Tag John Cornyn

The lipstick on a pig

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The artificial intelligence that is squatting, uninvited, in my Google search engine is trying to reassure me.  There are people  involved in this equation, it says, and “absolute proof that leaves no room for denial does not exist in human  discourse” because people may deny an obvious conclusion if it hurts their feelings.  Or if, as we’ve seen, it casts the Mayor of MAGAtown in a less than a blindingly positive glow.  My conclusion is you’ve got to keep piling up the facts and remain confident they will lead, eventually, to the scales falling from the eyes of enough people to make a difference.  As may be happening now, both in the Senate’s consideration of the nominee for attorney general and in a federal judge’s finding that a Donald Trump lawsuit against the IRS “was manufactured simply to justify its settlement”.

In May we discussed the very clearly corrupt intentions of the lawsuit filed by private citizen Trump (and his elder sons and their businesses) against the Internal Revenue Service of the government run by President Trump, seeking $10 billion to punish the IRS for laxity in letting TFG’s personal income taxes be stolen and later published (by the New York Times) against his wishes during his first term.  He swore in the court filing 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.”  But just as Judge Kathleen Williams began to question the legitimacy of Trump suing his own government – with Trump controlling the lawyers on both sides of a case in which there seemed to be no real conflict – Trump withdrew the suit (hoping to take away the judge’s control of the proceedings) and then his Justice Department announced a stunning settlement.

  • The creation of a tax-funded $1.8 billion fund to pay damages to persons who claim to have been victimized by the government under Democratic presidents, apparently to include those convicted (and later pardoned, by TFG) of offenses related to the treasonous assault on the Capitol on January 6; the fund was to be controlled by Trump-appointed trustees with no oversight permitted from Congress or the courts; and
  • The IRS would be barred, in perpetuity, from auditing any of the past tax returns of Trump or his elder sons or or any of their businesses, which I had characterized as “An after-the-fact non-disclosure agreement, shielding any evidence of any prior tax evasion” from use in court or from disclosure to the public.

It took less than two weeks for the prospect of a “slush fund” of tax money being used to pay off the rioters who attacked police officers on January 6 to rouse some GOP members of Congress who had conveniently forgotten the concept of “checks and balances” among the branches of government, while always remembering the political power TFG holds over MAGA America.  Acting attorney general Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee that plans for that fund were dead.  Deceased.  Irretrievably unrevivable.  And you could take his word for it, although he refused to put this new part of the agreement in writing.  But the part of the agreement preventing the IRS from auditing the Trumps?  Oh, that would stay in effect.

Meanwhile, Judge Williams had re-opened the case to investigate whether the court had been deceived through the misconduct of lawyers.  She was prompted to that action by a letter from three dozen former federal judges who argued “that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his ‘candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.’”

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…”

Did she ever.  In mid-July,

A federal judge held [July 13] that President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was manufactured simply to justify its settlement, including a multibillion-dollar “anti-weaponization” fund for political allies and a shield from IRS scrutiny.

“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process,” U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams wrote in a blistering 56-page ruling. “This was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

The fact that the federal government did not ever counter arguments that the arrangement was unconstitutional —and that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unilaterally canceled plans for the Anti-Weaponization Fund — were glaring signals that the lawsuit was not genuine, Williams said.

And furthermore,

Though the administration has argued that Trump had filed the lawsuit — a demand for a $10 billion payout for the leak of his tax returns — in his personal capacity, Williams said that explanation was untenable.

“The court declines to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here,” she wrote. “The Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.”

Williams added that Trump could have brought the lawsuit while he was a private citizen but appears to have waited until he was reelected president and appointed his former lawyer to help lead the DOJ.

Trump is appealing that ruling, which is a “full-throated repudiation of Trump and his administration” that came just as Blanche’s nomination as attorney general was going before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Where, as luck would have it, sit two Republicans who object to provisions of the Trump/IRS lawsuit settlement AND who are ending their terms this year and so are beyond the reach of Trump’s political threats.  By earlier this week,

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) had insisted that the Trump administration limit — in writing — central provisions of a controversial deal struck this spring between the Justice Department and the president to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. DOJ was not able to provide the senators sufficient assurances to win their agreement to support Blanche.

The senators have said their votes for Blanche’s nomination hinge on their requested changes to the deal. A “no” vote from either one of them would be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage, given the expectation that all Judiciary Committee Democrats will oppose Blanche’s confirmation.

(snip)

Tillis, who opted not to seek reelection this year and has shown an increasing willingness to tangle with Trump, has expressed concern that the payout fund could end up rewarding defendants who attacked police during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cornyn, who lost his reelection bid in May after Trump endorsed his primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, shared Tillis’s worries on the fund and has said he wants the administration to clarify, in writing, that the tax protections afforded by the deal do not apply to the Trump family’s future actions.

This resistance led to a rescheduling of the committee vote to next week.  Cornyn and Tillis had continued discussions with Blanche and reported some progress…until Blanche’s former law client couldn’t resist the urge to show everyone who is boss.

President Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to revive his controversial plan for federal payouts to people he says were “badly treated” by the Obama and Biden administrations, telling senators that he would “push hard” for legislation to fund the payments if they did not confirm his nominee for attorney general.

