If you read our first piece on this, you already know the shape of what happened: the President sued the IRS for $10 billion, then — through a Justice Department he controls, run by his former personal lawyer — settled the case with himself before a judge could rule on whether it was even real. The deal created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "Anti-Weaponization Fund" for people the administration deems victims of political persecution, and quietly barred the IRS from ever auditing his past tax returns.
So the natural next question, the one being asked in courtrooms and on the Senate floor this week, is simpler and more urgent: can any of it be undone?
The honest answer is that there are only two doors, and both are heavier than they look.
First, the problem in one sentence
Out-of-court settlements happen all the time, and there is nothing inherently illegal about one. What makes this one extraordinary is that the usual safeguard never engaged. Normally a judge reviews a settlement of a federal lawsuit and confirms that two genuinely opposed parties reached a genuine resolution. Here, because the President sat on both sides — plaintiff, and boss of every official defending the government — and because the case was dismissed before the court ruled, no judge ever signed off. That is the whole vulnerability. With the judiciary skipped, the only ways left to challenge the deal are to get a court to take it up anyway, or to get Congress to legislate it out of existence.
Door one: the courts
Someone has to sue, and someone already has.
This week, two officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer now running for Congress, and Daniel Hodges, an active Metropolitan Police officer — filed a federal lawsuit to block the fund. Their complaint names Trump, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and the argument is blunt: no statute authorizes the fund, the settlement underneath it is a sham, and the whole structure was a misappropriation of taxpayer money built to reward the President's allies. Because clemency restored gun rights to many January 6 defendants, the officers argue the fund would do something darker than waste money — it would bankroll and embolden the very people who once threatened their lives.
It is a serious case, brought by sympathetic plaintiffs. It also runs straight into the wall that kills most challenges like this before they reach the merits: standing. To sue in federal court, you cannot simply object that the government did something illegal; you have to show that it injured you, specifically and concretely, in a way a court can fix. Whether two officers' fear of future violence clears that bar is exactly the kind of question that can end a lawsuit in its first weeks. Ninety-three House Democrats filed a brief trying to get the original case dismissed and scrutinized, but they face the same gravity. The courthouse door is open. Getting through it is another matter.
Door two: Congress
The cleaner fix is legislative. Congress holds the power of the purse, and Congress can simply forbid the money from moving. Representative Jamie Raskin has already introduced a bill that would prohibit any federal funds from backing the settlement and bar convicted January 6 participants from collecting a cent.
There is one problem with that route, and it is arithmetic. Democrats are not the majority. A bill that blocks the fund cannot pass on Democratic votes alone, which means the entire question reduces to a single one: will Republicans break with the President?
The surprising part: some of them are
This is where the story stopped being predictable.
In the House, Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, who holds a Pennsylvania swing seat, said flatly that he intends to try to kill the fund, and sent Blanche a letter warning that the arrangement represents a dangerous backsliding in government transparency. In the Senate, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana argued that ordinary Americans worried about rent and groceries should not be financing a nearly $2 billion pot for the President and his allies, and said if there must be a settlement, the administration should bring it to Congress. Thom Tillis of North Carolina was harshest of all, calling the fund a "payout pot for punks" and saying many of the people in line to collect belong in prison, not in line for a check.
And the revolt did more than generate quotes. When Blanche met with Senate Republicans to reassure them and handed over a one-page explainer, the opposite of reassurance happened. By the end of the week, GOP leaders had to pull their own reconciliation bill — a roughly $70 billion immigration-enforcement package that was a presidential priority — because rank-and-file Republicans were ready to attach amendments killing the fund. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who acknowledged the White House never consulted him before rolling the fund out, sent the chamber home for recess. They take it up again June 1. That is not rhetoric. That is leverage, exercised.
Why breaking with him still costs something
It would be a mistake to read all of this as a party turning on its leader. The President's machinery for punishing defection is intact and on display this very week. He endorsed a primary challenger against Cassidy, who then failed to survive his runoff. He spent a Friday morning tearing into Tillis on Truth Social, branding him a "Nitpicker" and a "QUITTER." The message to every other Republican is not subtle: criticism has a price.
Which surfaces the quiet tell in the list of critics. Several of the loudest — Tillis, who is retiring; Cassidy, who has already lost his primary — are men with little left to lose. The harder test is whether Republicans who still have to face the President's voters next year will hold the line once the cameras move on. Outrage during a recess is cheap. A floor vote in June is not.
The 1976 law that is actually a 1998 law
There is one more thread, and it runs underneath everything: the question of whether the audit bar — the part that quietly shields the President's old tax returns — is even legal.
Here it helps to be precise, because two different laws keep getting blurred together. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 strengthened Section 6103 of the tax code, which makes your tax returns confidential. That is the law the original leaker broke. The law that governs political interference came later: after the Nixon tapes revealed a president scheming to sic the IRS on his enemies, Congress in 1998 added Section 7217, which makes it a crime — punishable by up to five years in prison — for the President, the Vice President, White House staff, or cabinet officials to request or interfere with an audit of any specific taxpayer.
Read that list again, because it contains the loophole. Section 7217 covers nearly every senior official in the executive branch with one deliberate exception: the Attorney General. And it was the Attorney General, Todd Blanche, who signed the order shutting down the audits of the President's returns. The carve-out that exists so the Justice Department can lawfully settle tax litigation is precisely the door this deal walked through.
That is also why the President's strangest public habit this week suddenly makes sense. Twice he insisted he "wasn't involved in the settlement" and knew little about the fund. Then, days later, he posted that he had personally given up a fortune by "allowing" the fund to go forward. The White House says there is no discrepancy. But the distinction is not vanity — it is potentially the line between legal and criminal. If the President directed the deal that closed his own audits, Section 7217 is squarely in play. If only his Attorney General did, the carve-out may shield it. A man insisting he had nothing to do with his own enormous benefit is not being modest. He is, perhaps, building a defense.
The other side
The administration's case is not nothing, and a fair accounting has to include it. Blanche has framed the fund as a lawful, systematic process to compensate Americans genuinely wronged by government overreach, and when pressed on payouts to people who assaulted officers, he argued that people who hurt police receive settlements "all the time." The associate attorney general who signed the original agreement has urged everyone that it is too early to judge how the fund will operate and pledged to recuse himself from claims involving his former clients. Those are real commitments. The trouble is that the fund's terms — who qualifies, what "weaponization" even means — remain undefined, which means the public is being asked to trust the discretion of the same branch that stands to benefit from it.
What it comes down to
Strip away the noise and the picture is clear-eyed, if not comforting. The lawsuits are sincere and may not survive the standing test. The legislation is real and cannot pass without Republicans who have every personal incentive to fold. The legal question about the audits is genuine and hinges on a single carve-out and on what the President actually did behind closed doors — something he is now conspicuously eager to deny.
But here is what is already different from a week ago. The deal did not slide through quietly, which is what self-dealing relies on. It is being challenged in a federal courtroom, it has sunk a presidential priority on the Senate floor, and it has a sitting Attorney General defending a one-page memo to a roomful of skeptical members of his own party. The checks the Constitution built to catch exactly this kind of maneuver were bypassed by design. What we are watching now is whether the people left standing — two police officers, a handful of Republicans willing to take the hit, and a calendar that runs out June 1 — can rebuild a check the system was supposed to provide automatically.
The whistle never blew on the field. Now everyone is arguing about it in the parking lot.
