Sen. Ron Wyden, longtime Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Commitee, has never been a fan of President Donald Trump. But I’ve never seen him quite this worked up.

The administration, Wyden declared in a statement on Friday, “is dripping with corruption from top to bottom” and is now plotting “among the most corrupt acts in American political history.”

What we are witnessing, he said, is nothing less “than a shakedown of the American people by a crook president and his crook lawyers…no more valid than if he had sued the White House kitchen for serving him an undercooked steak. Between this and the ballroom and a thousand other acts of corruption, Trump is a parasite on the American republic.”

In case you haven’t been glued to the news, the saga that has Wyden so enraged kicked off in late January, a week into Trump’s second term, when the president, along with his company and sons Eric and Don Jr., filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking “at least $10,000,000,000” in damages.

Ten billion dollars!

Basically, in 2019 and 2020, an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax returns and related filings to the New York Times, ProPublica, “and other leftist media outlets,” as the lawsuit put it. Admittedly, this was illegal, even though Trump had repeatedly (and falsely) promised to make his tax returns public. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for his leaks, which included a trove of documents that revealed how little US billionaires pay in tax.

The Trump lawsuit claims that the leaks caused the Trumps and their company “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

This is corruption of “a different scale,” because Trump “is negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The reputational claims are notable, coming from a man found guilty or liable in several civil and criminal fraud cases and liable for defamation and sexual abuse. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. And of course there’s Trump’s incitement of the violent attempt by his followers on January 6, 2021, to thwart the peaceful transfer of government, for which Trump was impeached though not convicted.

Early in his second term, Trump then pardoned all of the J6ers, dozens of whom, according to the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for unrelated........

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