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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.
Eventually the Dems will be back in power and all of these people (and especially the Trump family, and lol if they think a pardon will save them) are going to be the subject of extreme, unrestricted nuclear lawfare, whether or not it’s justified. A few smart lawyers and associates will sneak out with some profit, but the problem with democratically elected corruption is that it only works if you either stay in power, or come from a third world country (so you can just flee to Switzerland or Monaco or Singapore with your gains). The Trump sons are extremely stupid so don’t seem to recognize this, and Kushner is keeping his distance beyond the foreign policy stuff (and he already has the Saudis’ money locked up). Once Trump is gone and can’t run again Republican loyalty to Trump will be very short-lived, establishment reps have no reason to bat for him, and the populist wing of the Massie / Carlson type is turning on him or already has, and it’s only a year and a half in. Who is going to defend him once he’s out of power? Lindsey Graham? They can’t even flee because any country would gladly extradite them for favor with a future admin.
So I think the TDS around this is kind of stupid. If you want to see the Trump family face consequences for this venality, I’m pretty sure you’ll get your wish. In the meantime, maybe SCOTUS can at least do one or two useful things.
Thus, if they are going to get the penalty, they may as well commit the offense.
In the US justice system, a generally fair justice system where convictions of innocents are rare (something like 5% at worse, and those are skewed towards people with extremely bad luck in evidence stacked against them), the difference between doing the crime and not can be massive.
That doesn't mean lawfare doesn't happen, you can harass innocents over bullshit charges of course. But actual severe penalties are pretty much entirely resigned to the guilty. If you're doing the time, you did the crime.
Convictions of innocents being rare doesn't imply the system is fair, because you have to take base rates into account. It may be that they are rare because few innocents are targeted, but of the ones who are targeted, the conviction rate is high.
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