DONALD TRUMP: GRIFTER, WHORE CHASER, TAX EVADER, CON MAN, BUSINESS CHEAT, ADULTERER, GOLF CHEAT, LIAR, HUCKSTER, BANKRUPT 'BILLIONAIRE' AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES STILL ON THE LAM.
DONALD TRUMP AND HIS ASSAULT ON TRUTH: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies
President Trump's flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency. Fascinating, startling and even grimly funny, this is the essential, authoritative record of Trump's shocking disregard for facts.
Format: Paperbound
Pages: 345
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9781982151072
Item #: 4741323
Paul Ryan: Conservatism Is Doomed if We Trust Donald Trump Populist Appeal
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan plans to condemn the populist appeal of former President Donald Trump during a Thursday evening speech at the Reagan library.
“If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere,” Ryan plans to say according to speech excerpts released to Punchbowl News.
To win back the majority in Congress, Ryan will predict, Republicans need to focus on “conservative principles” and be agreeable.
“We win majorities by directing our loyalty and respect to voters, and by staying faithful to the conservative principles that unite us,” he plans to say. “This was true even when the person leading our movement was as impressive, polished, and agreeable as they come.”
President Joe Biden, Ryan will argue, won in 2020 by projecting himself as a “nice guy” who would move the country to the center but instead pursued a more leftist agenda than voters thought he would.
“These policies might have the full approval of his progressive supporters, but they break faith with the middle-of-the-road folks who made the difference for him on Election Day,” he will say.
Ryan will also ask conservatives to resist fighting every cultural battle picked by the left, suggesting that ordinary Americans are growing tired of the culture clash.
“We conservatives have to be careful not to get caught up in every little cultural battle,” Ryan will say. “Sometimes these skirmishes are just creations of outrage peddlers, detached from reality and not worth anybody’s time.”
Ryan will argue that Republicans are getting too distracted by minor grievances.
“Culture matters, yes, but our party must be defined by more than a tussle over the latest grievance or perceived slight,” he plans to say.
Ryan appears clearly concerned about the 74,222,958 voters that Trump rallied to his side in 2020 with his fighting style and populist brand of politics. Running with Mitt Romney on the 2012 Republican presidential ticket, Paul Ryan earned only 60,933,504 votes.
To win again, Ryan will argue, conservatives need to return to a more mild form of politics and offer principled conservative solutions.
“We must not let them take priority over solutions – grounded in principle – to improve people’s lives,” he will say.
Michael Cohen: Indictments Coming ‘Within the Next 30 to 60 Days’ in Trump Criminal Probe
Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen predicted Friday on “The Raw Story Podcast” that indictments will be issued against senior leaders of the Trump Organization “within the next 30 to 60 days.”
Cohen said, “I do truly believe that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they are turning. I believe Trump, for the first time in his entire life, is going to be held responsible for his own dirty deeds. I believe that as a result of that, you are going to see the tentacles of this investigation move into each and every one of the kids, move into Rudy Giuliani, it is going move into so many others, Allen Weisselberg, to Barry Weisselberg, to Jack Weisselberg. I think that there is a multitude of indictments that are going to be coming, and they are going to be coming relatively soon. And when I mean, soon, I mean before summer.”
He added, “That’s when I think you will see the beginning. I don’t think you will see the indictment of Trump before summer, but I do believe you are going to see indictments coming. I really do. I really do believe like within the next 30 to 60 days. You’re going to start seeing some of the — we’ll call them low-hanging fruit — indictments, you know, like Barry Weisselberg and Allen Weisselberg.”
The prediction starts at the 00:45:07 time stamp.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
New York grand jury convened to hear evidence of Trump business crimes
The Manhattan district attorney has convened a special grand jury as part of a long-term investigation into former president Donald Trump’s business operations, which are headquartered in New York City. The move, reported in the press on Tuesday night, is said to indicate that criminal charges could be brought against officials of the Trump Organization, including Trump himself, within the six-month life of the grand jury.
