Responding to: Can Blanche Actually Give Trump Immunity from IRS Audits? — Andrew C. McCarthy · 2026-06-06

What the Piece Argues

McCarthy argues that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s three-paragraph document granting Donald Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization permanent immunity from IRS audits or prosecutions is legally unenforceable. He asserts that Blanche possesses no statutory authority to bind the Treasury Department’s IRS, nor can he indirectly execute a request that the President is explicitly barred from making under Section 7217 of the tax code. McCarthy further contends that the immunity agreement fails as a contract because it lacks court approval and relies on a dropped lawsuit that provides no valid consideration. Ultimately, he concludes that while Trump desires protection from financially draining audits, this administrative maneuver cannot legally shield him from future IRS scrutiny.

Receipts

The framing pushes the illusion of an airtight, permanent shield while obscuring the bureaucratic and constitutional boundaries that actually prevent executive overreach.

  • The Illusion: DOJ letterhead and legal jargon (“RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS”) project absolute, self-executing authority that supposedly bars future government action. The Reality: Federal immunity requires judicial oversight or specific statutory authorization; a unilateral executive letter cannot override the IRS’s independent mandate or the separation of powers. (Anchor: 26 U.S.C. § 7217)
  • The Illusion: The “settlement” dropping Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit constitutes a binding contract where the government provides immunity in exchange for valuable consideration. The Reality: A dropped lawsuit without court adjudication provides zero valid legal consideration, rendering the “contract” void under federal scrutiny. (Anchor: Rule 11, Fed. R. Crim. P.)
  • The Illusion: The Attorney General operates as the supreme boss over all federal agencies, capable of commanding compliance across the executive branch at will. The Reality: The IRS resides in the Treasury Department, entirely outside the DOJ’s chain of command; the AG can only make requests, not issue binding directives, to Treasury agencies.

Tier 1: The Desk Check

When to use: Casual inquiry or initial pushback against bureaucratic overreach where a factual reset is sufficient.

The three-paragraph letter is legally inert. The IRS sits in Treasury, not Justice, so the Attorney General lacks the chain of command to bind them. Any future audit proceeds on the merits, not on a piece of stationery.

Tier 2: The Statutory Block

When to use: Formal correspondence, public statement, or legal briefing where statutory boundaries must be explicitly named.

Section 7217 of Title 26 prohibits executive pressure on IRS audits. Even with the AG exempted from direct prohibition, the statute strictly bars indirect requests on behalf of the President. The immunity addendum violates the statutory architecture and holds no force in administrative or judicial review.

Tier 3: The Contract Rebuttal

When to use: Countering claims that a signed document or dropped lawsuit creates an unbreakable bilateral agreement.

Executive agreements require valid consideration and judicial scrutiny to bind the government. Dropping a collusive lawsuit to avoid a “case or controversy” threshold provides no consideration. Without a judge’s seal under Rule 11 or 18 U.S.C. § 6003, the immunity grant is a unilateral fiction, not a binding contract.

Tier 4: The Jurisdictional Hard Stop

When to use: Confronting institutional actors or legal representatives who attempt to weaponize the letter to stall legitimate proceedings.

The purported immunity collapses under the absence of jurisdiction. There is no cognizable case or controversy upon which to ground a settlement. Treasury’s IRS retains full statutory authority to initiate proceedings; a unilateral DOJ declaration cannot strip another cabinet department of its congressionally mandated enforcement powers.

Tier 5: The Legislative/Institutional Slam

When to use: Public condemnation, editorials, or legislative drafting where the abuse of power must be framed as an intolerable systemic threat.

This administrative sleight of hand attempts to privatize the levers of federal enforcement. It demands zero court oversight, manufactures no consideration, and bypasses congressional appropriations to erected a personal fortress. It is an illegitimate exercise of raw executive prerogative that corrupts the rule of law and must be dismantled by statutory clarification and funding restrictions.

Tier 6 (Bonus 1+): The Prophetic Condemnation

When to use: Escalated public rebuttal demanding accountability, where moral clarity requires cutting through bureaucratic nonsense with restrained force.

