There is a particular kind of corruption that is hardest to prosecute, not because it is subtle or secret, but because it happens in plain sight, backed by the full legal weight of the institution that is supposed to prevent it. It does not require bribes passed in envelopes or kickbacks buried in offshore accounts. It requires only a signature — a settlement agreement, authorized by the Department of Justice, directing the United States Treasury to transfer millions of dollars to people who once committed misconduct against the public trust. The mechanism is legitimate. The outcomes are not.
Since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has paid out more than $8.5 million in taxpayer funds to settle legal claims filed by the president's political supporters and former allies, according to a report by The Washington Post published in late April. The total may rise substantially higher: the Department of Justice is reportedly considering settling a lawsuit filed by Trump himself against the Internal Revenue Service demanding at least $10 billion in damages — a sum that would exceed the entire annual budget request for the IRS. One settlement option under review, the New York Times reported last week, would involve the IRS agreeing to drop any ongoing audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses. Under federal law, that would be a crime.
Paying the Men Who Broke the Rules
The most detailed window into this pattern comes from an investigation published May 12 by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee. Raskin's letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche documented that the Justice Department has approved more than $3 million in settlements to former FBI agents who were terminated or disciplined for what the investigation described as "egregious misconduct" — and who, in nearly every documented case, are aligned with Donald Trump.
The cases are not close calls. One agent named in the investigation refused to participate in an inquiry into a violent white nationalist group — a direct abdication of federal law enforcement responsibility. Another agent participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol and subsequently lied about his involvement. Both were removed from their positions. Both received hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer cash after filing legal claims against the government.
The investigation also identified an agent who had leaked classified information and another who had, in Raskin's characterization, paid for sex in a manner that created a potential counterintelligence vulnerability. The phrase in the committee's press release is stark: "Classified Leaks, January 6, and Paying for Sex." These are not minor procedural violations. They are the kinds of conduct that end careers and, in some cases, result in criminal prosecution. Under this administration, they have resulted in government checks.
Raskin directed the letter to Blanche — Trump's former personal attorney, now the deputy attorney general — and demanded answers about the authorization process for the settlements: who approved them, whether the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility was consulted, and how the legal theories underlying the payments were justified given that the misconduct findings had already been made.
The Flynn and Page Payouts
The FBI settlement pattern sits alongside two other high-profile payments that illuminate the administration's broader approach to the use of the Justice Department's settlement authority as a political instrument.
In March 2026, the DOJ agreed to pay $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and was pardoned by Trump before leaving office in 2020. After the pardon, Flynn sued the government, claiming his prosecution was politically motivated. Courts dismissed his lawsuit. The DOJ settled it anyway.
In April 2026, a virtually identical scenario played out with Carter Page, the former Trump campaign advisor who was the subject of FBI surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the 2016 election. Page sued, claiming the surveillance was unlawful. A court dismissed the case. The DOJ agreed to pay $1.25 million.
The pattern in both cases is the same: legal claims rejected on the merits by federal courts, then resurrected through settlement agreements that bypass the judiciary entirely and deliver taxpayer funds to political allies without any legal adjudication of liability. Former DOJ prosecutor John Keller, who resigned last year after Trump officials directed him to drop corruption charges against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, described the Flynn settlement in particular as emblematic of how the department has been transformed. "The institution I worked for for twenty years," Keller told NPR in May, "doesn't look like the institution I left."
The $10 Billion Question
Even against this backdrop, the potential IRS settlement represents something categorically different in scale and legal exposure.
Trump filed suit against the IRS arising from the 2022 leak of his tax returns by a contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in federal prison in January 2024. Trump's lawsuit demands at least $10 billion in damages, a figure larger than the IRS's entire proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The New York Times reported on May 12 that among the settlement options under review is the possibility of the IRS agreeing to drop or terminate audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses.
Under 26 U.S.C. § 7217, it is a federal felony for the president or any executive branch official to request that the IRS conduct, terminate, or expedite an audit of a specific taxpayer. The statute exists precisely because the audit power, if subject to political direction, becomes a tool of either reward or punishment. The fact that the administration is reportedly considering this option — and that the consideration is being conducted inside the very department responsible for enforcing federal criminal law — is not a legal gray area. It is a described element of a potential federal crime, discussed openly in settlement negotiations.
