Democrats haven’t given up on removing President Trump from office.
The plot is intensifying.
And now Hakeem Jeffries may be about to blindside Trump with this unreal impeachment hoax.
What’s Actually Going On With the IRS Settlement
Democrats are already making noise about impeaching President Trump on day one if they win control of Congress in November.
If the past is prologue, Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will allow his caucus’s Trump Derangement Syndrome to lead the party down this path.
The story starts with a real crime. A rogue IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn illegally accessed and stole confidential tax return information belonging to President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization, then leaked it to left-wing outlets including the New York Times and ProPublica.
Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over that leak. A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team put it plainly: “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
Now, according to ABC News, Trump is expected to drop that lawsuit in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded compensation fund for people who were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration’s weaponization of the legal system.
That pool of potential recipients would include the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol protest, as well as entities potentially connected to Trump himself. The fund would draw from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which is the same permanent appropriation the federal government uses to pay court judgments and settlements.
The settlement would also cover $230 million in legal claims tied to the 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and the Russia investigation he endured during his first term. Trump would also reportedly receive a public apology from the IRS.
And the Biden administration’s weaponization of government against its political opponents was real and documented. Michael Flynn was put through a prosecutorial nightmare. Carter Page had his life turned upside down. IRS whistleblowers who tried to expose the Biden Justice Department’s kid-glove treatment of Hunter Biden faced retaliation. All of them have now received or are seeking compensation, and rightly so.
Melber Floats Impeachment on Live TV
That background didn’t stop MSNBC host Ari Melber from going on the air Friday and floating impeachment.
On his program *The Beat*, Melber called the fund arrangement “looting the government” and “self-dealing,” then said it was “the type of thing that a Congress could impeach and hold a trial on and review the evidence.”
But Melber himself admitted the whole scenario depends on Democrats winning back the midterms. He said, “if the Democrats win back the midterms,” a Senate trial becomes a realistic option.
So what he’s really describing isn’t a constitutional crisis. It’s a campaign pitch.
Melber’s guest, former White House special counsel Ty Cobb, piled on. Cobb said Attorney General Pam Bondi “directed her Justice Department to be loyal to Trump, not to the Constitution,” and claimed that “it really is Trump just looting the government.”
Cobb also accused the Trump White House counsel, Todd Blanche, of being a “coconspirator” in the arrangement.
These are serious charges delivered with zero serious evidence. Cobb, who once served on Trump’s legal team, has spent the years since making himself useful to cable news producers who need a former Trump insider willing to say the worst possible things about his former client.
The Left Calls It a Slush Fund. The Facts Tell a Different Story.
Senate Democrats wasted no time reaching for the most inflammatory language they could find. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland wrote on X that Trump was “dropping his bogus lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a slush fund, courtesy of your tax dollars, that he can use to pay off his political allies.”
Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, went further, calling it “a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies.”
But here’s what they won’t say out loud: the Biden administration really did weaponize federal law enforcement against its political opponents. That’s not a theory. The IRS really did leak Trump’s private tax information. The FBI really did spy on Carter Page using a fraudulent FISA warrant. The Justice Department really did drag its feet on the Hunter Biden investigation for years while treating Trump allies like public enemies.
The people who are eligible for compensation under this fund are people who had their lives turned upside down by a corrupt government. Democrats calling that a “slush fund” is rich coming from a party that spent four years using every lever of federal power to go after one man and everyone around him.
And the legal obstacles Democrats are pointing to are real but not fatal. A federal judge has questioned whether Trump’s IRS lawsuit can even proceed, given that he now oversees the very agencies he’s suing. The settlement would resolve that problem before the court forces a dismissal. That’s not corruption. That’s lawyering.
The Impeachment Talk Is the Point
None of this is really about the $1.7 billion. The left has been running the same play since January 20, 2017. Find something that sounds bad, get a former Republican on camera to call it impeachable, and hope the wall-to-wall coverage moves the polls enough to flip a few seats in the midterms.
Melber said it himself. The impeachment scenario only works “if the Democrats win back the midterms.” Republicans currently hold 53 seats in the Senate, and removing a president requires a two-thirds majority. The math isn’t close.
But the point was never really the math. The point is to keep the word “impeachment” in the news cycle, to make Trump voters feel like their president is always one bad headline away from being removed, and to give Democrat donors a reason to keep writing checks.
It’s the same playbook they ran in 2019. And in 2021. And every time in between when the ratings needed a bump.
The Biden administration spent four years turning the Justice Department, the IRS, and the intelligence community into weapons against political opponents. Now that Trump is using the same government apparatus to compensate the people who got hurt, the left wants to call it a crime.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Ari Melber to run that segment.
Sources: Breitbart, May 15, 2026; ABC News, May 14, 2026; IBTimes UK, May 16, 2026; Raw Story, May 16, 2026; Fortune, May 16, 2026