Category Justice

Fact is, this tortured abuse of the legal process is likely only the beginning

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

OK then, I guess up is down, right is left, the sun sets in the north and I was People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year in 1984 (a test of concept, before rolling out Mel Gibson the next year).  That we now live in Bizarro World is the only reasonable explanation for how Donald Trump’s Justice Department today could – with a straight face – ask a federal court “to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses.” [emphasis added]

The Justice Department, in a court filing, argued that confusion over another candidate on the ballot with a name very similar to the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, could taint the election result. Mr. Sullivan is in what polls suggest is a close race against Mary Peltola, a Democrat, but the ballot also features Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

A number of tight races across the country, including Alaska, could tip the balance of power in the Senate. The legal gambit also comes shortly after the administration sued the state of California over what it claims are 20,000 “likely noncitizens” on the state’s voter roll.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials, said he could not recall a similar instance in which the federal government sought to block certification of an election, “and certainly not 11 days before an election.” The issue of another candidate with a similar name has already been addressed by state officials, he said.

“D.O.J. making this claim this late smells of political interference and is against D.O.J. policy,” Mr. Becker said. “The feds have absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when and how to certify. The state officials are following Alaska state law, as the Constitution requires.” He said he expected the courts to reject the administration’s lawsuit.

Did DOJ argue that confusion might also work the other way, that voters who would have otherwise elected the other Dan Sullivan might be confused into voting for the incumbent senator?  That that might be another reason to stall certification until the confusion could be sorted out?  No, no it did not.  The new politically-supercharged Department of Justice (We Punish Trump’s Enemies; Just You Try Us!) has bravely stepped up to try to protect a poor, defenseless Republican senator from suffering at the hands of the stupid voters of his own state.  And it did so because, apparently, Trump himself told them to do it.  This would be the most pathetic example of the tortured relationship with the concept of truth by people living in Trumpworld that I found in the news today were it not for the sad claim that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire in Ukraine.  Yes, that  Melania Trump.

Remember, Donald Trump has the emotional maturity of a two year old and cannot admit to losing, or even to making a mistake.  That he is trying to corrupt the conduct of this election in the hope he can steal enough races to maintain his control of the Congress is a given.  That he is doing so while simultaneously sowing the seeds for the excuses he’ll rely on later to blame others for the loss…well, that dexterity may be his only remarkable talent.

The facts: Trump’s not-so-secret plan “for the most corrupt political party ever” in America to capture the next Congress

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Welcome back to the blogosphere’s recently-dedicated home of facts about our president.  In today’s installment we focus on the fact that any time he is confronted with true facts that do not suit him, TFG acts like a four year old who’s been told he can’t have any more ice cream.  Plus, we look at the associated counterfactual statements (the lies) he produces in these instances to salve his ego and (he thinks) to convince us all that he really is our favorite president ever.  That will include, currently most crucially, his lies about the integrity of next month’s elections.

There are very many sources that are independent of this Administration where you and I can check for verification of the truth or falsity of things Donald Trump says.  CNN has a dedicated area, as does the Washington Post, and there are websites that do nothing but fact-check politicians (not just Trump), and I have links to some of them in the far left column of this page under Reference.   (I wish there were a Meghan Trainor song-inspired https://iknowyoulieyourlipsaremovin.com/.)  You can check stupid things, like him ham-handedly altering a National Hurricane Center map to add Alabama to the predicted track of a hurricane, or repeatedly insisting in the face of compelling visual evidence to the contrary that the crowd at his first inauguration was the largest ever.  In these cases he’s much like the brat who stomps his feet and cover his ears screaming “I can’t hear you” when told it’s time to come inside for dinner.

