Andrew Weissmann

So is he going to be recording $1.8 billion in income?

Let's leave aside that this, as you said, is really coming from the taxpayers in what I think is a very, very collusive agreement with no adversity between the defendant and the plaintiff.

Yeah, but that's secondary.

In other words, this is Donald Trump saying, I am settling my claim

against the tax authorities.

And then the fact that he chooses to spend it by saying, okay, I'm directing that the money be used for X, Y, and Z, that doesn't make it not income to Donald Trump.

He is still getting this as a result of, he says, his claim against the IRS.

That's the whole reason that the DOJ is styling this

As a settlement agreement, but that has tax consequences.

And I'm going to really be interested to see how do they get out of that mousetrap that they've created for themselves, which is this.

I understand it from tax authorities.

This should be recorded as income to Donald Trump.

To make matters worse, Terry.

One of the briefs that an amicus wrote, a sort of friend of the court brief, was from former tax authorities saying that what the IRS is doing with comparable cases is fighting them because there are all sorts of defenses that the IRS has to the lawsuit.

The easiest one, the easiest defense is that Donald Trump's claim was out of time.

He had two years to bring it and he didn't.

So that means that the amount of money, if the IRS were to prevail on that, and it seems very open and shut, the amount of money that the public would owe Donald Trump for this claim is zero.

And I don't do math in public, but I know that zero is less than $1.8 billion.

Yes, that is the piece that broke that was not in the main story.

And it came out this one piece of paper that can be termed a general release, giving up the government's claims to money from Donald Trump, his family, his businesses.