They think a piece of letterhead overrides the Constitution. It doesn’t. This is naked graft masquerading as legal diligence, a cowardly attempt to buy permanent silence from the Treasury Department without answering to a single judge or statute. The paperwork is worthless, the protection is a mirage, and anyone betting their institutional credibility on it is backing a hollow shell.

Tier 7 (Bonus 1++): The Maximalist Apex

When to use: Total institutional breakdown or extreme abuse exposure where the full rhetorical arsenal and unvarnished profanity are deployed to shatter the narrative.

It’s a complete fucking fraud. A pseudo-AG scribbling magic words on DOJ letterhead doesn’t magically neuter the IRS or erase twenty-six U.S.C. You can’t just hand-wave the fucking rule of law to protect a private fortune. The immunity is void, the contract is a joke, and the entire stunt is a cynical, pathetic attempt to buy permanent impunity with public trust while laughing at the fucking system that’s supposed to stop them.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with persuadable moderates, good-faith family, people who need to hear the legal architecture without the fire.

Let’s grant the premise: Section 7217 of the federal tax code is not light reading, and Andrew McCarthy is a serious lawyer who has done the statutory work. His argument that Todd Blanche’s grant of audit immunity to the president is unenforceable is careful, narrow, and grounded in the text. It deserves a hearing.

But the statutory architecture, read carefully, tells a more damning story than McCarthy’s “Blanche exceeded his authority” framing lets on.

The statute says no “applicable person” — explicitly including the president — may request that the IRS conduct or refrain from conducting an audit, directly or indirectly. It then exempts the attorney general from that prohibition. Read together: the AG may make such a request; the president may not make it, even through an intermediary.

What happened here is not ambiguous. The president wanted audit immunity. Only the AG could provide it. The acting AG — nominated for the permanent job because, in McCarthy’s own words, “he’s shown he can be relied on to do the boss’s bidding” — signed a three-paragraph immunity document on AG letterhead, dated May 19, as part of a settlement in which the president dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. That is not an AG independently exercising his statutory authority. That is the president obtaining, through his hand-picked AG, exactly what the statute forbids him from obtaining — an indirect request.

McCarthy is right that the document is likely unenforceable. But the remedy he urges — congressional legislation, norms against self-dealing — mistakes the problem. The problem is not that Blanche needs clearer statutory boundaries. The problem is that a president who is categorically barred from making an indirect request made one anyway, using an AG who exists in his post to do the boss’s bidding. When the law’s prohibition is the thing the arrangement was designed to circumvent, clarifying the law will not help. What helps is naming that the prohibition was violated, and refusing to normalize the violation as a technical overstep.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: with identity-protective mixed-faith actors, op-ed readers, people who need the moral architecture to land with receipts.

McCarthy’s piece is useful in the way a careful legal brief is useful — it lays out the statute, the case law, the contract principles, and concludes the immunity document won’t hold up. But the careful-lawyer framing obscures the moral architecture of what actually occurred, and the moral architecture is where the column’s force should be.

The president of the United States is categorically barred by federal statute from requesting, directly or indirectly, that the IRS refrain from auditing him, his family, or his business. The exemption in the statute — the AG alone may make such a request — exists so that an independent attorney general, exercising independent prosecutorial judgment, can make case-specific determinations about the public interest. It does not exist so the president can install a loyalist as AG and route the prohibited request through him.

Here is what happened, stripped of the statutory-parsing civility: the president filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS that the judge appeared poised to find was collusive — meaning the president controlled both sides of the case. He then settled that lawsuit in exchange for, among other things, a three-paragraph document on AG letterhead, signed only by the acting AG, granting the president, his sons, and his business permanent immunity from IRS audits. The acting AG is the president’s former criminal-defense attorney, nominated for the permanent AG job because, per McCarthy, he does the boss’s bidding.

The statute’s prohibition on indirect requests by the president is not a technicality. It is the load-bearing wall. And the wall was walked around — by the president who is barred from walking around it, using the AG whose institutional function is to uphold the law, not to serve as the president’s statutory-circumvention instrument.

