Tag: richard neal
George Santos

Santos Busted For Unemployment Fraud, So Republicans Aim To Cut Crackdown

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was arrested and charged with 13 federal crimes on Wednesday, including unemployment insurance fraud. On Thursday, the House of Representatives is set to vote on a bill he is co-sponsoring that would repeal $2 billion in federal funding to crack down on that kind of illegal activity.

Scott MacFarlane of CBS News tweeted that Santos had pleaded not guilty and was being released on a $500,000 bond.

According to the indictment, in June 2020 Santos repeatedly took funds intended for people who lost employment during the COVID-19 pandemic, even though he was not eligible:

On or about June 17, 2020, the defendant GEORGE ANTHONY DEVOLDER SANTOS applied to receive unemployment insurance benefits through the New York State Department of Labor (“NYS DOL”). In that application, DEVOLDER SANTOS falsely claimed to have been unemployed since the week of March 22, 2020. Beginning on or about June 19, 2020, and continuing through on or about April 15, 2021, DEVOLDER SANTOS certified his continuing eligibility for for unemployment benefits on a weekly basis, in each case falsely attesting inter alia, that he was unemployed, available to take on new work, and eligible for benefits.

He allegedly continued to receive regular payments for his work as a regional director at an investment firm, for which he was paid $120,000 annually, while also receiving about $25,000 in unemployment insurance payments.

A spokesperson for Santos did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the allegations.

The indictment comes the same week as the Republican-controlled House is scheduled to vote on H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act, of which Santos is a co-sponsor.

The bill’s Republican backers say it would “recover potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in stolen unemployment benefit” by giving incentives to states to crack down on fraud and extending the statute of limitations for prosecutions.Democrats have noted, however, that the bill would actually repeal about $2 billion previously approved for the Department of Labor “to detect and prevent fraud, promote equitable access, and ensure the timely payment of benefits with respect to unemployment compensation programs.”

In a March 28 statement opposing the bill, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said:

This legislation slashes the fraud fund from the American Rescue Plan. It favors contractors who enabled fraud during the pandemic over the hard-working state workers who were actually on the frontlines of getting benefits out during the pandemic. The bill completely ignores the recommendations from the Republicans’ own hearing witnesses earlier this month to modernize state unemployment systems. That’s what this bill would do about fraud. Needless to say, more harm than good.

In a Tuesday blog post, the progressive nonprofit Center for Budget and Policy Priorities predicted the legislation was “more likely to hurt than help anti-fraud efforts” and noted:

In responding to the massive and unprecedented surge in UI claims in early 2020, while also attempting to implement new temporary programs to fill the huge gaps in the regular unemployment system, state UI agencies made payment errors when processing claims. Suggesting that states should undertake a decade-long effort to reclaim these amounts — rather than focus on preventing criminal rings from defrauding the system — would both unduly target individuals who did nothing wrong while also misdirecting public resources.

Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia pointed out the absurdity of the timing, tweeting: “You can’t make this up: House Republicans are beginning floor consideration *today* of a bill that would defund efforts to crack down on unemployment fraud. On the same day that one of their own members was hit with a criminal indictment for unemployment fraud.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise was asked on Wednesday if the indictment undermines the Republican message on unemployment benefit fraud and whether Santos should resign. After noting that his colleague is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the Louisiana Republican said: “We’re gonna continue to root out fraud, and there’s lots of it. We’re talking about tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud in many federal programs.”

Pressed again about whether the indictment undermines the party’s message, Scalise did not answer the question.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Powerful House Committee Releasing Six Years Of Trump Tax Returns

Powerful House Committee Releasing Six Years Of Trump Tax Returns

The powerful House Ways and Means Committee Tuesday evening voted to release Donald Trump’s tax returns, which it has fought to obtain for nearly four years. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that six years of the ex-president’s tax returns had to be provided to the Committee.

The New York Times reports “it could take some time before anything is available to the public.”

The vote, which took place behind closed doors after over three hours of deliberations was 24-16. All Democrats voted in favor of releasing the disgraced, twice impeached ex-president’s taxes, and all Republicans voted to shield them from public view.

Minutes before the committee’s Chairman, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) gaveled it into session on Tuesday afternoon, ABC News congressional investigative reporter Katherine Faulders posted video of Trump’s tax returns being wheeled into the chamber.

Trump is the first U.S. president to refuse to release his taxes in nearly five decades. When she ran against Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton made available to the public 38 years of tax returns. He falsely claimed that he couldn't release his taxes because they were "under IRS audit."

Adding some history, CNN notes that the “same statute has been used a number of times by Ways and Means chairmen for investigations and the Joint Committee on Taxation also used the statute to obtain information about former President Richard Nixon’s taxes in the 1970s. According to the House Ways and Means Committee, that information was requested and received without a legal fight.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Judge Rejects Trump Bid To Withhold His Tax Returns From Congress

Judge Rejects Trump Bid To Withhold His Tax Returns From Congress

By Eric Beech

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A Federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a bid by former President Donald Trump to keep his tax returns from a House of Representatives committee, ruling that Congress' legislative interest outweighed any deference Trump should receive as a former president.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden said in his ruling that Trump was "wrong on the law" in seeking to block the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns.

