u/FinTecGeek

Now that I have had time to truly review the entirety of the "case" here, I have a few thoughts to share on it for those who enjoy the finer details on things.

1. The first item is really whether or not Trump had a real "legal hook" in the first place to bring a suit, even if he were not President. I.e., if Trump were just a standard Plaintiff in this case who had never been President at all, is there anything here. To answer that question, we have to look at the statute he sued under. § 7431(a)(1), which relies on interpretations by IRS officers and employees of §6103, grants a form of compensable damages. However, it is cabined to actions related to IRS officers and employees. Littlejohn, who no one disputes in this case "stole and leaked data without authorization" was a contractor at the time, not an officer or even an employee. In summary, Trump has a "factual hook" sank in regarding his tax documents having been leaked, but there is no "legal hook" in the sense that the relevant statute their legal theory of the case was presented under does not expose the US government to any lawsuits at all.
2. If Littlejohn were an employee and not a contractor, does that change anything in this case? First of all, most likely not. The statute in question is quite narrow, and would cover a rather specific scenario where an IRS employee "knowingly did something that violates procedures in §6103" as part of their duties on the job. However, this is not actually what happened. What did happen is that Littlejohn stole the information and exfiltrated it, which was a criminal matter and the DOJ pursued him as a criminal. This was not that Littlejohn received an open records request at CNN and erroneously answered it with a full tax return, in violation of §6103. Rather, Littlejohn was acting completely outside of the scope of any official duty or capacity at the IRS at all, in a criminal way, and nothing in §7431(a)(1) actually creates a liability for the US government in that scenario at all. Trump could plausibly argue that this is still a problem of supervision, of failure to safeguard his data, of improper processes and procedures at the IRS. However, if he does that, he has fully left the statute he tried to sue under behind, because that statute is not about data security, data privacy, or poor management of the agency. There is no remedy for anyone, anywhere in the world for those issues.
3. Trump is suing for 10 billion dollars, but §7431(a)(1) is narrow and cabined to specific types of actual damages. Whether or not punitive damages could be available is another question to be asked between the adversaries of the case and receive rulings to that effect, but most often not when you are suing the US government in district court. Punitive damages under these facts would not be anywhere near 10 billion dollars if they come into being. This is quite a good barometer that the statute they are relying upon to file a suit has little to do with the case they are seeking to prosecute. In fact, it appears that Trump's actual theory is an "omnibus" theory of a weaponized government, sent after him in particular by his political foe or foes. There is no liability for the US government in that kind of case. That type of case does not exist, and the government would need to do little (or nothing) to defend against it except to say "you are not entitled to damages at all here, and even if you were, you are not trying your case with clean hands when seeking to attach 10 billion dollars in damages to a §7431 case, as the statute is narrow and does not cover 99% of the damages you seek compensation for, including reputational, political, etc."
4. There are no adversaries before the court. If you only take one thing away from this, it is that under the Trump admin's widely adopted legal theory of "unitary executive," these hypothetical swim lanes between various executive agencies and the Oval Office do not exist in any way. If you read §7431, it dictates that litigants go to a US District Court (an Article III court) to try their case. This is a problem for Trump in this case that consumes the entire case before it can start. That is, everyone who can put forth a legal theory to defend the US government in this case answers to Trump. This functionally means that there is no adversity in the case, there are no adversaries here to petition for anything, or respond to anything, or for that matter to even have hearings before a judge. The thing actually stopping the case from being moot is that Trump does not have the authority to write himself a 10 billion dollar check to satisfy his own lawsuit. And so, this case exists only as a way to short-circuit that problem of not having any power over the federal purse to pay his own claim.

Remaining questions are whether or not a "settlement," especially one that involved such convoluted concessions as to award almost 2 billion in monetary damages to parties who were never part of litigation or before the court in this case at all, and had the dramatic addendum shielding Trump and hundreds of his associates from IRS audits in broad ways can actually "exist." I mean, I know that this is a confounding question for some, because the DOJ says this settlement exists, they did a "press release" about it, etc. However, the actual root of the settlement (the litigation that led to it) is not, for the reasons discussed above, actually "real" and we will have to "wait and see" if anyone indeed benefits from it either financially or legally in the case of it shielding against any actual IRS actions against Trump, his two co-litigants in the case (his sons) or especially the people who were never parties to the litigation or before the court.

Quick recap: Trump, while President, sued his own IRS for 10 billion dollars for the "leak" of his tax return by a government contractor some years back. The DOJ made quite clear in their "settlement" with the President he is not entitled to any damages from this, however they made the truly strange decision to pay out other people not part of the litigation at any point 1.776 billion dollars to compensate them for "lawfare" and "government weaponization."

First note is that everyone reading this can probably think of a reason to file a claim. The links to reality were so weak with Trump's original case that pretty much anything goes if you yourself wanted to file a claim for a slice of this 1.776-billion-dollar pie. Of course, the Trump administration says that the fund can be "audited" but one has to ask, when they hand-select the five people running disbursements, what would actually be the motivation to say anything negative about those disbursements? I suspect any claim that looks like it was paid out to a person who is (at least rhetorically) an enemy of Biden-era policies will earn that group of 5 another gold star.

Next, we get to the actual concept at play here. Trump is pointing to some kind of "precedent" established under Obama for this. It is true (famously) that Obama employed the "sue and settle" method to affect certain environmental and other even more nebulous ends. However, this was not the going precedent. Trump himself along with every person who he has ever aligned with have spent a decade criticizing that conduct, and Republicans in Congress have said every possible negative thing there is to say about that conduct. That's not even to mention the criticisms of this conduct Obama received from those in his own party who were not comfortable with it. Not that this is a "consistency" attack on Trump. He is inconsistent as a baseline character trait. It is just interesting though to hear the actual plain-language attacks on the Obama conduct of the past make the full arc to now become the defense of the "present thing." I'm not sure I've ever seen any serious person try and do that.

In conclusion, I don't really know any American who has anything to lose by filing a claim and trying to get a slice of the pie they've sat up in the window here. The settlement's "stated aims" in theory open it up to claims for any (literally any) single thing, pair of things, group of things the government ever did under Biden which you could argue affected you in an adverse way. That would be emotionally, ideologically, politically, financially, etc. And the great news is, when they run out of funds from the obvious "run on the bank" they are about to have for any and every claim ever conceived of, they can start issuing "apologies" in place of a check.

Also, somehow, evidently Trump and his associates (still trying to get details on exact scope of this) are forever, for all of their remaining lives, indemnified from any type of IRS audit or investigation. This may not seem as strange to some of you as it does to me, so to make this clear, basically NO contract or settlement ever covers FUTURE unknowable conduct as immune. Past stuff, sure, but not ongoing, future coverage.

U.S. Foreclosure Filings Spike 18%: Delaware Emerges as a Hot Spot

We just sold our house and bought a new one a few months ago. Our house sold above asking, as is, we got several offers within an hour. It seemed like the people buying had been searching desperately for a house and our open house had 57 people show up in 4 hours. Now, all of a sudden, two homes in our more upscale neighborhood we just moved to are sitting, getting no showings, one dropped price by 20K, the other just delisted because of what they said were "lowball offers." Now I see an article about record foreclosures. Am I just out of the loop on this after just a few months? With so few homes being built in most places, it's hard for me to figure out how people would be managing to get upside down or not be able to sell a house.