The document is probably unenforceable — McCarthy is right about that. But enforceability is the wrong question. The right question is whether we are going to describe what happened as a legal error by the AG or as what it actually is: a corrupt arrangement in which the president obtained, through an intermediary he installed for the purpose, immunity the law explicitly denies him. The statutory text is clear. The arrangement’s purpose is clear. The only thing missing is the willingness to name it without the lawyerly softening that treats a deliberate circumvention as a mistaken overstep.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: with people who need to see the arrangement for what it is before they can oppose it — the bystander who hasn’t yet clocked how transparent the whole thing is.

McCarthy’s piece is 2,500 words of careful statutory analysis to reach a conclusion any sentient adult could reach in five seconds by asking one question: why did the AG need to sign this?

The answer is that the president is prohibited by law from requesting audit immunity. He cannot ask the IRS to stop auditing him. He cannot ask the IRS to stop auditing him through an intermediary. So he did the thing the statute plainly envisions someone doing who wants audit immunity and is prohibited from asking: he got the one person the statute exempts — the attorney general — to do the asking for him.

This is not subtle. The statute is not ambiguous. The arrangement is not complicated. The president wanted permanent IRS immunity for himself, his sons, and his business. The law says he cannot have it. He installed a loyalist as AG. The loyalist gave it to him. The end.

McCarthy’s article is the equivalent of a building inspector arriving at a structure where the load-bearing wall has been removed and carefully explaining the engineering principles that make the remaining structure unsafe. The analysis is correct, but it misses the point. The wall was removed on purpose, by someone who knew what the wall was for, using a contractor who does what the owner tells him. Calling it a construction error rather than an intentional demolition is a category mistake.

The $10 billion lawsuit the president dropped in exchange for the immunity? The judge appeared poised to find it was collusive — meaning the president was effectively suing himself. The consideration for the immunity was the dismissal of a case that may never have been a real case. So the deal was: drop the fake lawsuit, receive permanent audit immunity in return. This is what a corrupt transaction looks like when it wears a settlement agreement as a costume.

The statute was written for exactly this scenario. That is why the words “indirectly” and “president” are in the statute. The arrangement is the thing the statute prohibits. Calling it an overstep by the AG rather than a circumvention by the president is like calling a bank robbery an unauthorized withdrawal. The withdrawal is not the problem. The robbery is.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: with mixed-to-bad-faith actors who need the mirror held up — and with allies who need the clarity of seeing the structure named at full strength.

Andrew McCarthy wants you to believe this is a story about Todd Blanche exceeding his statutory authority. That framing converts a corrupt arrangement into a legal error, and it does so in the service of the arrangement itself — by treating the president as a bystander to his own immunity deal rather than as its architect and beneficiary.

Here is the statutory architecture: Section 7217 bars the president from requesting audit immunity directly. It bars the president from requesting audit immunity indirectly. It exempts the attorney general — alone among executive officials — from the prohibition, on the theory that an independent AG exercising independent judgment might have legitimate reasons to make a case-specific request.

Here is what the president did: he installed as acting AG a man McCarthy himself describes as someone “who’s shown he can be relied on to do the boss’s bidding.” He had that AG sign a three-paragraph document on AG letterhead — no deputy AG, no court review, no Rule 11 plea proceeding, no Section 6003 immunity application — granting the president, his sons, and his business permanent immunity from IRS audit. The consideration for this grant was the dismissal of a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS that the judge in the case appeared poised to find was collusive — meaning the president controlled both sides.

The president is prohibited from making an indirect request. The acting AG made the request. The president is the beneficiary. The acting AG is the president’s hand-picked instrument. The statute exists to prevent exactly this sequence. The sequence occurred.

Calling this a story about Blanche’s lack of statutory authority is like calling Watergate a story about G. Gordon Liddy exceeding his operational budget. The technical violation exists, but it is not what the arrangement is. The arrangement is that the president used the one person the statute exempts to obtain what the statute forbids, in a transaction where his own dropped lawsuit provided the cover. That is not an overstep. That is the thing the statute was written to prevent, executed by the person the statute was written to constrain, through the person the statute exempted for entirely different reasons.

