The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief…
— From the Office of the Attorney General order signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, May 19, 2026
The federal government’s enforcement powers can be set aside for a particular person in two recognized ways. A president can issue a pardon, which reaches federal criminal offenses but not civil liability or state action. A court can approve a settlement, which binds the parties to a case. This week, an acting attorney general signed a one-page order that establishes a third mechanism: a contractual release granting the president, his family, his trusts, and his businesses permanent immunity from federal law enforcement for anything the executive branch chooses to characterize as politically motivated. The order arises out of the settlement of Trump v. Internal Revenue Service. The headline event is the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, but a more consequential one sits below in paragraph C.
The two recognized mechanisms come with constraints. The pardon power is limited by its constitutional text to federal criminal offenses; it cannot reach civil liability, state action, or any agency’s prospective regulatory authority. The judicial settlement is limited by the case-or-controversy requirement, by the scope of the claims actually before the court, and by judicial supervision. Each mechanism is bounded by something. The third mechanism, as the order constructs it, is bounded by nothing. The release is contractual rather than constitutional. The executive branch in this case performed the work of all three: legislating the scope of the immunity in lieu of Congress, adjudicating the underlying dispute in lieu of a court, and committing itself to enforce the result. If this order stands as a lawful exercise of executive authority, federal immunity from law enforcement becomes whatever the executive branch decides to release. The central question this settlement presents is not whether the IRS lawsuit had merit, nor is it whether the Anti-Weaponization Fund will survive its inevitable challenges; it is whether the executive branch can confer on itself by contract an immunity that neither the Constitution nor the courts have ever recognized. The rule of law cannot accommodate a federal enforcement scheme in which the answer is yes.
Paragraph C of the order, which establishes the funding requirements for the Anti-Weaponization Fund created by the Trump v. IRS settlement, runs just eight lines. In them, the US, through its Department of Justice, “RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” each of the plaintiffs from any claim that has been or could have been asserted against them. The plaintiffs are President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. The release also extends to their “related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.”
The language in that last clause reaches the entire Trump family, every Trump entity, and every Trump trust.
The release is not bounded by the underlying case. It runs to (1) any matter “raised or could have been raised” in the case; (2) “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” — capitalized defined terms whose definitions are hidden away in a Settlement Agreement that has not been made public;* and (3) “any matters currently pending or that could be pending (including tax returns filed before the Effective Date) before Defendants or other agencies or departments.”
The release does not stop at the IRS or the Treasury. It sweeps in every executive-branch component — DOJ, FBI, SEC, FinCEN, any agency — for any matter that could be characterized as Lawfare or Weaponization. The federal government, by contract, has agreed never to pursue Trump, his family, his trusts, or his businesses for anything that meets that definition, forever.
The president cannot pardon himself for civil matters; the pardon power, by its constitutional text, reaches only “Offences against the United States.” For the same reason, he cannot grant himself immunity from state action. And even as to federal crimes, the self-pardon question is contested at best — the Office of Legal Counsel concluded in 1974 that “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself,” and no court has held otherwise since.**
Even the most expansive recent uses of the pardon power confirm these limits. On his last morning in office, President Biden issued preemptive pardons to his brothers James and Francis, his sister Valerie Biden Owens, and two of their spouses, anticipating prosecutions by the incoming administration. The pardons drew sustained bipartisan criticism. But valid though these concerns may have been, the pardons operated within the constitutional architecture: they covered only federal criminal offenses, were publicly attributed, named their recipients, and reached neither civil liability nor state action nor any agency’s prospective regulatory authority.
The release at issue here has none of those limits. It covers civil matters, his family, his entities, regulatory examinations, and forecloses both known and unknown claims. Settlement releases are routine; what is not routine is the scope. An ordinary government settlement releases the government’s claims arising out of the lawsuit at hand. This one releases the government’s claims arising out of anything that could be characterized, by the executive branch itself, as politically motivated. That is the difference between using an existing mechanism and constructing a new one.
The release covers “examinations or similar or related reviews … including tax returns filed before the Effective Date.” That encompasses the entirety of the IRS audit power. The Internal Revenue Code grants the IRS — not the Attorney General — independent statutory authority under 26 U.S.C. § 7602 to examine any return and to determine its correctness. The Code does not contemplate the Attorney General contractually waiving that authority on behalf of the IRS. The DOJ has broad settlement authority over federal tax litigation, but it is at minimum a serious question whether that authority extends to a prospective contractual waiver of the IRS’s future examination authority over unrelated returns. The order’s answer to that question is to assume it can. Rather than offering a defensible application of existing authority, the order simply assumes that the executive branch’s authority extends as far as the administration needs it to.
