Donald Trump is working to protect himself from being prosecuted once he leaves office
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Tierney SneedUPDATED 4 HR AGO
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President Donald Trump arrives to speak at Rockland Community College, on May 22, in Suffern, New York. Alex Brandon/AP
The deal that President Donald Trump reached with his own administration to set-up an “anti-weaponization fund” for his allies is the latest example of how his second stint in the White House has focused on undermining checks on presidential power and insulating himself from future investigations.
The agreement highlights the new hurdles Trump is erecting that that could stymie probes by congressional Democrats, successor administrations and even authorities outside the federal government.
On several fronts, Trump is dismantling post-Watergate transparency mandates, attacking Congress’ power of the purse, rewarding loyalists accused of committing crimes that support his causes, and assaulting independent agencies and executive branch watchdogs.
Trump has done so by capitalizing on and accelerating an expansion of presidential power embraced by the conservative Supreme Court, and by blowing through norms and political gravity that reined in other presidents, former government attorneys and constitutional scholars told CNN.
When Congress in the 1970s passed constraints on the presidency in response to the scandals of the Richard Nixon administration, courts at the time backed those laws.
“What we’ve now seen is this dramatic pendulum swing in favor of just more executive power that’s consolidated within the president himself, that’s no longer dispersed,” said University of Southern California Gould School of Law Professor Adam Zimmerman. “We also see someone who’s willing to use that power to push that power to the limit.”
Could Trump's foes benefit from "anti-weaponization" fund?
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The latest gambit – a controversial agreement arising from a legally dubious lawsuit Trump brought against the IRS – is more sweeping in its protections for the president than initially reported. Its language could shield Trump from more than just tax-related probes. And the broad criteria for whom could benefit from the nearly $1.8 billion fund could incentivize individuals to not comply with congressional investigations into the president.
“The announcement of this fund really crystallizes so many trends we’ve seen in this term, which is the president using, corruptly using, the power of the government to punish his enemies and reward his friends, including friends who would break the law on his behalf,” said Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, an organization of conservatives who oppose Trump.
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the fund in a statement that said it “was created to specifically hear and redress claims of lawfare and seek accountability for any American who was unfairly targeted for their beliefs.”
“Those who are upset about the Anti-Weaponization Fund should remind themselves that we are in this position because the President’s tax returns were illegally leaked, and previous administrations used their law enforcement agencies to relentlessly persecute their political adversaries,” the spokesperson said.
Immunity that extends beyond tax audits
The tax amnesty the new deal extends to the president, his business and his family was made public with an addendum quietly published the day after the original agreement was announced. In defending it, DOJ officials have described the arrangement as the IRS letting go of past audits of the president in exchange for a dismissal of the $10 billion case Trump brought against the federal government for improper disclosure of his tax returns.
“Every single settlement, both sides give away something,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who signed the deal and who was Trump’s personal lawyer during the Biden-era criminal prosecutions against him, told CNN last week.
The language applies not just to potential claims against Trump brought by IRS or Treasury, but by any agency, though the Justice Department clarified to CNN that the focus is on civil matters, rather than criminal. The Department has also stressed that the agreement covers audits or claims related to Trump conduct that predates the May 19 agreement.
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But the deal’s language forbids not just tax-related reviews, but any government claims related to Trump pre-settlement conduct that fits under the agreement’s conception of “lawfare” or “weaponization.”
Those terms have no legal meaning, but another part of the agreement defines those concepts in extremely broad terms, meaning the deal seeks to forbid all sorts of federal enforcement actions or reviews that could be aimed at past conduct by Trump, his family or his businesses.
Carrots and sticks for participation in probes into Trump
Already, Trump and his Justice Department have punished those who facilitated investigations into his conduct, while wiping away the prosecutions of his supporters.
“He’s sending the signal louder every day, that if you commit a crime on his behalf, you have nothing to worry about. In fact, you’ll be celebrated, and perhaps rewarded financially,” said Nunziata, who previously served as a lawyer in several Republican Senate offices.
Capitol riot prosecutors and DOJ employees involved in former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations were fired. The Justice Department dismissed the contempt-of-Congress case against former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, for his defiance of a House January 6 probe subpoena. Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James – both the faces of high-profile investigations into Trump – have been targeted with criminal charges.
