Donnie's Bigly Horrendous Week, Part II

"We’ve never had a president of the United States stir up a violent attempt to block the transfer of power. If we are to survive as a nation of laws and democracy, this can never happen again.” -January 6 Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS)

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

As I'd written just a fortnight ago in this august publication, a hyperactively serial career criminal like Donald Trump will inevitably face comeuppance several times in a day. And today, the beneficent Gods of Circumstance have obliged yet again and given the Al Capone of right wing politics reasons to look over his rounded shoulders.

    Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year but, for Donald Trump, it may prove to be the longest. And this clusterfuck of days actually got a head start on Monday when the January 6 Select Committee held its last hearing and unanimously voted to submit four criminal referrals against Donald Trump and others against John Eastman to the Department of Justice. This, of course, is a first for anyone who's ever occupied the Oval Office.

    The four referrals to the Justice Department were for: conspiracy to defraud the federal government; obstruction of an official proceeding re Congress’ certification of electoral votes and conspiracy to make a false statement. Those are some serious charges, to say the least, and one must assume that the Committee wouldn't have unanimously voted to make those referrals unless they had an airtight case, considering its unprecedented scope and severity.

     Obviously, a series of criminal referrals means the Justice Department can blow them off but neither can the DOJ treat this lightly. Remember, no president or former president had ever been referred for criminal charges by Congress. Plus, don't forget, Jack Smith is conducting his own investigation into the matter and will be, at worst, a reliable backup.

    The fact that the J6 committee even did that, let alone unanimously, shows one the crimes were many, they were severe and rose well beyond the level of the merely conspiratorial. A conspiracy is a illegal act committed or planned by a small or relatively small group of conspirators. Several of these criminal or borderline criminal acts involved, literally, almost half of the House of Representatives and I'll leave it to you to determine which half that was.

     Regarding his role in the referrals, John Eastman, author of the now-infamous "coup memo", whined about the "absurdly partisan nature" of the investigation and insisted the committee didn't address the gaps in security. That's a hill he doesn't want to die on as Trump sat on his hands for three hours and seven minutes and, even though he had the exclusive authority to do so, never once called out the National Guard.

     The 154 page Executive Summary came out yesterday in advance of the 1000 page report and is bolstered by 1200 interviews and countless thousands of hours of testimony culled almost entirely from Trump aides, Cabinet secretaries and other administration officials. One of the nuggets unearthed in a CNN exclusive was that a Trump lawyer, Stefan Passantino, tried to get Cassidy Hutchinson, the star witness of the investigation, to mislead that committee (who just took a leave of absence from his law firm, presumably, so he could spend more time with his own lawyers).

     Something a totally innocent guy would do.

I'm the Tax Man (for the 99%)

Yeah, I'm the taxman
And you're working for no one but me.- John Lennon, Paul McCartney

Also in the House yesterday, the powerful Ways and Means Committee, the chief tax law-writing committee in the lower chamber, voted to release Trump's taxes for a six year period, specifically 2015 to 2020, which neatly encompasses the period between the year Trump declared his candidacy to his final year in office. As I write this, these tax documents have not been released but that's not to say that there weren't any revelations on the tax front.

     For starters, we learned that Trump has been lying all these years about not being able to release his taxes because he was under audit. It's true he'd been under audit since 2009 but a funny thing happened on the way to the West Wing- Trump wasn't under audit his first two years in office as was mandated by federal law through the Mandatory Audit Program that's been law since the Carter administration.

    It ought to be stated that the 40 page report released by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation told the American people time and again that it has no investigatory powers. In fact, it states as much on page one which states, "(W)e express no opinion regarding whether any adjustment, or increase or decrease in tax, would have resulted if these issues had been pursued on examination."

     Still, the committee used its big cartoon hand pointing to several areas of interest. One of them was that between 2017 and 2020, the first and last year of Trump's squattage in the Oval Office, he declared no taxable income, despite making a total of $800,000 during those two years. Yes, Trump paid no taxes whatsoever in his final year in office and just $750 his first year.

     Not only that, but in 2016, Trump had the nerve to claim just $978 in wages despite making large real estate deals, licensing agreements, dividends and so forth. So, how did this happen? Well, let's  let Digby take the mic and bring it home:

     "John Koskinen, who was IRS commissioner during Trump's first year as president, told the New York Times that he knew nothing about all this. The committee's report obliquely suggests that it might be a good idea to vet individual agents more carefully, mentioning the 'substantial discretion an I.R.S. revenue agent possesses in conducting the audit of presidential returns and the absence of guardrails to ensure that such employee is not subject to undue influence by a president or his representatives.' After all, such an agent might turn out to be a Trump loyalist, like Beverly Hills tax attorney Charles P. Rettig, who defended Trump's decision not to release his tax returns in a 2016 op-ed — after which Trump appointed him IRS commissioner."

     Again, something a totally innocent guy would do.