Tag: treasury department
Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

Trump's Assault On Harvard Endangers Every American's Freedom

The question for the last three months has been, when will it end? The question today is, will there be anything left?

Every day, this country and our freedom suffer another body blow. Tonight, news landed that after Harvard University rejected demands for federal control of its academic life, the Treasury Department is taking steps to end its tax-exempt status. This, after the Trump administration has frozen some $2 billion in grants and cancelled outright $60 million in federal contracts with the university, with threats to cancel the remainder of Harvard’s $9 billion in federal grants.

This is a partial list of Trump’s blackmail demands:

Harvard must agree to “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government.”

Harvard must submit to the government auditing “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity” and hiring and admissions so that “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It’s unintelligible gibberish, but their “viewpoint diversity” means the end of free thought at Harvard.

“The University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” as defined by Donald Trump.

“The University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.”

There were other demands rejected by Harvard, including that “governance” of the university be altered so that those in charge must be “committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” That means Harvard leaders must do what Trump demands or else.

A letter posted on the university’s X account put the position of Harvard this way: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

Other universities such as Columbia and Northwestern have been subject to similar threats and caved into Trump’s demands. The administration is said to have a list of other universities upon which it will make similar demands.

Harvard is such an enormously wealthy institution that they recently announced that students from families making $200 thousand or less yearly would be given free tuition. Harvard is said to have an endowment in excess of $50 billion and doubtlessly has enough billionaires among its alumni to keep the place going – even thriving – for at least the next hundred years.

So why should we worry about Harvard at a time when our country is beset daily by these horrors, among many others:

American citizens as well as undocumented migrants are being snatched off the street and sent to interment camps in Louisiana and El Salvador.

There are new plans to send undocumented arrestees with no criminal records to detention in Guantanamo.

Tens of thousands of federal employees, including those serving in harms way overseas, have been summarily fired without notice on false premises.

Budgets of departments like Health and Human Services are scheduled for cuts of as much as 40 percent and entire federal departments such as USAID have been shut down without Congressional authorization.

The entire weight of the federal government is being wielded daily against organizations such as Planned Parenthood, and individuals from Trump’s first administration he doesn’t like have been threatened with criminal investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice.

The attorney general of New York state has been referred for criminal prosecution under federal law. Threats to prosecute former President Joe Biden and his family have been made repeatedly by Trump and hang in the balance.

Multiple law firms have been threatened with loss of security clearances and access to federal buildings necessary to represent their clients.

Defiance of court orders by the Trump administration, including those of Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court, are a daily occurrence.

With all of this going on, it seems silly to worry about the wealthiest college in the country, doesn’t it?

No. Harvard is just one more brick in the wall of fascism being constructed around all of us. The demands on Harvard, now spelled out in an official document signed by a deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration, the General Counsel of the Department of Education, and the General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services – all acting on the orders of Donald Trump – are written evidence of the imposition of thought police of a an authoritarian regime.

The next step after such demands is arrest on spurious charges; after that is imprisonment; the next step in the dark stairs leading to dictatorship is arrest without charges, already being used against migrants with no criminal record, some with protected immigration status; down at the bottom of the stairs is imprisonment without trial and conviction; we know from reading history that is less than a decade older than I am what is next: torture, disappearance, death.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland flew to El Salvador today and his request to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant renditioned to a prison known for torturing inmates, was at first denied. The Democratic senator was later permitted to briefly visit with Abrego Garcia in a San Salvador hotel.

Until Van Hollen forced the issue by showing up in El Salvador, we and his family had no way of knowing whether Garcia was alive or dead. Not even the Supreme Court has been able to compel Donald Trump to return him from imprisonment in El Salvador that the court has ruled is “illegal.”

It starts with people who are poor without proper “papers.” It starts with those who have skin that is not white or those who are not heterosexual or their gender identity is different from the one listed on their birth certificate. It starts with those from another neighborhood or another religion. It starts with them. Then it’s Harvard. Then it’s us.

We are in the terrible place history has recorded so well and that we ignore at our peril.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Elon Musk

Treasury Security Staff Warns Against 'Insider Threat' From DOGE Hackers

The handful of young men Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has hired to help him gut various federal agencies are now reportedly being treated as a significant security risk.

Tech publication WIRED reported Friday that the threat intelligence team with one of the payment systems managed by the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) is now recommending that Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (which is not yet a congressionally authorized federal agency) employees be monitored. An email to BFS information technology workers entitled "recommendations" explained the reasoning.

