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Notes -
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.
This is old stuff, this is how lawfare is done. You troll around the courts until your party is in office, then you settle the case for yourself, and give billions of taxpayer money to "Charitable organizations" that happen to be your political allies, and that's how you fund your politics. The only thing that is new is that Trump is doing it on the Republican side, rather than this being a one-party thing due to the control of major cities.
Complain about corruption if you want, but no tool of lawfare stays in only one toolbox. The entire reason the left hates Trump is that he does politics back to them. They used the Deep State to leak private financial records? Now Trump hits back. After a hundred felony counts and the blanket decade-pardons, I don't ever want to hear a criticism of Trump's dirty dealings without the full disclaimer. It's not corruption when the other side has been doing it for eighty years, but it is very precious special pleading.
If it’s such old stuff, why didn’t you bother to give an example? C’mon, surely Nixon or LBJ tried it, at least. We’ve got 80 years of sordid machine politics to choose from. One of them has to be more concrete than your sense of unfairness.
The hate was in full swing before he ever got into office. He ran on a platform of barbecuing sacred cows. Then he spent four years bumbling around, trying to figure out how to turn on the gas. If he’d been “doing politics” he might actually have accomplished something.
Gladly. It is positively shameful how much corruption is being excused with a pansy-ass “well, the other guys do it!” Maybe we should elect somebody to do something about it. Drain the swamp, as it were.
FULL DISCLAIMER: I think lawfare is bad! I think Biden’s pardon bullshit was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice! No one should be above the law. Am I allowed to critique the obvious corruption, now?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/doj-eliminates-obama-era-slush-200100938.html
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Can you think of any Democrats with any anti-corruption credibility? For example, anyone who has called for the ending of the mass healthcare/welfare fraud and the punishment of those responsible?
For comparison, the Trump admin just shut down a bunch of fake hospice businesses that were raking in billions of dollars in fraud, somewhere between "benignly tolerated" and "openly abetted" by the local Democrats. LA alone was $600 million, over a third of the settlement in the OP.
Good on them. This is a good crackdown, as far as I can tell.
The problem with looking for examples is that everybody, Democrats included, wants to claim credit for the big wins. Newsom can say that he’s proud of this bust; that plus ten dollars might get you a cup of California coffee. For related reasons, Democrats railing against Trump corruption are about as controversial and brave as Republicans concerned about Hillary’s emails.
If I had to pick Congressmen, I’ve got a soft spot for Jason Crow, who’s a bit of a grandstander but at least seems earnest about insider trading laws. Kirsten Gillibrand is another one who’s serious about the subject.
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Yes, and that he's doing it with no real fig leaf at all. Rov_Scam above described how the Democrats could get revenge ("settling by paying a large amount of their meagure fortune to the Preschooler's Trans Education Fund")... by just doing the thing they do anyway.
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I am also baffled that people do not know this. We had many such cases around BLM riots - rioters were arrested, they sued the local PD for excessive violence and sympathetic government enthusiastically settles. It is now basically accepted way of financing political players on par with "learing center" frauds, US AID frauds, or frauds via other supposed NGOs that are solely financed from government to do party activism.
It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe. This type of legal corruption is now baked into the society, it is how business is done and it is inevitable. Your local political activist protests with understanding, that his legal fees will be covered by some leftist activist group who in turn understand that they will get financed from some fake project or settled lawsuit with possible career moves from activism into local, state or federal bureaucracy or maybe some consultant job. This is how millions of people live and do business, it is the same system that was in place in Rome with politicians having their client network attached like leeches on tax systems and monopolies etc.
Refusing to play this game means that you will lose and then get laughed off the stage by cynical progressive wonks as a stupid moron. They can now gleefully claim for decades how the right does not have institutional brainpower and numbers and support network from low level activists to high level people in academia and other institutions. Of course they don't have them, they refused to play the game for decades, and let the opposition entrench deeply into all the systems.
This does not strike me as inherently a racket. It's perfectly anodyne in western civilization for the government to spend money on public art, not just brutalist utilitarian concrete. Has been since the Romans. No doubt there is corruption in what artists get the commission, particularly if it's always avant-garde artists whose aesthetics are light-years away from the kinds of statues and decorations people actually want in their neighborhoods - but a small fraction of the budget being reserved for art is not in principle outrageous or even surprising.
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This type of collusive litigation is not a thing in Europe - in general the UK has less government-by-litigation than the US, and civil law countries have a lot less. In most of Continental Europe, there is direct on-budget government funding of political parties tied to the numbers of votes they receive or the number of seats they win. Everywhere, there is direct on-budget government funding of left-wing GONGOs.
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We used to have the question of "who was president in 2020?", now we have the question of "who was president in 2018?". He was the guy in charge! He's suing himself for his own administration's failure to properly secure information.
Is your contention that Trump ordered his own IRS to leak his financial records? Or was that part of the "resistance" so popular in the first Trump term?
It's his administration, I don't know what rules he or his appointees did or didn't have in place for protecting against leaks by employees but ultimately the buck stops with the boss.
This is nonsensical. Was Obama responsible for the Washington Navy Yard shooting because 'the buck stops with the boss'?
He wasn't responsible for pulling the trigger, but yes - as Commander in Chief Obama was ultimately responsible for both security at the Navy Yard and the security clearance system that allowed Alexis to keep a clearance despite his criminal and psychiatric records. This is the whole point of having a unitary executive - The Buck Stops Here, as the sign on Truman's Oval Office desk says.
That the US generally allows autolitigation is well-established law - if as owner-manager of your own company you injure yourself on the job due to your own negligence, you can sue the company for having a negligent boss. (And you might want to if the company has third-party liability insurance that will pay the damages). But there is a reason places like Lowering the Bar and Above the Law will post the casefile and publicly mock you for it.
It is also part of a consistent pattern of behaviour on the part of Trump. His 2024 campaign was almost as much against his own first administration as against the Biden administration. Both Trump and his supporters in the country think he wasn't really in charge in the 2016-20 period and shouldn't be blamed for what happened.
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Do you think we should abolish the Civil Service? Going back to the patronage system would make your position here much more tenable.
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