“It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account, vowing to pass an “Anti-Weaponization Bill” should his nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general fail in the Senate.

Trump added that he would keep Blanche as acting attorney general and blasted two GOP senators — John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (North Carolina) — who have blocked the nomination from advancing over concerns about the fund.

It was not immediately clear what legislation the president was referencing, and the White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s post.

So, what do we have here:

  1. A man who ceaselessly brags about his business acumen (even though he is a man who ran casinos  into bankruptcy), but who swears in court that public disclosure of his tax returns causes him public embarrassment and tarnishes his business reputation.
  2. A man who, at any time in the years when he was not president of the United States, could have sued the IRS over its contractor’s theft of his tax returns that got leaked to the New York Times, but who didn’t do so until he was president again and thus controlled the governmental department that runs the IRS as well as the department that files lawsuits on behalf of the government.
  3. A man who claimed he really really deserved $10 billion dollars in compensation for real damages done to him, but who dropped the suit without argument when the judge began to question the suit’s legitimacy.
  4. A man who claimed not to know anything about the settlement of that lawsuit (sorta like he claimed not to know anything about Project 2025), but who was all on board with paying almost $2 billion dollars to people he had already pardoned for their crimes in attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6.  And still is, even after a federal judge found that the suit was just the lipstick put on the pig of an effort to legitimize a multi-billion dollar payoff to Trump supporters while shielding his possible past tax evasion from government scrutiny.
  5. A man who wants his former personal criminal defense lawyer to run the Department of Justice (so he can punish his political enemies), but who thinks nothing of bastardizing the legal procedure for putting him in that office in order to get his way after officials in another branch of government have the temerity to do their job instead of rubberstamping his edicts.

When a man’s actions tell you who he really is…it’s time to believe him.  Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, you know; just piling up some facts over here, boss…

E pluribus unity

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

After two days of consideration, and some moping, I’ve determined that I am disappointed with the final vote by the Senate in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, especially since they were so close to calling witnesses who might have provided evidence that could have won over enough votes to convict him of the charges.

I got up early (for a Saturday) to watch the closing arguments, and even though Mitch McConnell had emailed that he would vote to acquit I was happy to learn that there was a chance that witnesses would be called to testify.  As someone who believes Trump’s illegal and un-American behavior deserves whatever punishment is available, I began dreaming—calling witnesses was going to increase the chances that something would happen that would persuade more senators to convict Trump.  It might be the only way to get Republicans who were hell bent on protecting Trump—or who at least wanted to look like they were protecting Trump, in order to insulate themselves from the anger of Trump nation—into a position in which they could vote their real conscience.  Deep down, where everyone knows that Trump is a menace.  Even Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz.

https://twitter.com/Eric_Alterman/status/1360998689448357888

Although disappointed in the verdict, I am not surprised by it.  Because this is not a movie.  In fiction, without a doubt, there would have been a surprise speech from some Republican senator that clearly and persuasively and emotionally laid the blame for inciting the attack on Congress on Trump, not just for his speech on the Ellipse that day but for the months of blatant lies inflaming his supporters into thinking a nefarious force was stealing the election.  Something like this, right up until the “but…”

Of course, there was a nefarious force at work…it was Trump.

I can’t comprehend how or why people believed Trump’s warning that an election that had not yet happened had already been rigged.  Not that Trump doesn’t have a high enough opinion of himself to make the claim that the only way he could lose would be through theft, but I still don’t get how so many Americans would accept this transparently self-serving claim as true—before the first vote was even cast, and with no offer of proof for how it would happen.  After all the opposition to Trump’s policies and his actions that had developed over the years, why was it hard to believe that a lot of people wouldn’t want him to be president any more?  You didn’t have to agree with those people to be honest enough with yourself to see that they were there, and they were going to vote for someone else.

The election came, and he did lose, and he bored right in with the lie.  There was no evidence of widespread fraud.  Court after court after court (after court) rejected literally dozens of legal claims.  Right through the recounts and the canvasses in state after state, right through the certification of electoral votes in all fifty states, the lying persisted.  These men and women who believed themselves patriots—the only real Americans left—convinced themselves that Trump was right, that taking up arms against their own government was the patriotic thing to do.  They were so entrenched in the delusion that they even photo-documented themselves committing the crime, unburdened by any concern for their own legal culpability.  Hundreds of them are now aware of just what a mistake that was.

The case against Trump presented by the House managers left any honest audience little wiggle room in concluding that Trump committed an impeachable offense: encouraging an armed assault against the United States Capitol and its defenders, the members of the legislative branch of government, and his own vice president.  The smoking gun was right there in Trump’s tiny hand: even if you accept the argument that he meant it when told his supporters that day to make a peaceful protest, you have to explain why, for hours after the violence began, he did nothing to try to stop it.  Didn’t get on TV and call on them to stop.  Didn’t Tweet at them, telling them to stop.  Didn’t call in the National Guard, or any other law enforcement to assist the Capitol police.  Did nothing to restore law and order. *

A majority of the U.S. Senate voted that Trump is guilty of the charge, but not the two-thirds of members present that the Constitution requires.  Today the Houston Chronicle editorial board praised those seven Republicans senators who braved the backlash sure to come by voting to convict based on the compelling evidence presented in the trial.  As for the others:

Their colleagues who voted to acquit either averted their eyes from the glaring evidence or cowered behind strained legal arguments. History will judge them, but the American people need not wait. We bore witness to the assault on our nation’s Capitol and the evidence presented in trial.

