US judge voids Trump settlement with IRS granting him protection from tax audits FRANCE 24

This settlement between Donald Trump and the US government is now legally invalid. The agreement had granted the president immunity from tax audits and set up a fund to compensate Trump allies who believed they'd been unjustly persecuted. On Monday, federal judge Kathleen Williams argued the initial lawsuit was filed in bad faith and the result was collusive. She found the two parties did not have opposing interests. Trump, the plaintiff, was president and therefore in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, the defendant. This was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to address grievances not defined in the law. Nearly every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax records, but Trump became the exception when he refused to do so during his first term. In 2019, a contractor leaked more than two decades of his tax information to the press. In January of this year, Trump, his sons Eric and Donald Jr., and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, alleging the government failed to prevent the unlawful disclosure of the president's tax returns. The settlement's anti-weaponization fund was quickly scrapped after it sparked uproar among both Democrats and Republicans, and now the IRS could move forward with future audits into Trump's tax claims as the judge's decision prevents parties involved in the case from referring to the settlement or citing its terms in future proceedings.