The word for using the statutory exemption as a vehicle for the prohibited conduct is circumvention. The word for an arrangement in which a president’s hand-picked AG grants the president permanent immunity in exchange for dropping a potentially collusive lawsuit is corruption. The careful-lawyer framing that treats this as a legal error rather than as a corrupt arrangement is doing political work — it launders the corruption into a question of statutory interpretation, which is the kind of question reasonable people can disagree about. The arrangement is not a question reasonable people can disagree about. It is a president obtaining through an intermediary what the law says he cannot obtain, and the intermediary is the person he placed in the job to obtain it.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: against bad-faith actors and for catharsis — when the arrangement is so transparent that treating it as a legal question is itself a form of complicity.

Let’s review the transaction, because the careful-lawyer genre in which McCarthy operates makes it sound like a complicated statutory question when it is, in fact, the simplest arrangement in American public-corruption history.

The president of the United States is explicitly barred by federal statute from requesting, directly or through an intermediary, that the IRS stop auditing him, his children, or his business. The statute exempts the attorney general — on the theory that an independent AG exercising independent prosecutorial judgment might, in some conceivable universe, have a legitimate reason to make such a request. The president then installs as acting AG a man whose sole qualification for the job — McCarthy’s own language, I am merely quoting — is that “he’s shown he can be relied on to do the boss’s bidding.”

The president files a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The judge appears poised to find the suit collusive — a polite legal term for “the president is suing himself.” The president then dismisses the suit. In exchange, the acting AG — the boss’s-bidding-doer — signs a three-paragraph document on AG letterhead granting the president, his sons, and his business permanent immunity from IRS audit. There is no court review. There is no plea proceeding. There is no Section 6003 immunity application. There is no deputy AG co-signature. There is a three-paragraph addendum to a settlement of a lawsuit the judge was about to call a fraud, signed by the president’s hand-picked doer-of-bidding.

McCarthy spends 2,500 words concluding that this arrangement is probably unenforceable. This is like examining a bank heist and concluding that the getaway driver was probably speeding. The enforceability of the immunity document is not the question. The question is whether the president of the United States used the one person the statute exempts to obtain what the statute explicitly forbids, in exchange for dropping a lawsuit that may not have been a real lawsuit. The answer is yes. The statute exists to prevent exactly this. The arrangement is the thing the statute prohibits.

The careful-lawyer framing treats this as Todd Blanche’s error — a technical exceedance of statutory authority by an acting AG who didn’t understand the limits of his exemption. This is a category error so profound it tips over into bad faith. The arrangement was not Blanche’s idea. Blanche does not have a personal interest in whether the Trump Organization is audited. Blanche is not the beneficiary of the immunity. The beneficiary is the man who installed Blanche to do his bidding. The arrangement is the president’s arrangement, routed through the president’s instrument, producing the president’s immunity. Calling it a Blanche problem rather than a Trump problem is like calling a puppet show a hand problem.

The statute says the president may not make an indirect request. The president made an indirect request. The indirectness is the point — that is why the instrument exists. The AG exemption is not a loophole the president accidentally fell through; it is the vehicle he deliberately drove through the prohibition. The arrangement is not complicated. It is corrupt, and it is simple, and every word McCarthy wrote about statutory interpretation and contract consideration is theater designed to make what is simple sound complex, because complexity is the lawyer’s version of a smoke machine, and what needs obscuring here is that the president did exactly what the statute says he cannot do, through exactly the mechanism the statute’s authors would have predicted, producing exactly the result the statute was written to prevent.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: when the moral register must carry what the analytical register has established — for the reader moved by the witness of scripture and the canon of moral disgust, who needs the prophetic word to land.

The prophet Jeremiah diagnosed a condition for which the English translation is imprecise but the clinical picture is exact: “they do not know how to blush.” The Hebrew idiom (Jeremiah 6:15, 8:12) names a civic pathology in which the capacity for public shame has been burned out of the governing class — not the private shame of the individual conscience, which may or may not still function, but the public acknowledgment that a line has been crossed, that what has been done is what a civilized people does not do.

The arrangement before us is the clinical presentation. The president is categorically barred by statute from requesting, directly or through an intermediary, that the IRS refrain from auditing him, his family, or his business. He installed an acting attorney general whose qualification for the office is that he does the boss’s bidding — the columnist Andrew McCarthy, a man of the right, supplies the diagnosis himself. The president filed a lawsuit against the IRS that the judge appeared poised to find was collusive — the polite legal term for a fraud on the court, a suit in which the plaintiff and defendant are effectively the same entity wearing different institutional masks. He then dismissed that suit. In exchange, the acting AG — the boss’s-bidding-doer — signed a three-paragraph document granting the president, his sons, and his business permanent immunity from IRS audit, in perpetuity.