The investigation, overseen by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is coordinated with a state probe run by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, which has focused on potential charges of tax evasion against the former president.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published prominent reports on the convening of the grand jury, which outlined possible charges against Trump. These reportedly could involve both his conduct of the business and financial operations of the Trump Organization and his personal finances, including illegal payoffs during the 2016 election campaign to women who claimed to have had sexual affairs with him. Both newspapers said that the summoning of a grand jury meant that charges were likely to be filed within the next six months.
The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation began in the wake of revelations by Trump’s former personal attorney and long-time bagman and fixer, Michael Cohen, who served a three-year prison term for his activities and is now a cooperating witness. It was Cohen who reportedly delivered the hush money to the two women, pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy magazine centerfold Karen McDougal.
The state investigation, overseen by the attorney general, also began in response to revelations by Cohen, in this case his testimony before Congress in 2019, where he described Trump’s manipulation of real estate values, inflating them in applications for bank loans while minimizing them when filing tax returns.
The Post reported, “The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance thinks he has found evidence of a crime—if not by Trump, by someone potentially close to him or by his company.”
Both the president’s son Eric, a top official of the Trump Organization, and the company’s longtime top financial officer, Alan Weisselberg, have given sworn testimony to the Vance investigation.
The potential charges include the manipulation of the valuation of various real estate properties “in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation,” the Post said.
The Vance investigation has long been one of the main dangers to the Trump family, whose fortune has been based on New York City real estate, where virtually every deal by every big investor involves a large element of fraud—certainly in relation to tax evasion.
In that sense, the decision to go after Trump is certainly rooted in political calculations, including disqualifying Trump as a potential candidate in 2024, as Democratic Party prosecutors at the local and state level single out Trump for what “everybody does” in the American ruling elite.
That said, there is no doubt that Trump is a gangster guilty of countless crimes, before and especially during his presidency. His impending prosecution would resemble that of mobster Al Capone, who perpetrated or ordered hundreds of murders, but ultimately went to prison for tax evasion.
Earlier this week, James announced that her office was now initiating a criminal probe based on its investigation of civil infractions by the Trump Organization and coordinating this with the criminal probe run out of Vance’s office. The two investigations were said to be focusing on the valuation of a 212-acre Trump estate in the New York City suburbs, Seven Springs in Westchester County, where Trump obtained a $21 million tax break.
Trump issued a statement denouncing the now-joint state and local investigation as “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history… driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors.”
If anything, however, the most evident feature of the twin probes is their slowness. The Democrats hesitated to bring any charges against a sitting president, deferring to the Trump Justice Department’s finding that no criminal charges could be brought against a US president while in office—essentially a declaration that the president was above the law.
Even now, with New York state and local prosecutors considering charging Trump with tax and accounting crimes, the Biden administration has gone to court in support of the position taken by the Trump Justice Department in relation to the Mueller investigation, the two-year-long probe of baseless claims that the 2016 Trump presidential campaign was coordinated with the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, fought a protracted legal battle to keep secret a memo from his own Office of Legal Counsel advising him on how to handle the public release of Mueller’s findings. Congressional Democrats sued to obtain the memo, suggesting that Barr had disregarded his own office’s legal advice when he wrote a cover letter declaring that Mueller had cleared Trump of any wrongdoing, when Mueller’s findings were more equivocal.
Biden’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, announced Monday it would appeal a judge’s order to release the internal memo, citing the same grounds—the necessity to protect internal deliberations within the executive branch.
The right-wing Wall Street Journal gloated in an editorial, “As the appeals court considers what to do, the Biden and Trump administrations are now on the same page.”
District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who has read the internal memo, declared that Barr was being “disingenuous” in his description of Mueller’s findings and that the Justice Department had deceived the court about the role of the memo in the decision-making process.
“The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” she wrote.
Trump faces still another legal proceeding, this one involving a civil suit brought by Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell over Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021 to the crowd that then marched on the Capitol, stormed the building, and temporarily blocked the certification of his defeat in the Electoral College.
Trump’s attorney Jesse Binall argued Tuesday in a pleading filed with the federal district court for the District of Columbia that the speech was protected under the First Amendment and that Trump had “absolute immunity” while in office as president to contest the election results.
Can New York Arrest Donald Trump?
Leftists are fantasizing about Donald Trump being arrested, booked, and put on trial. Well, they are fantasizing about that…again.