TFG has proven over and over that unlike most mature human beings, he insists that all “truth” not only does not put him in a negative  light, it must be nothing less than the most complimentary light.  Ever since he left military school he has existed in a world where his family’s wealth has allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wants and to ignore any negative consequences.  For example, The University of Pennsylvania couldn’t be forced to give him the good grades he’d need to graduate first in his class, but it couldn’t stop him from lying about it afterward.  If ever there is offered any “truth” which claims Trump is anything less than the sterling and respected character he pretended to be on a television show, then that “truth” is a vicious lie being spread by his enemies.  (Who all “hate Trump,” apparently.)  No matter what he’s talking about, he always sounds like a real estate huckster incessantly selling the biggest and best deal, making you an offer you’d be a fool to refuse.  If he had stayed in that private business world his lies wouldn’t matter to the rest of us, so long as we had the good sense not to do business with him.

But he didn’t.  Now, his lies are about things that really matter.  Every single, solitary accusation of “fake news” directed at a reporter or newspaper or network that doesn’t praise the president for every single, solitary move he makes, facts notwithstanding, does two things. It proves that he does not know how journalism is supposed to work: reporters are not there to promote the president (any president), they are there to report what really happened, as truthfully and as fairly as they can, for the benefit of the American citizens for whom every president works.  No president likes negative coverage and some publicly object to the emphasis reporters put on “bad news” stories, but no other president has so blatantly, transparently and falsely accused the journalists of just making shit up to hurt him.  And, his use of repeated false claims are a political propaganda technique to make people believe outrageous things that are not true.  It was called “the big lie” by that noted political philosopher Adolf Hitler, who wrote that the general population could be manipulated with the use of this tool since they wouldn’t believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”  Well folks, someone does.

The most dangerous example of Trump’s use of the big lie is his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election, to continue to deny it to this very day despite the complete lack of evidence of any fraud significant enough to have changed the outcome, and his continued insistence that all American elections are “rigged.”  Always against him, apparently, even in the two cases where he won.

That claim, which is false – unsupported by any facts – has a very specific goal in mind:

  • to give Americans a reason to believe him when he claims the expected Republican losses in this year’s midterm election are the result of voter fraud,
  • and to get them to agree with his efforts to overturn the results of that election
  • so Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate
  • where the party will continue to roll over and play dead for Trump’s destructive agenda.

Republicans will smugly respond (as they often do) that it’s not hard to find liberal or even moderate commentators who will shill for this anti-MAGA conspiracy.  They have a harder time arguing the facts when they’re offered by a real Republican, a certified conservative – not a Trump butt boy but a true conservative, like former federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig.  He argues in The New Republic that the Trumpist assault on the November midterms is an important next step in their effort to overturn American democracy: fight the results of the expected Democratic victories in House and Senate races, which lays the groundwork for Congress to refuse to seat the Democratic winners  next January and seize control of the government.  Read it yourself and see if you think he’s overstating the case.

…Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

(snip)

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3 [emphasis added].

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

(snip)

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

(snip)

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, Luttig encourages all House members, both parties, to campaign on that point: make sure to loudly highlight any candidate who refuses “to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.”  It will be effective, assuming the issue becomes important to voters to care about and if we can trust the candidates who promise not to steal the election.

He also he lays out – in enough frightening detail to make you realize that some people have actually given this “plan” a lot of thought – the steps the Republicans may take to refuse to allow some or all of the Democrats who win in November to take their seats in the new House in January.  It begins with Speaker Mike Johnson unilaterally, and quite legally, removing current House Clerk Kevin McCumber, “a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”  Then Johnson appoints someone more loyal to TFG, who “refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.”  When those who are excluded from that roll object, this whole circus expands into the courts.  And that will take time.  Time during which the country would be in a full-blown constitutional crisis with Congress unable to do any business, including responding to international threats.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

But we can always count on the Supreme Court to be the voice of reason, to restore a little sanity to the whole process…right?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Surely indeed.