The order is signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who, before becoming Deputy Attorney General, was Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney in the 2024 federal criminal proceedings against the president. He signs as Acting AG because, in early April, Trump fired the confirmed Attorney General, Pam Bondi, following sustained reporting that he was frustrated with her insufficient pursuit of his political opponents. The president then installed his former defense lawyer, who signed an order granting that former client — and the client’s family, trusts, and business empire — permanent release from federal liability. The conflict of interest is on the face of the document; so is the chain of events that produced it. The signature is not incidental to the release. It is part of how the third mechanism works: when internal checks on executive overreach become inconvenient, they are removed. The pattern is not without analogues abroad. Russian President Vladimir Putin built his “power vertical” on the same principle: institutional officials who declined to act on political directives were replaced with those who would.
The Anti-Weaponization Fund will almost certainly face legal challenge. The US Constitution’s Appropriations Clause provides that money may be drawn from the Treasury only by an act of Congress. The Fund’s $1.776 billion disbursement comes from the Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation set aside to pay court judgments and settlements against the federal government. Without underlying congressional authorization for a program of this kind, that disbursement presents a clear constitutional problem.
The release, by contrast, will not be tested in the same way. The lawsuit from which it issues was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which permits a plaintiff to withdraw a case unilaterally, without judicial approval, so long as the defendant has not yet formally responded. The dismissal took effect the instant it was filed, foreclosing the court from considering whether the lawsuit met Article III’s requirement that federal courts decide only genuine disputes between parties with opposing interests. No court will now scrutinize the settlement that resulted. The release binds the United States as a matter of contract law, at least for now.
The order purports to bind the United States, but it does not bind the states themselves. The release language only extends to federal actors. State attorneys general and district attorneys retain every state-law authority they held last week, both as to existing matters and as to anything that may yet arise. Existing convictions in state courts, outstanding civil judgments, and investigations currently in progress are not within the release’s reach. Nor are investigations and prosecutions that have yet to be opened. None of these should be treated as foreclosed.
The release does not bind future Congresses, a fact that could have imminent practical consequences given this year’s midterm elections. The Judgment Fund is a statutory creation, amendable by statute. Congress has every authority it had last week to condition further disbursements, claw back unappropriated balances, or require congressional approval for settlements that exceed a defined threshold. This is the obvious legislative response, not just to this settlement, but to the next one. A Congress that wishes to retain its power of the purse in any meaningful sense must legislate that power back into operative force.
The release does not bind future Department of Justice administrations. A future DOJ that concludes the order exceeded the Attorney General’s lawful authority — particularly with respect to IRS examination authority under 26 U.S.C. § 7602, which the Internal Revenue Code does not assign to the AG — has every legal basis to argue the release is ultra vires: a Latin doctrinal term meaning that an act taken in excess of the actor’s lawful authority is, by definition, void. Given the unorthodox origins of the release, an ultra vires argument would likely face contract-law challenges. The strength of any such argument tomorrow depends on how seriously the legal academy and the practicing bar develop its constitutional and statutory defects now.
The release does not bind the public’s access to it. The Settlement Agreement that supplies the definitions of “Lawfare” and “Weaponization,” the terms doing most of the operational work in paragraph C, remains undisclosed, leaving us with only guesses as to how expansive the order truly is. Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, congressional oversight, and discovery in any collateral proceeding are the existing tools for compelling its release. Transparency about what the federal government has actually agreed to is imperative; it is the predicate for every other remedy.
Blanche’s order says FOREVER, in capital letters, twice. Forever is a claim, not a fact. And the document does not bind the institutions that will decide whether it remains true. The states, future Congresses, future DOJ administrations, the bar, the press, the courts that have yet to scrutinize this order face a choice. They can treat this settlement as an aberration to be litigated around, or they can treat it as what it is: a template that, if it stands, will be used again — not only by this administration, but by every administration that follows. The architecture of federal immunity was not built to absorb a third mechanism. Whether it does will not be decided by the order. It will be decided by them.
Notes
* That a federal release of this scope rests on terms the public cannot read is itself the problem; the definitions could in principle be narrow, but the government’s decision to withhold them does not narrow the document the public can read.
** Some readers will ask why Trump v. United States is not the operative authority here. The Court’s 2024 decision held that former presidents have absolute immunity for actions within their “core constitutional powers,” presumptive immunity for other “official acts,” and no immunity for “unofficial acts.” It addresses criminal prosecution for conduct in office. It does not reach pardons, civil liability, regulatory examinations, family members, or business entities. The release at issue here is broader than anything Trump v. United States held, and it was accomplished by contract rather than by the Court.
Ingrid Burke Friedman is JURIST News’ editorial director.