We will not forget Trump’s crimes or the failure of most in his party to hold him accountable. Senators failed to show the same kind of courage that Republican state officials did as they resisted the former president’s pressure to overturn an election.

They failed to put their duty to safeguard democracy above partisan allegiance. They took no strength from former Vice President Mike Pence, who rebuffed calls to interfere in the Electoral College certification process, or from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who investigated allegations of voter fraud and, finding no evidence, chose to resign rather than perpetuate Trump’s false claims.

They failed to honor the bravery of the officers who risked their lives to prevent further carnage, including Capitol officer Brian D. Sicknick who was killed and the almost 140 officers who were bruised, bloodied and bashed by a mob wielding bats and flag poles.

Perhaps the starkest profile in cowardice belongs to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for voting to acquit and then delivering a damning speech proving he knew better. McConnell declared Trump “practically and morally” responsible for the Capitol riot but relied on a questionable legal interpretation to claim the Senate lacked the power to hold a former president accountable. Then he tried to pass blame on the House for delays when he himself blocked the Senate from starting the trial while Trump was still in office.

Such excuses, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s claim that Democrats were being “unnecessarily vindictive” in pursuing impeachment, aren’t fooling anybody who’s been paying attention.

So, disappointed…but not discouraged.  Not yet.  The verdict of the U.S. Senate does not protect Trump from the criminal justice system, which can still prosecute him for his actions in regard to the attack on the Capitol just as it can for his attempts in Georgia and elsewhere to pressure local officials to commit election fraud.  Not to mention the civil and criminal investigations in New York and elsewhere, which get the feel of being too much to remember, so thanks to George Conway for bothering to write it down.

In the meantime I intend to try to follow the advice offered by E.J. Dionne yesterday: think about how the good that came out of this trial can be the foundation for the future:

…a diverse and able group of prosecutors laid out an indelible record not only of what happened on Jan. 6 and why, but also Trump’s irresponsibility throughout his term of office: his courting of the violent far right; his celebration of violence; his habit of privileging himself and his own interests over everything and everyone else, including his unrequitedly loyal vice president.

This record matters. We often like to pretend that we can move on and forget the past. But our judgments about the past inevitably shape our future. Every political era is, in part, a reaction to the failures — perceived and real — of the previous one. The Hoover-Coolidge Republicans loomed large for two generations of Democrats. Ronald Reagan built a thriving movement by calling out what he successfully cast as the sins of liberalism.

By tying themselves to Trump with their votes, most House and Senate Republicans made themselves complicit in his behavior. And Trump will prove to be even more of an albatross than Hoover, who, after all, had a moral core.

(snip)

It’s a sign of how far and how fast the ex-president has fallen that opponents of impeachment rationalized their votes by saying, as McConnell did, that Trump must still confront the “criminal justice system” and “civil litigation.” You’re in trouble when your would-be friends are saying you should be prosecuted rather than impeached.

All of which strengthens the hand of a president whose central campaign theme was a warning against the threat that Trump posed to democracy itself. A bipartisan majority of 57 senators and 232 House members has now declared that Joe Biden was right.

Here’s some of what Joe Biden had to say, standing in front of the Capitol two weeks after Trump’s mob tried to steal an election and subvert our system of government.

Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now.  A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country.  It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II.  Millions of jobs have been lost.  Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.  A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us.  The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.  A cry for survival comes from the planet itself.  A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.  And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.

To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.  It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:  Unity.

(snip)

I ask every American to join me in this cause.

Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred.  Extremism, lawlessness, violence.  Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.  With unity we can do great things.  Important things.  We can right wrongs.  We can put people to work in good jobs.  We can teach our children in safe schools.  We can overcome this deadly virus.  We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all.  We can deliver racial justice.  We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.

(snip)

Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.  The battle is perennial.  Victory is never assured.

Through the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setbacks, our “better angels” have always prevailed.  In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward.  And, we can do so now.  History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.

(snip)

And so today, at this time and in this place, let us start afresh.  All of us.  Let us listen to one another.  Hear one another.  See one another.  Show respect to one another.  Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.  Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.  And, we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.

My fellow Americans, we have to be different than this.  America has to be better than this.  And, I believe America is better than this.

(snip)

This is a time of testing.  We face an attack on democracy and on truth.  A raging virus.  Growing inequity.  The sting of systemic racism.  A climate in crisis.  America’s role in the world.  Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways.  But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.  Now we must step up.  All of us.

* EDITOR’S NOTE: This post has been updated to remove a referenced Tweet which claimed Trump and his family watched the attack on the Capitol from a party tent on the White House lawn.  That was not correct; the Poynter Tweet below explains the error.  HIPRB regrets the error.