“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” the email read. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”

Last weekend, the New York Times reported that DOGE employees had gained access to the BFS' systems, which oversee the disbursement of roughly $6 trillion in annual federal government payments involving everything from Social Security and Medicare benefits to small business loans, government contracts and federal income tax returns, among others. One of the staffers reportedly had administrator-level access to those systems, and Talking Points Memo reported that staffer may have already made changes to the payment systems' source code.

“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” email read. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”

Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled in favor of plaintiffs who sued to block DOGE staffers from accessing those systems, meaning they have now been temporarily locked out while their access is being litigated. The staffer who is accused of changing the payment systems' code — 25 year-old Marko Elez — recently stepped down from his role after the Wall Street Journal linked him to a racist social media account. He was reportedly reinstated after Vice President JD Vance advocated for him to be rehired on Friday.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Judge Locks Musk And His Gang Out Of Treasury Data Systems -- For Now

Judge Locks Musk And His Gang Out Of Treasury Data Systems -- For Now

A federal judge just issued an order locking employees of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk out of the U.S. Treasury's internal systems managing roughly $6 trillion in annual payments. Legal experts are celebrating the win, but warn that the fight is not yet over.

On Thursday, Brookings Institution senior fellow Norm Eisen announced that a federal judge sided with plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the Treasury Department and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. In the court order, Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kottar-Kotelly (appointed by President Bill Clinton) ordered that the Treasury Department not grant access to any of the payment systems, while specifying that Musk employees Tom Krause and Marko Elez be relegated to read-only access. [Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal linked him to racist posts on a deleted social media account.]

Eisen's post was met with celebration, though some urged continued vigilance and follow-through. University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald observed that the "next step" could be to "ignore the courts." George Mason University political scientist Jennifer N. Victor noted that it's possible that President Donald Trump's administration could choose to ignore the court order.

"Good news, but now the harder test. Will Trump comply?" she wrote. "If not, who will provide enforcement? According to the Constitution, it’s Congress’s job to oversee the bureaucracy. But the judicial and legislative branches have few tools — all administrative —to enforce laws and rulings."

Mother Jones reporter David Corn also hoped for "good enforcement" of the ruling. University of Kansas religious studies professor Sam Brody echoed that sentiment on Bluesky, and called on "security guards at Treasury" to physically prevent Musk's representatives from entering the building.

"In a lawless situation, it actually does come down to guys with guns standing in front of doors," Brody wrote.

"Now, we need real government [information technology] experts to go in there and re-secure the data and make sure malware wasn't deposited by Chinese, Iranian or Russian operatives - or by Musk and his boy band - after admin access was granted," Quinnippiac University journalism professor emeritus Rich Hanley posted to Bluesky. "I'm sure security wasn't part of their foray into the data trove."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet


Former President Trump

Trump Lawyers Make Desperate Bid To Conceal Tax Returns

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Attorneys for Donald Trump are making a last-ditch effort to prevent Congress from getting Trump's tax returns, a week after the Justice Department cleared them for release.

On Wednesday, Trump's lawyers urged a federal judge to block release of the tax returns from the Treasury Department to the House Ways and Means Committee, according to NBC News.

The lawyers argued that the committee's stated purposed of using Trump's returns in order to refine how the IRS audits presidents was just a pretext for alternative motives.

"While House Democrats had offered countless justifications for obtaining the president's tax returns, no one at the time had ever mentioned a desire to find out how the IRS audits presidents," they wrote. The committee, they said, had only sought returns for one commander in chief and failed to ask the IRS for the "most relevant information—namely, how it audits presidents."

Democrats on the panel have been seeking tax returns for Trump and his businesses since 2019 and made a renewed push this year with the incoming Democratic administration.

While former Attorney General Bill Barr had inserted the Justice Department into the process in order to reject the committee's request, last week the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) ordered Treasury to comply with the committee's request.

"We cannot know where receipt of the requested tax information will take the Committee, any more than the Committee itself can predict what it will find or determine," wrote OLC. "After reviewing and analyzing the information, it will be squarely within the Committee's responsibility to decide whether or not to include some of that information in a report to the full House that might be available to the public."

Presidents always get audited by the IRS, but the audit is supposed to be done expeditiously. Trump's perennially specious claim that he couldn't publicly release his tax returns because they were under audit was part of what motivated the House Ways and Means Committee to seek review of the audit process.

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