The statute exists for this. The word indirectly is in the statute for this. The AG exemption was drafted for the case of an independent officer exercising independent judgment in the public interest — not for the case of the president installing a loyalist to route the prohibited request through the one channel the statute left open. The arrangement is not a mistake. It is not an overstep. It is a circumvention — a deliberate use of the law’s own architecture to defeat the law’s purpose. And the governing class, when presented with the arrangement, responds not with the blush the prophet sought but with a 2,500-word statutory analysis, as if what we are looking at is a question of contract consideration rather than the deliberate corruption of public office for private immunity.

Amos cried judgment on those who “turn justice to wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground.” The wormwood here is the bitter fruit of an arrangement in which the public trust — the office of the attorney general, the settlement authority of the United States, the letterhead on which the immunity is printed — is converted into a shield for the private beneficiary who installed the officer to hold it. The righteousness cast to the ground is the statute itself, which stands on the books as a prohibition and is walked around as if it were a suggestion. The prophet’s indictment was not against ignorance of the law but against the knowing manipulation of legal forms to produce injustice; the word the Hebrew uses for this is not error but abomination — the thing that cannot be countenanced by a people who claim to live under law.

The whitewashed tomb of Matthew 23 makes its appearance in every era wearing the architecture of its time. In this era it wears a three-paragraph addendum on Department of Justice letterhead, signed by an acting attorney general who cannot delegate his functions because there is no deputy, in exchange for the dismissal of a lawsuit the judge was about to call a sham. The tomb is the immunity. The whitewash is the statutory-parsing article that treats the arrangement as a question of enforceability rather than as a corruption of the office whose name appears at the top of the letterhead. The dead bones inside are the rule of law, which cannot survive a governing class that has trained itself not to blush.

The prophet’s task is to name the thing that the careful lawyers will not name. The arrangement is corrupt. The statute was violated. The violation was not accidental; it was the purpose of the arrangement. And the governing class, in its refusal to name what has been done, has acquired Jeremiah’s diagnosis: it no longer knows how to blush. The worm that does not die is the damned precedent this immunity arrangement sets — that the statute’s prohibition is a formality, that the AG exemption is a vehicle, that the public office exists to shield the private beneficiary who controls it. The goddamn cup of trembling that was poured for others will be drunk by those who poured it. The prophet does not specify the timetable; he specifies only that the cup exists, and that it is being filled.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: the cathartic apex, the release valve — for the reader who has absorbed the analysis and the prophecy and needs the gloves to come all the way off, the full expletive arsenal deployed against the arrangement and its apologists.

Let’s strip the fucking legalese off this thing and look at what actually happened, because the statutory-interpretation genre McCarthy is working in is a laundering operation — it takes a corrupt transaction and makes it smell like a seminar question.

The president of the United States is explicitly barred by fucking statute from asking the IRS, directly or through an intermediary, to stop auditing his ass, his kids, or his business. The statute says “indirectly” because the people who wrote it were not fucking stupid — they knew a president who wanted immunity would find someone else to do the asking. So they closed the door and locked it. The AG exemption exists for the case of an independent attorney general making an independent call about the public interest. It exists for the hypothetical AG who says, “in this specific circumstance, auditing this specific person would compromise an ongoing national-security investigation.” It does not exist so the president can install a toady, have the toady sign a three-paragraph immunity-for-immunity swap, and call it a settlement.

That is what happened. The president installed Todd Blanche — McCarthy’s words, not mine: “he’s shown he can be relied on to do the boss’s bidding.” The president filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS that the judge was about to call a collusive fraud — meaning the president was suing himself, the lawsuit was a goddamn Potemkin village constructed to generate a settlement vehicle. The president dropped the fake lawsuit. The boss’s-bidding-doer signed a document granting the president, his sons, and his business permanent immunity from IRS audit. No court review. No plea proceeding. No fucking oversight whatsoever. A three-paragraph addendum on AG letterhead, signed by one man who exists in his job to do what the boss tells him.