I hope relying on the Supremes to save America’s bacon is not our only chance to kick Trump in the teeth and defeat his election-stealing plans.  (Note to the people who indicted James Comey in North Carolina: this is not a threat of actual unlawful violence against the person of the president, it is the use of a common metaphor indicating I would like to beat him in this contest.  Er, change that “beat” to “triumph over.”)  I like to think that enough people across this country have sufficient distaste for this Administration and its extralegal antics to turn out in numbers large enough to flip enough House and Senate seats into a Democratic majority that would resuscitate the Congressional checks-and-balances impulse that has gone dormant during Trump II.  And I trust that those same people – and maybe a good portion of the inhabitants of MAGA world, too – won’t stand for a blatant attempt to commit such a fraud.  Luttig hopes the same:

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

Hey Houston, hope you’re happy with the new chief federal prosecutor who says there’s at least one religion that’s incompatible with our civilization

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The Trump Administration has gamed the system to install without Senate confirmation a new U.S. Attorney in the nation’s fourth largest city, a man who has said he believes that hundreds of thousands of the residents of that district are unfit to be Americans because of their religious faith.  In a country where everyone is guaranteed freedom of religion by the U.S. Constitution, the new chief federal prosecutor for a district that is home to nine million people in an area bigger than 16 other whole states is on the record stating – without caveat – that “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”

This is probably not what the smug Trump spokesrobots had in mind when they smirked that “elections have consequences,” but they were right.

Each president of the United States is responsible for nominating people to serve in about 4000 government jobs, and you can assume that virtually all of those people share the president’s political views to some extent.  By law, there are about 1200 of these nominees who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and that is generally easily done when the president’s party has a majority in the Senate, as the Republicans do now.  Barely.  And yet, this president – or more accurately, this president’s men, since this president himself is too uneducated in government operations and too disinterested in learning about the actual inner workings of government to have ever thought up this workaround on his own – has chosen to evade that requirement of confirmation in a number of cases after Senate Democrats “stymied some of the Trump administration’s more controversial picks. While the Senate confirmation process is intended to vet candidates for these high profile jobs, many of Trump’s picks have sidestepped that process.”  Including, now, Aaron Reitz, described by his new office here.  The Texas Tribune reports:

Aaron Reitz has been appointed the next U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. Reitz previously worked as a top deputy to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and worked in the Trump Justice Department before running for attorney general earlier this year.

Reitz finished fourth, despite Paxton’s endorsement, in a crowded and expensive primary. The Marine Corps veteran ran on a militant platform of destroying the left, going after DEI and waging “counter-jihad” on radical Muslims.

(snip)

Reitz enters the position at a perilous moment. The U.S. attorney’s office is likely to be involved in deciding whether to prosecute anyone in relation to [last] week’s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Houston. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is leading the investigation, and the Harris County district attorney has vowed his own investigation, as well.

I wrote about Reitz’ campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry here.

It’s no surprise that this Administration would favor someone like Reitz for this job; it is becoming less and less surprising to learn how it has bent the rules of nomination and confirmation all out of whack to slide him into the post without him having to defend his odious beliefs in a public confirmation hearing.  Like he had to do in February 2025 when he was appointed to another top Justice Department post:

During a confirmation hearing in February 2025, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Reitz on a social media post where he said President Donald Trump should follow the lead of President Andrew Jackson and ignore a Supreme Court decision.

“There is no hard and fast rule about whether, in every instance a public official is bound by a court decision,” Reitz told the committee. “There are some instances in which he or she may be lawfully bound and some instances where he or she may not be lawfully bound.”

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin called Reitz’s appointment to the OLP “a danger to the rule of law,”; while some conservative lawmakers and scholars defended the stance amid debates about the power of district-level courts to issue nationwide injunctions on controversial issues.

