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Tag: trump pardons
The Only Promise Todd Blanche Can Honestly Make Is More Dishonesty

The Only Promise Todd Blanche Can Honestly Make Is More Dishonesty

Todd Blanche was Donald Trump's personal attorney, so it was natural that when he was elevated to attorney general, a journalist asked whether he would "pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?"

The correct answer to such a question is obvious: The Justice Department and I are committed to the impartial administration of justice. We will always make prosecution decisions based solely upon the facts and the law after a fair evaluation of the evidence.

But Blanche said something a little different:

"No, I'm not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. The president, I mean, if I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, 'I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,' which is what he has said, what you're saying to me is I should say, 'No, sir, I'm not going to do it.'"

What jumps out first about Blanche's answer is the blithe refusal even to mouth (however disingenuously) the expected platitude. This is the Trumpian way. They don't just break the rules behind closed doors; they shatter the rules in broad daylight. It's not enough, for example, that the Trump Justice Department is denying resources to the team that investigates and prosecutes foreign corrupt practices; Trump issued an executive order pausing all such prosecutions. So it's not news that Trump's new attorney general will fail to seek impartial justice, but the refusal to even feign regard for impartial justice is new.

The substance of Blanche's justification is also fatuous. Pledging to act independently of the White House doesn't mean acting in every instance in direct opposition to the president. That's absurd and it's not what independence requires. Nor could the president order the attorney general to "go after every violent criminal in this country," since more than 98% of violent crimes are state offenses, not federal ones, and in any case the combined forces of the state and federal governments don't have the resources to go after every violent criminal.

So much for deflection. The coffee-spitting moment came later, when Blanche was asked whether he would carry out an order that "crossed a legal or ethical line" and he proclaimed, "The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal — or illegal. He never has. He never will."

Let's let the Freudian slip pass, but in fact the president had demanded that the Justice Department do something unethical that very week — namely, reconsider the decision to drop spurious vandalism charges against David Hearn. Jeanine Pirro's own motion to the court acknowledged that the original indictment was based upon false information provided by the Department of the Interior.

Nevertheless, Trump fumed that Pirro had "choked." This week, we learned that she was convening a special grand jury for some unknown purpose. If I were Hearn, I'd keep my lawyer close.

And that perversion of justice is only a ripple in the flood of plainly politicized acts and forbearances by this administration. This is a president who sent a DM to his attorney general demanding the prosecution of his political opponents. It's hard to think of how you could more comprehensively upend the idea of blind justice.

Trump's apologists do have a valid point when they note that the Manhattan district attorney's case against Trump in the Stormy Daniels case was also a form of lawfare. I said at the time that the case was flimsy and almost certainly would never have been brought if Trump were not the target. Trump's flagrant lawbreaking did present a quandary: How do you hold him responsible for his crimes without unintentionally validating the idea in the minds of his supporters that all justice is corruptly motivated?

There are no easy answers. Still, the Bragg prosecution was a local case, not the federal government seeking to punish a political foe. Ditto for the civil case Letitia James brought. At the federal level, Attorney General Merrick Garland was actually extremely reluctant to pursue federal charges against Trump despite the gravity of his conduct before and on January 6. It was only after Trump announced his reelection bid that Garland felt compelled to appoint a special prosecutor (precisely to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest).

Nor is it the case that President Joe Biden's administration used the Justice Department to settle political scores. To repeat, Garland was widely criticized for moving slowly against Trump's obvious lawbreaking in the Mar-a-Lago documents case as well as the January 6 insurrection. One can understand his hesitation.

One administration prosecuting another opens the possibility of a dangerous tit-for-tat, but whatever your view about the wisdom of going slow against Trump, it's preposterous to "whatabout" this. Under Garland's leadership, the department brought indictments against Rep. Henry Cuellar, Sen. Bob Menendez, Rep. T.J. Cox, Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan, Mayor Eric Adams (and we know how that turned out when Trump returned), Mayor Andrew Gillum, and Hunter Biden — all Democrats.

Trump's second-term Department of Justice, by contrast, has been a nonstop cavalcade of corruption, featuring blatantly political prosecutions, attempted prosecutions or investigations of Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, "sandwich guy," Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Alex Padilla, John Brennan, John Bolton, Sean Dunn, Ras Baraka, Jacob Frey, anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota including the widow of Renee Good, and many more.

Biden made poor decisions in pardoning his family at the end, but that was trivial compared with the mass pardons for the January 6 criminals, the pardons for cronies, donors, other corrupt public figures, the firings of any official who participated in the January 6 or Mar-a-Lago investigations, the kid-glove treatment for Ghislaine Maxwell, and of course, the putrid attempt to create a $1.7 billion slush fund for so-called victims of lawfare along with a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump and his insatiable family regarding past tax evasion.