The statute was written to prevent exactly this. The word indirectly is in the statute for exactly this. The arrangement is the thing the statute prohibits. And the response from the careful-lawyer right is 2,500 words about whether the contract consideration was adequate and whether Blanche had authority to bind the IRS — as if we are looking at a fucking contracts hypo rather than at the president of the United States routing a statutorily prohibited immunity grant through the one official the statute exempted, using a nominee whose job description is servility.

This is not a legal error. This is corruption — simple, obvious, staring-you-in-the-face corruption of the kind that used to end presidencies. The president wanted immunity the law says he cannot have. He put a man in the AG’s office whose function is to give him what he wants. The man gave him what he wants. The rest is commentary.

McCarthy’s article is the commentary. It is painstaking, it is lawyerly, it is probably correct on the enforceability question, and it is also a moral abdication dressed in bluebook citations. Calling this arrangement a Blanche problem rather than a Trump problem — calling it an overstep rather than a circumvention, calling it a statutory question rather than a corrupt transaction — is the rhetorical equivalent of watching someone drive a truck through a storefront and writing a careful analysis of whether the truck was properly registered. The registration is not the fucking issue. The issue is that the driver aimed the truck at the storefront and accelerated.

The statute says no indirect request. The president made an indirect request. The AG was the instrument. The immunity is the product. The lawsuit dismissal was the cover. The whole thing stinks of a transaction in which public office was converted into private shield, and the people whose job it is to name that conversion are instead writing about contract consideration and whether the judge can act on a dismissed case. Jeremiah’s unblushing face has acquired a law license and a National Review column. The prophet was not running a seminar. He was naming a people who have lost the capacity for shame. The shame here is that the president used the Justice Department to shield himself from the IRS, and the response from his own side’s legal commentators was to debate the enforceability of the shield rather than to name that the shield should never have been printed. That is what corruption looks like when it has been normalized — the legal analysis has replaced the moral response, and the very people who should be screaming are instead bluebooking.

The Deeper Breakdown

The cui bono finding. The concentrated beneficiary is Donald Trump personally — and, derivatively, his sons and the Trump Organization. The value at stake has been reported at roughly $100 million in potential tax liability. The mechanism is the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS — a suit the presiding judge, Kathleen M. Williams, appeared poised to find collusive (meaning Trump effectively controlled the plaintiff and the defendant). In exchange for dismissing that suit, Trump received, among other things, a three-paragraph addendum on Department of Justice letterhead, signed by Acting AG Todd Blanche, granting the Trumps and the Trump Organization permanent immunity from IRS audits or prosecution — “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED,” in the document’s own capitalization, regardless of whether the underlying information is presently known.

The statutory architecture. Section 7217 of Title 26 explicitly bars the president — named in the statute — from making any request to the IRS to conduct or refrain from conducting an audit, “directly or indirectly.” The AG is exempted from this prohibition, but only to make an independent request; the exemption does not authorize the AG to make the request on behalf of the president, because the president is barred from making the request indirectly. The statute’s structure is clear: the AG can ask; the president cannot ask, even through the AG. Blanche’s immunity document is, on its face, the president obtaining through the AG what the president is categorically barred from obtaining.

The personnel architecture. Blanche was Trump’s criminal-defense attorney before becoming acting AG. McCarthy — a former federal prosecutor and National Review contributor writing from the right — states plainly that Blanche is being nominated because “he’s shown he can be relied on to do the boss’s bidding.” The arrangement thus involves a hand-picked loyalist, installed in the one office the statute exempts, executing the exact request the statute forbids the president from making through an intermediary.

Why the immunity is likely unenforceable — and why that’s not the point. McCarthy is correct that Blanche lacked authority to bind the IRS (which sits in Treasury, not Justice), that the settlement bypassed judicial review (no Rule 11 plea proceeding, no Section 6003 court order), and that the consideration — dismissal of a potentially collusive lawsuit — is legally suspect. But the enforceability question is secondary. The primary fact is that the president obtained, through an intermediary he installed for the purpose, permanent audit immunity the statute explicitly forbids. Whether the document holds up in court is a question for later litigation; whether the arrangement is a corrupt use of public office for private benefit is a question for now, and the answer is yes.