McFadden, who also said it was within the power of the committee's chairman to publish the returns if he saw fit, put his ruling on hold for 14 days, allowing time for an appeal.

Trump was the first president in 40 years not to release his tax returns as he aimed to keep secret the details of his wealth and the activities of his family company, the Trump Organization.

The committee sued in 2019 to force disclosure of the tax returns, and the dispute lingers nearly 11 months after Trump left office.

Trump lawyer Patrick Strawbridge told McFadden last month the committee had no legitimate reason to see the tax returns and had asked for them in the hope of uncovering information that could hurt Trump politically.

House Democrats have said they need Trump's tax returns to see if the Internal Revenue Service is properly auditing presidential returns in general and to assess whether new legislation is needed.

McFadden, a Trump appointee, said the committee would be able to accomplish its stated objective without publishing the returns.

He cautioned the panel's Democratic chairman, Representative Richard Neal, that while he has the right to do so, "anyone can see that publishing confidential tax information of a political rival is the type of move that will return to plague the inventor."

Neither the committee nor Strawbridge immediately responded to requests for comments on the ruling.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Peter Cooney)

Democrats May Have Missed Chance To Get Trump Tax Returns

Democrats May Have Missed Chance To Get Trump Tax Returns

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

When Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives in 2018, they pledged to start holding President Donald Trump accountable — including, notably, by obtaining his tax returns. But House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal has been reluctant to aggressively use his authority in demanding the documents, as a new Washington Post report revealed Thursday, allowing the president and the administration to persist in its lawless refusal to comply.

In his trepidation, Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, even missed a key 15-day window in which he could have obtained the returns, according to the report.

Getting the tax returns in the first place should have been straightforward. The law explicitly says:

Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives … the Treasury Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request … [emphasis mine]

There’s nothing ambiguous or unclear about this. Neal has the authority to ask, and Secretary Steve Mnuchin has no choice but to comply. As former federal prosecutor Harry Litman explained in the Washington Post:

“Shall” means, well, shall. The language is the well-established norm, across a range of legal settings, used to denote an absence of discretion on an official’s part. It leaves no room for quibbles by the secretary.

But the administration thinks the law doesn’t apply whenever a particular provision inconveniences the president, so it delayed its response to the request multiple times. Eventually, it claimed that the administration didn’t have to comply with the law because the president was being unfairly and disingenuously targeted, rendering the request unconstitutional. The absurd and implausible argument ultimately comes down to the idea that the president doesn’t have to follow the law if Congress is being mean to him. Of course, neither the Constitution nor the law in question provides any grounds for thinking this is the case. However, it does comport with current GOP orthodoxy that opposition to Trump is de facto illegitimate.

So the battle has landed in court, with Democrats in Congress forced to fight for what is clearly their due. And while Republicans insist that the president is being unfairly harassed, it’s important to remember that Democrats have only requested what every other modern presidential candidate has freely made public before Trump, and what Trump himself has repeatedly promised to release. Given Trump’s unprecedented openness to corruption and conflicts of interest — and his shady opaqueness and broken promise to release the documents — seeing his tax returns is even more important.

The court battle, the Post reported, will likely take a long time:

Several Democrats involved in oversight, including Rep. Daniel Kildee (Mich.) of the Ways and Means Committee, see a long path to getting a final court decision, even if they expect to win in the end. Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump-appointed judge who was assigned the case in July, will hear the case first, and any decision is likely to be appealed to higher courts, up to the Supreme Court.

For it to be resolved by fall 2020 would amount to Democrats drawing a possible but improbable legal “perfect straight,” according to Harry Sandick, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

It seems a complete waste of time to take an issue up the Supreme Court when the law is so obviously clear, and where the issue at stake is Trump’s own uniquely corrupt presidency. But just because the law is clear, we shouldn’t assume that the right-wing justices won’t side with the president out of pure partisanship, even if they dress up their arguments with legal formalities.

And while Trump deserves most the blame for pushing his administration into defending a lawless and corrupt position, Democrats — Neal most of all — are also worthy of criticism for dragging their feet on the issue. Demanding Trump’s tax returns could have been one of his first acts upon taking control of the committee, but instead he waited, and wasted, months. And according to the Post, he’s shown private reluctance about fighting the president on this issue:

Neal’s discomfort in confronting the Trump administration has been apparent in internal meetings of the Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee, according to the House Democrat involved in oversight and an aide to a House lawmaker on the committee speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly without fear of professional repercussions. When discussing the subject of the tax returns, Neal frequently tells stories of bipartisan cooperation under former Ways and Means Committee leaders, particularly Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), pining for an era of political comity that others on the committee believe no longer exists, these people said.

Perhaps the most frustrating part the whole episode is that New York passed a law that would give the chairman that right to request Trump’s state tax returns. The Post reported:

For 15 days after that legislation passed, Neal could have had Trump’s state returns on a direct flight from Albany to Washington, said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago. But that window closed after Trump’s personal attorneys sued New York to block the law July 23. On Aug. 1, a federal judge ordered New York not to release those returns while the lawsuit is pending.

It’s difficult to judge a lawmaker purely on one anonymously sourced report, but these descriptions of Neal paint the picture of a man not up to the task of holding Trump accountable. Trump is willing to break all the rules to get what he wants; Democrats should at least be aggressive within the rules when trying to counter him.