I can’t imagine that either party is eager to write such a memorandum. Instead, the race is on to settle before May 20. And whaddya know, the parties turn out not to be very far apart, even though Trump’s case would be weak even if he weren’t president. (More on that here.)
According to Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of The New York Times, a settlement is in the works that would drop any IRS audits of Trump, his family, or his businesses. One advantage to this approach is that it would spare Trump having to pretend he’ll donate the proceeds to charity. Since nobody knows what the penalties from such audits would be, nobody can pinpoint such a settlement’s monetary value. On the other hand: Do any such audits still exist, and, if they do, is there any chance they’ll be resolved during Trump’s presidency? Even if the answer to the first part of that question is “yes,” the answer to the second part is surely “no.” So perhaps what Trump’s lawyers seek instead is some sort of indemnification against future IRS action akin to the blanket immunity the Supreme Court gifted him in 2024.
If any adversarial relationship exists in this lawsuit at all, it’s probably between Trump and his own lawyers, because he has a well-documented tendency either to fire them or to refuse them payment. Given such tensions, I’d guess the two unnamed sources who described this possible settlement to the Times were floating it as a trial balloon, not to the public, but to Trump himself. Will Trump go for a settlement in which no money changes hands? Very possibly not; he really likes money. It would be very like Trump to grouse that his Justice department settled Russiagate lawsuits from Carter Page and Michael Flynn, each for sums reportedly in excess of $1 million, but that the IRS wouldn’t do the same for him. And I’m the biggest victim of all!