Trump Will Drop Lawsuits If We Hand Him $1.7 Billion To Dole Out To Cronies and J6ers
The J6ers might succeed where contractors have failed: getting Donald Trump to pay for services rendered. Granted, the service was trying to overthrow the government.
There is good news on the legal front: Donald Trump is prepared to drop several lawsuits he has filed against the federal government that he leads, including the ridiculous $10 billion he was seeking over an IRS contractor leaking his tax returns to the media in 2020.
The bad news is that in exchange, Trump wants complete control of a $1.7 billion “compensation fund” that he can use to pay off January 6 rioters and anyone else allegedly harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the government, which is wingnut-ese for under-baked attempts at holding them accountable for their criminal behavior.
What a sweet deal. Attempt a violent insurrection, fail, and still get paid for it by the government you were trying to overthrow. It’s kind of ironic when you think about it, given Trump’s history of stiffing employees. There are law firms and tile contractors from coast to coast who wish he had ever been this attentive to their invoices over the last 50 years.
And this payment comes after these 1,600 had been pardoned by the president and let out of prison, which was already a disgusting abuse of power in service of the mass hallucination that Trump really won the 2020 election. We swear, these people are both the dumbest and luckiest people this country may have ever produced, and this is a country that produced the Kardashian family.
ABC News has some details, and you know Trump is going to take enormous advantage of this one:
The settlement terms are expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims, sources said.
Trump had already claimed he would donate any money he got from these lawsuits to charity, a promise that isn’t worth the oxygen he inhaled while making it. As we noted in January when he filed the $10 billion lawsuit over the tax return leak, the man has 419 affiliated business entities that received notices from the IRS that their tax returns might have been affected. Presumably, any one of those 419 entities could file a claim, and any money received goes into Donald Trump’s pocket one way or the other.
The $1.7 billion would come out of something called the Judgement Fund, which has long been run by the Treasury Department to pay court judgements and settlements to people and entities that have sued the government. This fund is overseen by a commission, but one term of the settlement would be to make sure that mechanism goes the way of the dodo bird and Amelia Earhart:
President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars[.]
Oh cool. Trump has stacked every other commission he oversees with his own cronies who will let him do whatever he wants. (Think of the Kennedy Center board, or the boards that are supposed to oversee and approve White House renovations.) This board would reportedly have five members, and all awards would be given out on a majority vote. Anyone think any of the lickspittles Trump is going to approve is going to object to any payouts?
The best part of this story might be this passage, which Chris Hayes described the experience of reading as causing his soul to leave his body:
[S]ources have described the proposed compensation fund as a hybrid between a victim compensation fund -- similar to the civil claims process that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill -- and a truth-and-reconciliation-style commission.
A truth and reconciliation commission like the one South Africa set up in the aftermath of apartheid, or Argentina set up to investigate and prosecute crimes committed during its Dirty War, or the one Chile set up to investigate the actions of August Pinochet’s government, or Canada set up to investigate abuses in its system of residential schools for Indian children, or that Rwanda set up a few years after its 1994 genocide.
Imagine a commission set up to clear the names of Donald Trump and his minions who stormed the Capitol on January 6 by rewarding them with money taking its place on that list of genuine atrocities. It’s like adding the name of whoever won the Iowa high school state football championship in 2006 to the official record of Super Bowl winners. It is offensive to any notion of justice or truth.
But it fits right in with Trump and his mountebanks’ belief that they are the most persecuted people in American history.
ABC also reports that officials in the Trump administration have raised “ethical concerns about the arrangement,” which HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA OH LORD OUR SIDES. And the James-Younger Gang had ethical qualms about stealing from banks. Fellas, it’s a little late in the game for you to be concerned about Donald fucking Trump’s ethical lapses, or that the public might notice he’s not on the up-and-up.
One final irony about this whole story is that the tax returns leaked by the IRS contractor showed Trump had paid all of $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and no income tax at all in 10 of the 15 years before his first term. So not only did the United States Treasury (and by extension the taxpayers) get cheated out of what would have been tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars if we had a system that actually ensured the wealthy pay their fair share, but we might now be taking $1.7 billion out of the Treasury and handing it over to the established tax cheat to do with as he sees fit.
It is time to ask a very important question, which is whether our reality is actually one giant episode of Punk’d.
[ABC News]
Wonkette survives not by snagging a piece of that sweet $1.7 billion in taxpayer money, but thanks to the generous support of our readers.
One my friends posted this on social media. I didn’t catch this in news stories about the trip.
“Masterful trolling by China's Xi Jinping. His parting gift to Trump was rose seeds. Trump paved over the White House's beautiful rose garden, a garden Xi Jinping is reported to have enjoyed when visiting there.”
When you're protected by Murc's Law, and crucially are the champion of the unreconstructed, you have vast deference in the political and legal systems. The latter is especially important but doesn't get a lot of attention. There's generally not much clout in that; there's more clout in agonizing over how Democratic "messaging" should convince people not to vote for someone who is validating and catering to every one of their closely-held conservative-coded bigotries.