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Trump granted clemency to everyone charged or convicted in the Capitol attack, and now top administration officials are not ruling out those defendants – including those convicted of assaulting law enforcement – receiving payouts from the new fund.
“It’s fair to say that this administration uses a lot of sticks and a lot of carrots,” Zimmerman said, calling the president’s pardon power “an extremely large carrot” and the new fund “carrot cake.”
Zimmerman, who worked on the compensation fund for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack, pointed to the influence Trump will have over the commission that doles out compensation. The president can fire at will the board’s members, who will be chosen by his attorney general.
“It is a completely fair concern that this could be part of a significant set of incentives for people not to potentially participate in future government investigations, or even the legislative hearings that, we might imagine, would take place if the Democrats took the House or the Senate,” Zimmerman said.
New hurdles to future scrutiny
When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he did so with the benefit of a sweeping 2023 presidential immunity precedent from the Supreme Court that wasn’t on the books for his first term. That Supreme Cout case dealt with Trump’s immunity in criminal prosecutions of conduct that could be connected to official presidential acts. But the Justice Department is also now pushing back against the civil lawsuits against the president related to the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.
Meanwhile, DOJ is working on regulations that would sideline investigations by state bar associations into department lawyers for attorney disciplinary proceedings.
When those proceedings were brought against attorneys who worked on Trump’s 2020 election reversal plots, they revealed new details about how the schemes played out. The outside groups that have filed the bar complaints against Trump-aligned attorneys have argued the proceedings will discourage lawyers from breaking ethics rules to help the president. But the administration and its allies, and even some Trump critics, argue that the ethics proceedings amount to an abuse of a disciplinary process.
The Justice Department – defending its proposal to suspend state bar investigations while its own disciplinary proceedings are underway – argues that because it has its own ethics and professional responsibility team, the agency should have the ability to review its own employees’ conduct first.
Internal checks on the chopping block
As the administration has sought to blunt investigations that could touch on the president, it’s barreled through the post-Watergate reforms that created internal checks and oversight mechanisms within the executive branch.
At the beginning of his second term, the president fired several inspectors general, who are tasked by Congress with investigating fraud, waste and abuse within their agencies. Those offices were the source of multiple probes that scrutinized the conduct of the first Trump administration and led to congressional investigations, including the 2019 impeachment proceedings against the president.
Earlier this year, a Justice Department office charged with giving legal advice to the executive branch told the president he was no longer obligated to follow the Presidential Records Act, which requires that White House documents be preserved and ultimately turned over to the National Archives for public use.
Under the DOJ’s theory for the law’s supposed unconstitutionality – a theory a federal judge has already rejected – Congress could never pass a statute that would “encroach” on the performance of a president’s executive power. The DOJ’s memo cast doubt on the idea that Congress could have a “legitimate” reason to study the inner-workings of a White House for the purpose of drafting laws.
Recent boosts to presidential power from the Supreme Court
The administration’s challenge of statutes that serve as a check on the presidency is in step with a shift under the Supreme Court in favor of the so-called “unitary executive” theory of presidential power.
The conservative majority – three members of which Trump appointed – has let Trump remove without cause heads of ostensibly independent agencies, trampling over limits placed by Congress. The Supreme Court is now considering a case that could decide on the merits the scope of a president’s firing powers.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority last year also gave the administration the greenlight in an emergency order to withhold $4 billion in foreign aid funding – diminishing another check that Congress has on the presidency.
The new anti-weaponization fund fits “within a pattern of looking for ways to be able to spend money without Congress, to get greater executive control over federal spending,” said Zachary Price, a constitutional law professor and University of California San Francisco Law School.
Ironically, in its pushback to oversight from the Democratic House during Trump first presidency, the administration argued that courts need not order compliance with congressional subpoenas because lawmakers could use their spending powers to encourage participation in the probes. Now, if Democrats regain the gavel after the midterms, their tools for constraining the president will be weaker than what they had at their disposal with the 2019 House takeover.
“It takes a certain amount of honorable conduct for our government to work,’” said Doug Letter, a former longtime DOJ attorney who then served as general counsel for the Democratic-led US House in Trump’s first term.
Trump’s conduct goes “so far beyond what anybody thought when putting together the Constitution and our system of government,” Letter said. “I am not sure what the real check is, other than impeachment.”
CNN’s Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
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