fund, one confusing clause appeared to open the
door for them to file claims.
Indeed,
officials at the Trump Organization briefly discussed whether to do so,
according to people with knowledge of the matter. No decision was made. On
Friday, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily froze the fund.
Devlin
Barrett and Russ Buettner contributed reporting.
Alan
Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the
criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former
President Donald J. Trump.
Andrew
Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
Glenn
Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written
about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and
prisons.
Ben
Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President
Trump.
Subscrever:
Mensagens (Atom)