Politico reported almost a year ago how the Administration is working around the requirement for Senate confirmation in the cases of some of its own nominees.  The law allows the Administration (any Administration, not just this one) to appoint an interim or acting U.S. Attorney to take over the job for up to 120 days while awaiting Senate confirmation of the permanent nominee.  If the Senate does not confirm the nominee after 120 days, the federal judges in the district can appoint someone to take over the responsibility of running that office, and that  person can serve indefinitely (no 120 day limit) until the Senate does finally confirm a nominee.  If the Senate never  does confirm a nominee – or an Administration never nominates anyone else for the job – the person picked by the judges can stay in place until they leave on their own or the president asks them to step down.  No Senate confirmation ever required.   Here’s how it’s worked in the Southern District of Texas:

  • Alamdar Hamdani was nominated by President Biden in November 2022, and was confirmed by voice vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee and then the full Senate that next month; he resigned at the end of the Biden Administration in January 2025…it is customary for most political appointees to resign so a new president can appoint a new person to the job.
  • Nicholas Ganjei was sworn in as the acting  U.S. Attorney in Houston in January 2025, the start of the second Trump Administration.  When no permanent nominee was named, the district judges in the Southern District of Texas voted, unanimously, on May 28 to make Ganjei the new permanent U.S. Attorney.
  • President Trump nominated Ganjei to be a federal judge in Houston in November 2025; he was confirmed by the Senate in February 2026 and started his new job in March 2026.
  • John Marck was appointed acting  U.S. Attorney in March 2026, succeeding Ganjei.
  • Then Marck was himself nominated to the federal bench on April 6, less than a month later, and he was confirmed to that new job June 24.  He left the U.S. Attorney’s office July 9 (last week).
  • On that same day, July 9, it was reported that the judges in the Southern District of Texas had voted unanimously to confirm Reitz as the new man.  With no 120-day limit, no Senate confirmation needed.

And so we have a new chief federal prosecutor in Houston who said just months ago, while running to be Texas attorney general, that Islam just doesn’t fit in with life in Houston…or Texas, or America, or anywhere in the Western world!  To quote me again from this past January:

He didn’t blast the individual Muslims who’ve committed acts of terror in Western nations, he didn’t accuse all Muslims of hating America, he didn’t even nonsensically claim – as Greg Abbott and others have – that Muslims in Texas are trying to build towns where only Muslims can buy property and their religious law will supersede Texas law, although he did do that later in the ad.  No, he relied on some unspecified religious and civilizational authority to proudly proclaim, as if there was ever any real doubt, that “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”  Without specifying why, of course.  Perhaps we can construe that he feels Muslims do not conform to the (unspecified) “Christian values” which he promises to defend from the Muslim “invasion” that has been supported by “politicians.”  (Do you wonder if the Christian value of recognizing that others may find their own path to God is one of the Christian values he’ll defend?)

That’s some pretty assertive, take-no-prisoners religious bigotry.  And just the dreary worldview that Christian nationalists – who by definition reject the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty for all  in the United States – are selling.

Do you still need to be persuaded of the importance of voting?

A sliver of dawn, a sleight of hand

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Just two weeks ago the president who never stops impressing us with his corruptive instincts and self-serving interpretations of law and custom raised the bar like nobody’s ever seen before.  He went to court as a private citizen suing his own government for $10 billion in damages, then withdrew the suit in favor of the establishment of a multi-billion dollar fund he could control from the shadows that could make payments with taxpayer dollars (your taxes and mine) to anyone who claimed to have “victimized” by the Biden Justice Department, including the people convicted of crimes for storming the Capitol on January 6.  Turns out those “billion-dollar slush fund” headlines were too much, even for the cowed and subservient Republicans in Congress who had never before seen any Trump proposal they couldn’t love.  But so far, they still providing cover for another part of the “settlement” that’s just as corrupt and self-serving for you know who.

In the good news section, we have yesterday’s declaration by the acting attorney general “withdrawing a proposal to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people claiming to be victims of unfair prosecution, amid a revolt among Republicans who saw it as an ethical and political disaster.”  Even at that, though, the acting AG (and Trump’s former criminal lawyer) wouldn’t go as far as some members wanted.

Democrats repeatedly requested that Mr. [Todd] Blanche commit to rescind, in writing, his order creating the payout fund.

“You started it, you established it in writing, so it just makes sense to rescind it in writing,” said Representative Grace Meng, Democrat of New York.