The New York State Attorney General’s investigation of the Trump Organization is now “no longer purely civil in nature,” Fabien Levy, the spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James, confirmed to Politico by email. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan D.A. We have no additional comment at this time.”
It is important for political observers, cowardly-lion Republicans, patriots, and activists to know what is happening here. More ammunition and detail are needed to arm the reader properly for this latest tempest in a teapot being sold as a hurricane.
Leftists are so enthusiastic about Trump’s imminent arrest that the government of Palm Beach County is making plans to arrest the former President at his Mar-a-Lago resort in high-society Palm Beach, Florida. According to Politico,
Law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Fla., have actively prepared for the possibility that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could indict former President Donald Trump while he’s at Mar-a-Lago, according to two high-ranking county officials involved in planning sessions. Among the topics discussed in those meetings: how to handle the thorny extradition issues that could arise if an indictment moves forward.
Do sensible people think that local County officials sit around making plans for something that might happen and that others would handle? For crimes like these, an accused might turn himself in or show up in court.
If New York state issued an indictment, arresting Trump would require opening a case in Florida with its governor, Ron DeSantis, executing the indictment through the state’s police. The Palm Beach County government would not be involved. The Secret Service would handle surrounding events.
So why is Palm Beach exciting the media about something that is really none of its business? The magician distracts the audience by getting them to look over there.
Speaking as a political activist since 1984, this is a stunt aimed at the same failed tactic: The establishment tries to peel away Trump voters to get their support for the Mitt Romneys, Bob Doles, John McCains, Bushes, and so on. If Trump voters see him being hauled off in handcuffs, would the voters fall back in love with Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and John Kasich?
The establishment misses that the voters never liked the swamp creature Republicans in the first place. In 2008 and 2012, we stuck clothespins on our noses to make sure the Democrats didn’t win but they’d already lost us at “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Nevertheless, in 1994, the establishment ran independent candidate Marshall Coleman against Oliver North, the GOP nominee and choice of Republican voters, resulting in the election of Democrat Chuck Robb as Virginia’s U.S. Senator. We were mad before Trump.
As a criminal defense and constitutional attorney in Virginia and the federal court in the District of Columbia, I analyzed this in-depth with criminal defense consultant Norm Bradford for Thursday’s discussion on Action Radio (starting at 1:32). I passed the New York State bar out of law school although I did not end up practicing there. Here are the key points from that discussion:
First, New York is investigating “The Trump Organization” (“TTO”), a business, not Donald Trump, the individual. Companies can be charged with crimes.
Therefore, is Donald J. Trump going to be arrested? No.
Second, what does it mean that the investigation is now a “criminal” probe? Nothing. At most, it means that some people from different offices down the hall have been called in and asked “Well, what do you make of this?”
Third, will New York prosecutors indict The Trump Organization? Yes. Everything I hear says they’re crazy up there. New York’s legal system was woke before anyone knew the word. Because it is New York, where the grand jury and the petit (trial) jury are drawn from the mostly Democrat voters, and the prosecutors and judges are all soaked in just one political party, it is likely that they will indict TTO. No one can stop them.
Fourth, is this indictment dangerous? Probably not. There will be a trial that the prosecutors will lose at the end (which may be a year or two down the road).
Fifth, does it matter? No. Three words: Statute of limitations.
The statute of limitations is one of the very few defenses that are objective and non-discretionary. A judge has no choice. Once the statute of limitations is invoked, the entire project comes to a screeching halt.
Anything the New York A.G. is investigating expired years or decades ago. The statute of limitations is three to six years under New York State law depending on what kind of crime is alleged.
The rumors we have heard involve events in the 1990s. Although Trump did not set up a blind trust, in the summer of 2015, Trump turned TTO over to his children for them to run.
So, it has been almost six years now since Donald J. Trump even ran TTO. His children may want to review their actions, but what the Left wants is the former President in handcuffs. Expect more screaming at the sky as Leftists’ unrealistic hopes are dashed once again.
Sixth, could Trump’s lawyers screw this up? Yes. Everything here assumes that Trump’s lawyers respond effectively.
