President Donald Trump insists he was not involved with an IRS settlement that creates an unsupervised $1.8 billion fund that potentially hands out millions of dollars to people who attempted to overthrow the 2020 U.S. election. But Zeteo reports the president is lying about his lack of involvement.“After news broke this week that Donald Trump’s administration had agreed to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies, in order to settle the president’s completely bogus lawsuit, Trump got busy telling a blatant lie,” reports Zeteo writers Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng. “I wasn’t involved in the settlement,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “I could have been involved, but I didn’t choose to be.” Only he was, reports sources inside the administration.“[T]hree sources with knowledge of the matter tell Zeteo that Trump and his advisers signed off on the fund, received updates in recent months as so-called ‘negotiations’ continued, and that the president could have stopped the deal at any time.“He was very involved,” one of the sources said. “He was kept in the loop, White House officials were kept updated on progress. Donald Trump isn’t doing the busy work himself, but he was involved in it as much as Tim Cook is involved with Apple … or Elon [Musk] with SpaceX.”The Justice Department announced the deal in exchange for Trump dropping his lawsuit against his own government for an IRS leak of his tax returns during his first presidency. That information revealed the president paid very little taxes, and it set the stage for follow-up news reports that put Trump in a shadow of suspicion.But critics were already lining up to derail his suit. Zeteo reports the judge overseeing Trump’s case against the IRS “had expressed concern that the parties – Trump and his administration – might not be ‘sufficiently adverse’ for there to be any actual case or controversy, since Trump ‘is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.’ But before the judge could rule on that question, the Trump DOJ quickly announced a settlement, which ended the case but paved the way for this new contentious fund.“And while Trump’s administration has claimed the president won’t personally benefit from the settlement, the deal came with a special late addendum, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to wipe out any audits and investigations Trump and his business empire could be facing in relation to his tax returns,” reports Zeteo. “That’s convenient, since the Trump Organization reportedly could have owed $100 million, depending on the outcome of a long-running dispute with the IRS, which believed Trump had tried to write off the same losses twice.”The White House blasted Zeteo’s report in a response to the organization's request for comment.“Per usual the liberal hacks at Zeteo have no idea what they’re talking about, nor do their so-called sources,” an unnamed White House spokesperson said.