What Happened to the Public Integrity Section
To understand why no internal corrective is likely, it is necessary to understand what has happened to the DOJ's own corruption-fighting infrastructure.
The Public Integrity Section — the unit within the Criminal Division specifically tasked with prosecuting public officials who abuse their positions — had approximately 40 full-time staff attorneys in January 2025. By May 2026, according to reporting by NPR citing current and former department officials, that number had been reduced to two. The reduction is not primarily the result of normal attrition. It reflects the combined effect of mass firings, forced resignations, and the reassignment of experienced prosecutors to other priorities.
John Keller told NPR that Trump's pardons of at least 15 people convicted or charged with public corruption — including former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, former congressional aides, and others — have created a systemic deterrent effect. "When prosecutors see those pardons," Keller said, "they ask themselves why they should take on the career risk of a high-profile corruption case when the executive can simply undo the outcome." The chilling effect is not incidental. It is structural.
Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington has calculated that the DOJ has lost more than 6,000 years of combined prosecutorial experience to firings and resignations since January 2025. The Public Integrity Section's de facto elimination is one component of a broader hollowing-out that has left the department without the institutional capacity — and, critics argue, the institutional will — to bring complex public corruption cases at all.
The Mechanism of Legitimacy
What makes the settlement pattern particularly difficult to challenge is that each individual transaction can be defended, in isolation, as a routine exercise of legal discretion. Settlement agreements are a normal tool of government litigation. Agencies settle cases they might lose, cases that would be expensive to try, cases that carry reputational risk. DOJ settles thousands of claims annually.
But the pattern here — paying Trump allies for claims that courts had already dismissed on the merits, compensating FBI agents for their documented misconduct rather than defending the disciplinary process, and entertaining a settlement that would give the president relief from tax audits — cannot be explained by litigation risk calculus. Courts had already evaluated the Flynn and Page claims and found them wanting. The FBI agents' misconduct findings were formally adjudicated through established disciplinary processes. The IRS audit consideration, if accurate, describes something that federal law makes explicitly illegal.
The mechanism being used is legitimate. The pattern of outcomes is not. That gap — between the form of legal process and the substance of what it is accomplishing — is the signature characteristic of institutional corruption. It does not announce itself. It uses the paperwork of legitimacy to accomplish the objectives of self-dealing.
Who Authorized This?
Rep. Raskin's letter to Todd Blanche asks the central question plainly: who, within the Department of Justice, authorized these settlements? The question is not rhetorical. Settlement agreements of this magnitude require sign-off from senior officials. The authorization chain exists and is documented. The department has thus far not provided substantive responses to congressional oversight inquiries on the subject.
Kash Patel, the FBI Director who has been a central figure in the Trump administration's reshaping of federal law enforcement, is named in Raskin's investigation as having overseen or approved at least some of the agent payments. Patel's prior role as a congressional investigator working to discredit the Russia investigation — and his long-standing public identification as a Trump ally — makes his involvement in approving payments to agents disciplined for January 6 participation a question of obvious public interest.
Neither Patel nor the DOJ responded to specific inquiries from press outlets that have covered this story. The settlements, as legal documents, are public records. The authorization decisions that produced them are not.
The Cost of Captured Institutions
The founders of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, and the generations of prosecutors who built it into one of the few institutions in American government specifically designed to hold power accountable, operated on a premise that seems almost quaint against the current landscape: that the law applies to officials as well as to citizens, and that the department's job was to enforce it without fear or favor.
That premise is not self-executing. It requires an institution staffed by people committed to it, led by officials who will not override it, and protected by political culture that treats its violation as disqualifying rather than expedient. The current administration has, by the evidence of its own documented actions, rejected that premise across every dimension. It has reduced the corruption-fighting staff from 40 to two. It has pardoned those convicted of public corruption. It has settled claims that courts dismissed, compensating the claimants without any adjudicated finding of liability. And it is reportedly considering a settlement that would, if executed as described, constitute a federal felony committed by the President of the United States.
More than $8.5 million has already been paid. The meter is still running. And the only institution constitutionally positioned to investigate, the DOJ's own Public Integrity Section, has two attorneys left.
The Ethics Reporter will continue to track settlements, pardons, and the restructuring of the Justice Department's anti-corruption infrastructure.
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