“I’m not committing to put anything in writing,” he said, adding that he would abide by his word and would take the request under advisement.

So, won’t sign, but you can trust him?  Right.  Some Republicans senators trust him so much that today they’re considering writing a ban on the fund into law! [6/5 Editor’s note: they tried, but they did not succeed. Later today Justice Department filings in two courts stated the fund is not going forward; I’m still not convinced.]

And just because Blanche “promised” this bad idea would be canned does not, I think, mean we should trust that it will.  The Trumpists usually come up with a backup plan to get whatever crazy thing they want; they are not the kind to throw up their hands and whisper “oops, my bad.”

Still, on its face at this point, I finally see a glimmer of a sign that Trump can be stopped: by the citizens who react so viscerally to such a poorly-camouflaged grift, who then empower the paper tiger members of Congress to for once do their —-ing jobs and stand athwart a runaway Executive and shout “Stop!”  The only people who seem unhappy about this development are those January 6 offenders-turned-pardonees who thought they’d stumbled onto a way to monetize their treason.

Another good news part is that the federal judge who originally felt she had no choice but to let this plan go ahead has had a change of heart.  After three dozen former federal judges argued “that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his ‘candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system,’” Judge Kathleen Williams re-opened the case to investigate allegations that the court was deceived through the misconduct of lawyers.  All of whom, you’ll recall – both sides – are Trump’s lawyers.  Words like “collusion” and “fraud upon the court” are being summoned.

Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had in fact questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.

In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.

In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

She also wanted Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”

(snip)

In their filing…the former judges claimed that Mr. Trump had improperly used his suit against the I.R.S. as a way to obtain “unlawful private benefits” for himself and his family, and to create a fund that would dole out taxpayer money “without constitutional or congressional authority.”

They also argued that the president had tried to shield the deal from judicial oversight by rushing a settlement and “short-circuiting” Judge Williams’s ability to examine its terms.

Now, it wouldn’t be much of a good news/bad news set up if I didn’t have at least one bad news item to point out.  And it comes from right in the middle of the good news about the Trump Administration’s “aw shucks” reversal of the plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay “victims” of political harassment by the Justice Department.  The Biden Justice Department only, of course.

But Mr. Blanche said he would leave in place [emphasis added] an order he signed last month that would, in effect, block the I.R.S. from investigating Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses for existing tax violations.

“Nothing has changed with that,” said Mr. Blanche, who added that the tax order would not shield Mr. Trump and his associates from future investigations.

Sleight of hand is a wonderful thing when used by magicians as entertainment, but it’s not so damn entertaining when our government distracts us with shouts of “nothing up my sleeve” while end-running Congress to legalize whatever tax evasion TFG might have committed in the past…you know, back in the time he gloated that not paying federal taxes “makes me smart.”

Trump and Republicans have offered zero clarity about the future of the other part of his slush-fund scheme: the grant of immunity from IRS scrutiny for Trump, his businesses, and his family members. Incredibly, this would “forever” bar IRS audits of past tax claims by the Trump clan or the Trump Organization. Democrats can try to make Republicans vote on that  towering act of corruption, which might prove politically even worse.

(snip)

Democrats tell me they’re moving to force votes in Congress that would effectively nullify the IRS immunity piece, as well. That provision is potentially an incredibly lucrative giveaway for Trump: It could benefit him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. So one approach would be for Democrats to use “reconciliation”—the process that Republicans are using to pass the ICE funding, which enables Senate passage by simple majority—to push amendments that would nix Trump’s IRS immunity scam.

“We will do whatever we can to force a vote during the budget reconciliation process on this monarchical outrage and further plunder of the people,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, emails me. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Democrats are set to push an amendment that will “revoke” Trump’s and his family’s “free rein to commit tax fraud.”

