Tag Carrie Johnson

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

Pat Ryan 2 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.

Reflecting on September 11: a call to our better angels

Pat Ryan 4 Comments

In the entry hallway at our house we have a framed picture of the night skyline of Lower Manhattan as seen from New Jersey, the twinkling twin towers of the World Trade Center the focal point.  The caption under the photo reads, “We’ll never forget.”  Not forget what happened that day?  That’s the easy part.

That morning I was at my desk at work with the television tuned to CNN, trying to concentrate on the newspaper, when I became barely conscious of talk about a plane hitting one of the towers.  They got my attention when I saw the video of smoke coming from the north tower and heard the anchor talking to someone who said he saw a passenger jet hit the building.  That’s ridiculous, I thought: those planes would never accidentally hit a downtown building, and you could see on TV that the sky was a clear, brilliant blue…must have been a small private plane or something.  My office mate walked in and I brought him up to date on what they were saying, then we sat and watched…and saw a passenger plane come into the frame and slam into the other building!  My first thought: this is not an accident.  (Firm grasp of the obvious, eh?)

I didn’t move from the TV.  Another plane hit the Pentagon.  I watched the towers collapse, fascinated at how they seemed to accordion down on themselves, and not believing the size of the dust cloud they sent up.  Then we were all sent home from our government office in Houston because no one knew what might be the next target.  I sat in front of my television at home the rest of the day trying to get it all straight in my head—what do we know, as opposed to what we think we know—as I had done sitting at a microphone in a radio studio in Houston more than 15 years earlier, on the day space shuttle Challenger blew up.

In the next few weeks we learned that the hijackers who died along with almost 3,000 innocent victims on September 11 were connected to a global terrorist network called Al Qaeda, founded by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, and which was implicated in prior attacks on American targets around the world.  Apparently, Al Qaeda was attacking those it saw as enemies of its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.  Before the end of the year, President Bush sent American troops to Afghanistan to get bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and their protectors within the Taliban.  We’ve been at war ever since.

Not just an impossible to quantify war on “terrorism,” which is really more a tactic than an enemy, but an actual boots-on-the-ground bullets-in-the-air war, and there’s still no end in sight.  One big reason, I believe, is that “we” aren’t at war.  Our armed forces are at war, and so are their loved ones, but when have the rest of us felt like we were at war?  There haven’t been any shortages of goods, damn few protests, and no tax increases to pay for a war.  Absent any kind of personal connection it’s not surprising that many Americans find it hard to remember that “we” have been fighting war constantly since late 2001—and for much of that time, two wars.  We have come to think of it, when we think of it at all, as a perfectly normal situation; for many of our soldiers, sailors and Marines, being in a shooting war is all they know professionally, and what their spouses and kids assume to be a normal life.

We went to war in Afghanistan to get the people who attacked us on September 11.  We finally killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan this year, but there’s no sign of an end to our presence in Afghanistan.  We went to war in Iraq to…go ahead, you fill in the blank, but we know it wasn’t to get Al Qaeda, since they weren’t there, or to stop Saddam Hussein from using his weapons of mass destruction, which also weren’t there.  Ironically, the war we chose to fight in Iraq only strengthened our enemy there, if it didn’t actually create an enemy where he didn’t previously exist.  Last month, some eight and a half years after that war began, was the first month that there were no American casualties in Iraq.

The attacks of September 11 were a shot to the solar plexus of the American people.  In the immediate aftermath we did what Americans do after a surprise attack, whether from a mortal enemy or from Mother Nature: everyday men and women responded heroically in the face of the crisis, then we all took care of those who needed to be taken care of.  We opened our hearts and our purses without complaint or even a second thought, and helped each other through until the shock wore off, then turned our attention to those who attacked us.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see the second surprise attack, the one launched by cynical politicians and government functionaries who took advantage of our fear and anxiety.  The news media, shamefully fearful of even being accused of being less than loyal patriots, stood by and let officials get away with murder, in the figurative if not the literal sense.  We let our fear overpower “the better angels of our nature” and spent parts of the next ten years squandering our time, our treasure and our good karma.

We crawled all over each other with demonstrations of the trappings of patriotism as if that was all that was required to be a patriot, as if claiming allegiance to America’s ideals was just as good as living up to those ideals when it really matters.

We let natural wariness in unusual circumstances turn into fear of The Other.  We treated Americans who are Muslim, and those who came here from the Middle East and southern Asia, as though they were in the cockpits of those planes in spirit that day.  People whose only sin was that they practice a particular religion—including those in the peaceful mainstream of that religion, not in the violent, radical extreme—or trace their heritage to a particular part of the world weren’t given the benefit of any doubt but that they were enemies of America.  How much time have we wasted on things like trying to ban shariah law, or trying to stop Muslims from building mosques where some loudmouth decided it’s not appropriate?

How is it that we really spent breath fighting with each other over whether it’s all right to torture prisoners, or just OK to secretly send them to friendly countries where they do the torturing for us?  Were we napping when the government enacted Patriot Acts at the expense of our own civil liberties?  Why did we devote our time and energy to a blue ribbon investigation into ways we could better protect ourselves in the future, and then not implement the recommendations?

How did we sit still for the manipulators who used this attack on our country to whip up sympathy for a war against a country (and its people) that had nothing to do with that attack, with the result that a larger number of Americans have died in that needless war—Americans who bravely, selflessly volunteered to protect the rest of us—than died in the original attack?  And that’s to say nothing of the cost in dollars, and the resulting impact that has had on our national economy and well being.

Back then, I thought that a few months after the attacks, when the shock subsided, we’d regain our perspective, but it seems that I was thinking about a different America, one which perhaps only ever existed in dreams: one where we followed the rules we set for ourselves, even when we were frightened; where people who hijack our airplanes and use them to kill thousands of our fellow Americans have the right to a fair and public trial; where, when crazy people who claim to adhere to the tenets of one of the world’s great religions but are in fact an extremist group led by a delusional maniac with a messiah complex attack our cities and our government institutions, we don’t ignore facts and logic to leap to the conclusion that every person in the world who practices that religion is part of a plot to get us.

Today we have the chance to do better, and I believe we can.  We can work to put aside our fear and get over the juvenile impulse to attack anyone different from ourselves.  Let’s choose to deal with people based on who they really are and what they really do, rather than relying on our fevered imaginations to do our thinking for us.  Let’s start, for example, by recognizing the difference between Al Qaeda and Al Jazeera, or the difference between a community center and a terrorist training camp.

Not forgetting the events of September 11, 2001—that’s the easy part.  If we don’t do the hard part, and act like the people we pride ourselves on being, then the terrorists have already won.

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