IRS is ‘forever barred’ from examining Trump. What to know about the immunity deal that’s shocking experts

Remember Donald Trump’s response in the 2016 presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton blasted him for paying virtually no federal taxes?“That makes me smart,” Trump said.By that logic, Trump is looking smarter than ever now.On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service agreed to drop all pending probes of Trump over whether he’s paid his fair share of taxes, to settle a lawsuit brought by the president over a leak of his tax returns. That could include, assuming it was ongoing, a long-standing audit into a technique Trump reportedly used to avoid paying taxes years ago that could have hit him with an estimated $100 million bill if the IRS found wrongdoing.Trump has repeatedly denied he did anything wrong and has blasted the IRS investigation as politically motivated, without providing proof.Details of IRS audits are not public and the merits of each side’s arguments are impossible to tell. But the way the president’s case against his own government’s IRS was resolved is highly unusual, experts say.Trump sued the IRS, a federal agency within his administration, putting him in the unusual position of challenging an agency overseen by the executive branch he leads — a rare move, experts say, and possibly unprecedented. Then that agency decided, in another unusual move, to grant him immunity. The immunity deal Under the settlement to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the 2018 leak of his tax returns to The New York Times, the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization’s current tax filings, according to a one-page document released Tuesday. That was quietly added to an original settlement establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people whom Trump thinks were improperly investigated by the government.Tax experts say this grant of immunity is shocking in the breadth of protection it offers the president and could undermine confide