Here a complication arises. Now that Trump seems to have put his slush fund on hold, Senate Republicans may drop any effort to nix it via legislation from the reconciliation process entirely. If so, that could procedurally preclude Democrats from offering any amendments involving the IRS settlement—including one nixing Trump’s IRS immunity scam.

(snip)

Now imagine if the public broadly understood that Trump has ordered his Justice Department to reach a deal exempting himself—and his businesses and family members—from a good deal of IRS examination. This could personally and directly benefit Trump by saving him enormous sums of money while quite consciously placing him and his cronies above laws that the rest of us must live under.

That’s another level of self-dealing entirely. And Trump is flaunting it with great relish. OK, then: Democrats should do everything they possibly can to ensure that vulnerable Republican incumbents own every last little bit of it.

We all know – or certainly should know by now – that the only person Trump cares about is himself.  If he could finagle a couple billion dollars to buy the continuing fawning adoration of his supporters, that’s fine; but the one part of this whole agreement he won’t give up willingly is the order to protect himself from the IRS.

You damn right nobody’s ever seen anything like this before

Pat Ryan 3 Comments

Do I have this straight: the president as a private citizen sued a department of his own government for billions of dollars, then dropped the suit as the Justice Department announced a fund that gives (essentially) him control of $1.8 billion to disburse at his whim, with no oversight, and the government agreed never to audit any of his prior income tax returns?  That doesn’t seem right…how did we get here?

As a candidate for president, who later was convicted of multiple dozens of felonies, he was asked to release his income tax returns as is customary in these elections, but said he was being audited and would release them once the audit(s) were complete.  (There is no law that prohibits the release of returns that are under audit, although some lawyers would urge their client not to while the matter is ongoing; the public release of tax returns is a nod to openness and to prove that the candidate will have no secret conflict of interest once in office.)

But then this candidate never did release his tax returns, and never gave any further reason why he chose not to do so.  (Some returns were released later by a House committee, though.)

The candidate (and we all know who I’m talking about) won the 2016 election, and later some of his federal tax returns were published after an investigation by the New York Times.  Those returns show the man who claims enormous wealth twice paid only $750 in federal income tax.  This same man had proudly boasted during the campaign that not paying taxes was an indication of his intelligence, rather than his greed or his unwillingness to pay his fair share of the operation of our nation’s government.

After the twice-impeached former president won re-election in 2024, which itself forced the termination of several other criminal cases against him due to a custom not to prosecute sitting presidents, he filed a $10 billion lawsuit – yes, TEN BILLION DOLLARS – against the Internal Revenue Service – yes, an arm of the same Executive Branch that he himself was now (again) the leader of – to recover for the alleged damages done to him by the Service’s alleged laxity in allowing his tax returns to have been published against his wishes.  That’s right: the president admits – he swears in the suit– that letting the public see his tax returns “caused Plaintiffs 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.”  Curious claim for such an outstanding and successful businessman, right, but there it is.

As the judge assigned to this case started to ask questions that indicated the suit may not have smooth sailing – that, for example, there didn’t seem to be any real conflict here if the president is suing his own government and he controls the lawyers on both sides – the president announced he has withdrawn the lawsuit.  As is his right.

But THEN, the president’s Justice Department – which has in this second TFG Administration brought shame upon itself and the nation for openly seeking revenge (under the cloak of “justice”) against the boss’ political enemies and those of the boss’ supporters – announced the creation of a giant (insert your own descriptive adjective here) fund controlled by the president’s supplicants that can be distributed by them/him, with no oversight from Congress or the courts, to those who claim damages from being victimized by a previous government of another party which had attempted (ineptly and too slowly, it turned out) to investigate allegations of lawbreaking by TFG himself.  And by his minions.

Mr. Trump’s decision to drop his suit against the I.R.S. appeared to be intended to strip Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the I.R.S. case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees [emphasis added] without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter. Judge Williams, tacitly acknowledging her hands were tied, accepted the president’s dismissal of the suit and formally closed the case by the end of the day.