Trump’s lawyers should have motions to quash any indictment already written and in their briefcases. Anywhere they are in New York or the country, they should be able to file a motion to quash within an hour…before there is time for Democrats to spin up talks about arresting him.
Seventh, unlike Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Trump does not do his own taxes. If anything was amiss, the fault lies with attorneys, accountants, real estate appraisers, financial advisors, etc. Because it is their job to tell Trump and TTO what can and cannot be done, they would be the ones at fault. Even if Trump said to do it, it is their actual legal responsibility to say no, you may not do that.
Eighth, did TTO do anything wrong? No.
The rumors are from former attorney Michel Cohen, who claimed that TTO valued real estate too high for the purpose of getting loans but too low for the purpose of paying taxes.
Governments have Tax Assessors. They don’t listen to your opinion about what you think your real estate is worth. There is a process for disputing a tax assessment. That makes it even more clear that it is up to the government to decide.
Similarly, nobody loans money on real estate without ordering an independent appraisal from a licensed appraiser. A lender who does not order its own independent appraisal is grossly reckless.
In the law, fraud cannot be fraud unless the accused made a knowingly false statement intending that someone rely upon it, that the person (or entity) did rely on it, and that this reliance was reasonable. If Donald Trump says, “This is the most beautiful high-rise in Manhattan,” that is purely an opinion. If I say that my townhouse is worth its weight in platinum, no reasonable person would believe that and therefore (a) it is not intended to be relied upon and (b) it would be unreasonable for anyone to rely upon that statement. These are clear-cut legal principles. Any case against TTO will lose in the end.
At the end of the day, we’re witnessing leftist and NeverTrump grandstanding. Trump should be prepared to fight back hard but, ultimately, none of this is serious.
Big Dirty Money: “White-collar crime” and the nature of capitalism
Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White-collar Crime , by Jennifer Taub, Viking, New York, 2020
The term “white-collar crime,” which appears in the subtitle of a new book, Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, was apparently first coined during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The phenomenon is as old as capitalism itself. In Jennifer Taub’s work the focus is on the United States, but the reality she describes, though nowhere more explosive than in the US, is a global one.
Taub, a professor at the University of Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, brings together much valuable data and information on white-collar crime and on the connection between its recent prominence and that of extreme wealth inequality. Her book is noteworthy for correctly focusing on the role of class in shaping the lives and futures of humanity.
The author indicates that white-collar crime must be defined far more broadly than embezzlement or what might be termed low-level forms of corruption. She gives some recent examples of white-collar criminals, all extensively reported by the WSWS: the Sackler family, worth some $14 billion (as of the book’s printing), responsible for the marketing of oxycontin, which led to 232,000 overdose deaths between 1999-2018; Pacific Gas and Electric, to blame for the deadly Camp Fire of 2018 in California, which left 85 dead and the town of Paradise completely destroyed; and General Motors, whose faulty ignition switches led to sudden engine shutdowns and at least 124 deaths between 2002 and 2014, when the cars were finally recalled.
All of the above criminals escaped serious punishment, paying for the lives lost through fines that amounted, even where sizable, to the mere cost of doing business.
Taub makes a number of useful points in the course of discussing these issues. As she notes, the US has a prison population of 2.3 million, but even the very few white-collar criminal convictions (as opposed to civil cases) rarely lead to jail time. The few who have been jailed— Michael Milken is one prominent example—have served their time in “country club” prisons, facilities whose very existence illustrates the fact that incarceration is a weapon principally designed for and used against the working class.
Taub is hardly the first to note the huge gulf between the treatment of the poor and the wealthy by the so-called justice system. Petty offenses get harsh punishment while big criminals get off scot free. Eric Garner lost his life for selling untaxed loose cigarettes, Taub points out, while the executives of companies responsible for death and misery on a vast scale have paid no price. Indeed, as Taub was putting the finishing touches on this volume last May, this class reality was brought home, to the horror of vast numbers of people all over the world, in the murder of George Floyd after he was accused of passing a small counterfeit bill at a neighborhood convenience store.
