(Dobbs) Drip. Drip. Drip.

What can we infer from a provision on Trump's behalf that means any unlawful financial misbehavior in the past is now exempt from prosecution?

The story I sent out early this morning was about Donald Trump’s corruption, announcing an almost $1.8 billion taxpayer-paid kitty called the “anti-weaponization fund” at the Department of Justice to compensate citizens for their grievances against the United States— it could include everyone convicted of criminal violence after the insurrection of January 6th. But that turned out to be only half the story.

This afternoon, the Justice Department added the second half. It put a one-page addendum up on its website, an addendum that would ban the IRS from pursuing any past tax claims or audits of Donald J. Trump, and of his family.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

As a part of Trump’s agreement yesterday to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the government for reputational harm, it says the Internal Revenue Service is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing audits or investigations of the president, of “related or affiliated individuals” and organizations for anything they might have done up to this day.

Whatever happened to the foundational American principle that no man is above the law? Donald Trump has just put himself and his family, and his allies, above it.

Reading quick comments from historians, no president has ever gone this far before. The only one in modern memory who even came close was Richard Nixon, but his corruption was strictly political. Trump’s is personal. Trump’s means personal gain.

Washington Democratic senator Patty Murray framed it this way: “This is corruption that has never been more blatant or more widespread.”

We would be shocked to see this kind of corruption in any other Western democracy. Can you imagine it happening anywhere from the U.K. to India to Japan? But it’s easy to imagine it as business-as-normal in authoritarian states around the globe. Now, that’s what we see in the mirror.

Neither the president nor other cabinet-level officers of the federal government is allowed under the law to tell the IRS to do an audit, or to stop and audit. Now Trump doesn’t even have to try.

What can we infer from a provision on his behalf that means any unlawful financial misbehavior in the past is now exempt from prosecution? We just report. You decide.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. He also has been a consultant for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net