(snip)

Money for the fund will come from a special, unlimited account available to the Justice Department for settling lawsuits. That pool of money gives the department the authority to make monetary settlements without needing approval from Congress. A group of five people, selected by Mr. [acting attorney general Todd] Blanche, will oversee the operations of the fund, though Mr. Trump can fire its members at will. It will stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before Mr. Trump leaves office.

Creation of the fund, which could be used to compensate Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is sure to please a president who has demanded not only retribution but recompense. But it could create major political problems for congressional Republicans already dealing with the political ballast of his unpopularity — and who will now be forced to say if they support or oppose allocating taxpayer cash to his allies at a time when many Americans are struggling economically.

AND, the agreement attempts to protect itself by claiming up front that no arm of Congress or the courts, or anyone else on this planet or any other, in perpetuity, has any legal right to try to do anything at all about it.  (We’ll see about that: two police officers who were in the Capitol on January 6 have already filed suit to block creation of the fund.  I bet there will be others.)

AND MORE THAN THAT, this agreement also bars the IRS from auditing TFG’s previous tax returns, or those of his sons, or their companies.  For ever.  (A get out of jail free card?  An after-the-fact non-disclosure agreement, shielding any evidence of any prior tax evasion?)

Is that about it?  What should we think about all this?

“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group that has been critical of the administration.

But others disagree, including some of the nearly 1600 people indicted for their role in the January 6 attack who have already been pardoned or had their convictions dismissed.  By TFG.  They could be getting a payout from the government they attacked.

Some felt that the fund validated their self-image as victims of the government. Others felt elated — albeit somewhat stunned — at the prospect of a payout. And not a few felt a bit confused at how the process of filing claims and receiving checks could play out.

“So many questions,” said Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years on a seditious conspiracy conviction arising from the riot. “But it’s a good direction.”

From the “most corrupt ever” reactions, to the folks annoyed by the nuisance of filling out the application, a more pertinent question (or impertinent, if you are TFG) would be, is this legal?  The answer is, I think: we will see.

The whole enterprise was a jarring shock to the conventional understanding of the constitutional system, raising what legal experts said were profound questions about presidential power. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, they said, Mr. Trump will have managed simultaneously to thwart Congress’s power of the purse and the ability of the courts to police the separation of powers.

(snip)

Professor [Samuel] Bagenstos, who served as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, wrote in January about the danger posed by the Judgment Fund.

“An administration that wished to spend money on projects or beneficiaries not authorized by Congress,” he wrote, “could simply encourage its desired recipient to bring a lawsuit against the United States and then settle that lawsuit (no matter how frivolous) by making a payment from the Judgment Fund.”

While Congress has ceded power to the executive branch, it could also reclaim it. Indeed, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Tuesday that he expected lawmakers to scrutinize how the president’s lawsuit had been ended.

(snip)

A Justice Department news release on Monday said that the “plaintiffs” — that is, Mr. Trump and his family — “will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages of any kind,” a provision the White House used to defend the fund. Still, the opportunity to help direct payments approaching $2 billion to allies has value.

So does the elimination of the threat of an audit. In 2024, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump could face a tax liability of more than $100 million.

The deal was open to question for other reasons.

The I.R.S. had plenty of defenses to Mr. Trump’s suit. For instance, it might well have been barred by the statute of limitations.

Nor was it clear that the agency was liable for the acts of Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor who pleaded guilty to leaking Mr. Trump’s tax information and whose actions Mr. Trump had cited as a reason he had been wronged by the government.

The sum Mr. Trump sought was also roughly equal to the agency’s annual budget.

And the suit was palpably collusive, ordinarily a reason for a judge to toss a case.

Tuesday’s addendum to the settlement, the codicil purporting to immunize Mr. Trump and his family, raised its own legal questions.

(snip)

Even under the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision conferring broad immunity on Mr. Trump for his official acts, purely private conduct, as the filing of a tax return would seem to be, is fair game for prosecution after a president becomes a private citizen. It is not clear whether the addendum could block a future administration from pursuing such a claim.