The magnitude of the class gulf today is one that could barely have been imagined by famed French novelist Anatole France when he famously ironized, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
The last 40 years have seen an uninterrupted growth of white-collar crime and of all the abuses associated with it. Government has done much to facilitate this growth, and the political representatives of the corporate elite have often shared in the spoils. Furthermore, this has been a thoroughly bipartisan operation. As Taub explains, “in the Carter and Clinton administrations, legislation was enacted that allowed the credit default swap and private mortgage securities markets to flourish, enabling the toxic mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the banking system in 2008.”
This history serves to illustrate, as Taub does not point out, that the dividing line between the legal and the criminal, to put it mildly, is a porous one in the capitalist economy.
After the 2008 crash, the greatest since the Great Depression, the get out of jail card really came into its own during the two terms of Democratic President Barack Obama. “The Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009 to 2015 let every bank executive engaged in accounting or securities fraud get away without prosecution,” writes Taub. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., another Democrat, brought no charges, except against a tiny bank that no one had ever heard of.
Taub’s polemical zeal in exposing glaring injustice can only be welcomed. Her outlook, however, could perhaps be summed up in a paraphrase of the Biblical reference to the poor—we will always have white-collar criminals with us. Or to put it somewhat differently, capitalism is here to stay.
She reviews the history, over most of the last century, of what she terms “corporate crime waves and crackdowns.” This is a cyclical conception, in which capitalist “excesses” are followed by regulation and reform, until the pendulum swings back toward corruption once again. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, whose birth is associated with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Later, after the speculative boom of the 1920s, came the reforms associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Big business steadily attempted to evade or circumvent regulation, and the decades from the 1940s through the 1960s are dubbed a period of “invisible industrial violations,” as Taub puts it, leading to scandals such as Love Canal and the thalidomide birth defects. This was followed by yet another decade of regulation, this time under the improbable reformer Richard Nixon. The Environmental Protection Agency was established, along with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After Watergate, other legislation established the Federal Election Commission.
American capitalism unquestionably did undertake major regulatory efforts in the last century. What Taub does not discuss, however, is the connection between the last 40 years, a period of uninterrupted deregulation and social counterrevolution, and the crisis and decline of US capitalism. There is little or no mention of globalization in this book, and no discussion of the financialization of the economy. We are left with the supposed problem of human nature, and of what is seen as an endless struggle against greed. Behind white-collar crime, however, is not simply greed, but a system of production and distribution that produces and requires it.
A cyclical theory of inequality and corruption followed by regulation and reform does not explain the last several decades. The Biden administration and its backers, who it is safe to presume include Professor Taub—even if she recognizes, quoting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, that Donald Trump “did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it”—claim that a new era of reform is beginning. The conditions confronting US and world capitalism, however, are entirely different from those of the post-World War Two era.
The capitalist media dwell incessantly on misleading catchphrases like “systemic racism,” but the conditions described by the author demonstrate that what is truly systemic to capitalism is class inequality and all of its consequences. The solution to the misery that Taub details—the lives lost to poverty, illness and police violence—must also be systemic. It is not the pipe dream of a new era of reform, but rather the overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of a socialist society.
This is not Taub’s program. The final chapter of her book is entitled, “The Six Fixes,” and what she proposes is not much more serious than this somewhat glib heading. She calls for a new Department of Justice division devoted to white-collar crime; the amendment of the bribery laws to make it easier to convict politicians like Virginia’s former governor Robert McDonnell, who beat a bribery rap because of a legal loophole; legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers; the restoration of Internal Revenue Service funding, after years and years of cuts that have been designed to cripple any effort to go after massive tax fraud; a nationwide registry for white-collar convictions; and improved data collection on white-collar crime.
To call these reforms would be a genuine stretch of the definition. Some of them amount to little more than improved methods of keeping track of the crime taking place, not doing anything about the conditions themselves. Even New York Times columnist James B. Stewart, in his review of Big Dirty Money, observes about these “fixes,” “These are earnest and well-intentioned, but small bore given the scope of the problem [Taub] so vividly illustrates.” It should also be pointed out that the fact that Taub, discussing whistleblowers, mentions Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood, but not Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, reflects her allegiance to what passes for bourgeois liberalism today.
Despite its serious faults, and although Big Dirty Money does not go much beyond a description of important aspects of 21st century capitalism, the exposures in this volume are vivid and at times gripping, and the book is therefore recommended, with the above caveats.
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