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President Donald Trump's long-running explanation for not releasing his tax returns was upended on May 19 when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a Justice Department document that effectively shut down any existing Internal Revenue Service audits, investigations and enforcement actions against Trump, his family and his sprawling business empire.

Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has declined to follow the tradition of U.S. presidents releasing tax returns, saying he couldn't do so because of ongoing IRS audits.

“I may even release my current returns,” Trump told reporters May 20 when stepping off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland when asked about the agreement between the president and his own administration.

Meghan Faulkner, communications director for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called on Trump to release his taxes now that the audits have shut down.

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Two police officers who clashed with rioters at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection in 2021 have sued Donald Trump over plans to create a $1.776bn “anti-weaponization” fund.

The fund, which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund, is set to compensate allies of the US president who he claims were victims of prosecutorial overreach.

It was created as part of an agreement in which Trump and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Harry Dunn, a retired US Capitol police officer, and Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan police department officer, filed a complaint in US district court in Washington DC on Tuesday.

“In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J Trump has created a $1.776bn taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name,” the lawsuit says.

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Thousands of Mississippians, along with allies from other southern states, gathered at the state’s War Memorial Building auditorium on Wednesday in support of voting rights. It was the latest in a series of actions protesting the supreme court’s recent decision gutting the provision of the Voting Rights Act preventing racial discrimination, and held on a site integral to the state’s history of Black disenfranchisement.

Section 2 “stopped states, counties, cities, from passing redistricting maps that discriminate against Black voters and it led to the biggest growth of Black political power since Reconstruction”, said Amir Badat, the southern states director at the voting rights group Fair Fight Action.

“And now, the Roberts court has opened the door to the biggest destruction of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction.”

The rally was led by a coalition of organizations, including People’s Advocacy Institute, Mississippi Votes, Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, One Voice, Fair Fight, Mississippi for a Just World and NAACP, among them. It followed the “All Roads Lead to the South” rally in Montgomery, Alabama, over the weekend.

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Donald Trump displayed his supremacy over the Republican party on Tuesday when voters in northern Kentucky rejected the maverick congressman Thomas Massie in favour of the US president’s hand-picked challenger.

Ed Gallrein, a retired navy Seal and farmer who was recruited into the race by Trump, defeated the seven-term incumbent in a primary election in Kentucky’s fourth congressional district in what the president’s allies framed as a test of whether dissent could still exist inside today’s Republican party.

The election took place as voters in five other states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, Oregon and Idaho – went to the polls to decide their nominees for the November general election, in what was the biggest primary night of the year so far.

In Georgia’s gubernatorial race, lieutenant governor Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson advanced to a runoff for the GOP nomination, while former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic nomination outright. And in Alabama, Trump ally Tommy Tuberville won the Republican primary for governor, while former senator Doug Jones secured the Democratic nomination.

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The Justice Department agreement with President Donald Trump over his leaked tax returns includes a guarantee that the tax agency will no longer pursue any claims over tax liabilities it may have against Trump, his family members and his companies.

The nine-page settlement agreement made public by the Justice Department May 18, set up a $1.776 billion fund for "victims of lawfare and weaponization," did not include any mention of the government's efforts to go after Trump, his family and his companies over longstanding tax disputes.

On May 19, DOJ posted a separate one-page document on its website – signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche – with the new details. It includes what appears to be an all-inclusive release in which the Internal Revenue Service is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from “prosecuting or pursuing” any and all efforts to determine if Trump and the other parties are liable for non- or under-payment of taxes, interest, attorney’s fees or expenses incurred by the government.

Trump sued the IRS in January for $10 billion for a contractor leaking his returns, even though he had been promising since 2014 that he would release the returns to the public if he ran for president.

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A jury in California took less than two hours to decide that Elon Musk waited too long to file a lawsuit against his one-time business partner Sam Altman over the direction he's steered the artificial intelligence company OpenAI since the two had a falling out nearly a decade ago.

In a unanimous decision, the nine-member advisory jury said Musk was beyond the statute of limitations when he launched his case in 2024. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, agreed, tossing the case out.

"I've always said I would accept the jury's verdict," Gonzalez Rogers said after issuing her decision. "I think there's a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding."

The decision brings a swift end to a three-week trial that laid bare the fears and ambitions that led two of Silicon Valley's biggest personalities to team up 11 years ago to launch OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and then to part ways after a dispute over how to run it.

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