The aptly named Blanche (because he should, but doesn't, blush) was along for all of it. He personally visited Maxwell in prison and has yet to provide an explanation for that highly unusual visit, nor for her promotion to a more comfortable prison. He was at the Department of Justice as 3,400 lawyers resigned in protest rather than engage in the kinds of unethical and unprofessional conduct Pam Bondi and Blanche were demanding. He has defended with a straight face James Comey's indictment for threatening the president with an Instagram photo of seashells.

This ethical flexibility was enough to make even some Republican senators hesitate about confirming him. But in the end, all but Collins and Murkowski voted yes, presumably because they fear that if it's not Blanche it will be someone even worse. Thus does Trump extort his party — by threatening to get even dirtier.

But this tactic only succeeds because of learned helplessness by Republican office holders. In fact, when Trump gets pushback, he backs down. Ask Iran. Or consider the first utterly horrific attorney general candidate he proposed, Matt Gaetz. Enough Republicans balked that Trump withdrew his name. He didn't nominate someone even worse after that (admittedly a tall order). He went with Pam Bondi, a smidge less awful.

It seems the tactic of standing up to Trump is just crazy enough to work. But, no, the GOP has not learned that lesson. They've chosen spinelessness instead, and even after a decade of this, I still cannot understand why.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators


JD Vance

JD Vance's Racist 'Fraud Task Force' Conceals Real Fraud In Trump White House

JD Vance’s first claim to national attention as vice president was when he admitted to making up lies about pet-eating Haitian migrants. Vance justified the lie by saying that he was prepared to lie if that was needed to push Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. With his anti-fraud task force, Vance is continuing his practice of pushing racist lies.

To be clear, there is fraud in government social programs and some of it is done by immigrants from developing countries. But there is no plausible story where this fraud accounts for a large share of the budget, or that immigrants are especially likely to be fraudsters. And there is no remotely plausible story where, as Trump henchman Stephen Miller claimed, that eliminating fraud could balance the budget. It is also absurd to imagine that the Biden administration was not pursuing fraud.

In fact, the vast majority of the fraud is not done by the beneficiaries of these programs, but by businesses that profit from them. For example, the Government Accountability Office estimates that in 2023, there was over $100 billion worth of improper payments in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, roughly seven percent of total spending.

Most of this was not fraud. It was often overpayments for procedures, or in some cases, simply a failure to properly document a payment request. In any case, this was money being paid to providers, hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors’ offices, not undocumented immigrants from Latin America or Africa.

It doesn’t seem like JD Vance has much interest in going after these people. In fact, Donald Trump has been getting a lot of money from issuing pardons to these fraudsters.

It’s also again worth pointing out that eliminating fraud will not come close to balancing the budget. The government was looking at a deficit of almost $1.9 trillion this year on $7.4 trillion in total spending, and that was before Trump started his war with Iran.

A more vigilant crackdown on fraud would be lucky to get into double-digit billions, reducing the size of the deficit by maybe one percent, and that would be high-end. For folks with bad memories, it was just a year and a half ago that Trump enlisted Elon Musk to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse. He mostly came up empty-handed, although he did fire a number of people at government agencies, who they then had to hire back. He also dismantled USAID, contributing to tens of thousands of deaths due to AIDS, and also leaving the world unprepared to deal with the Ebola outbreak.

The government also has inspectors general (IG) attached to most departments and agencies. Their job is to ferret out fraud and waste. One of Trump’s first acts was to fire most of these IGs, presumably because he didn’t want people calling attention to his own fraud, waste, and abuse.

If Vance seriously wanted to crack down on fraud and reduce the deficit, he could be working with the I.R.S. to collect some of the $600 billion in taxes that go unpaid each year. But this would mean disproportionately going after white people who are Trump’s campaign contributors, not the look Trump wants for the fall elections. Also, Musk disproportionately went after workers at the I.R.S., leaving it less able to crack down on tax cheats.

It should be apparent to all but the hopelessly naïve that the point of Vance’s fraud task force to stir up racist resentment for the fall election. With his war with Iran going badly, his tariffs an economic disaster, and inflation jumping to rates not seen since the worst of the pandemic, Trump desperately needs a distraction.

Racism has been Trump’s strong suit since his earliest political forays, such as calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Black teenagers who were charged and did prison time for a brutal rape. They were later exonerated. More recently, we were treated to his nuttiness on President Obama’s birth certificate. Trump may not be very good at running a business or the country, but he is a superstar when it comes to exploiting racism, and JD Vance is a willing and able sidekick.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Right-Wing Lawyers Are Already Squabbling Over January 6 'Slush Fund' Spoils

Right-Wing Lawyers Are Already Squabbling Over January 6 'Slush Fund' Spoils

President Donald Trump has reportedly received a $1.776 billion settlement from his own IRS over his allegation that the agency owed him money for a contractor who leaked his tax returns — and the money is now inciting a full-blown MAGA civil war.

Now, according to commentator Will Sommer, this settlement is causing a civil war within certain ranks of the MAGA movement.

“In April, lawyer Mark McCloskey bowed out of his quixotic quest to win reparations for January 6th rioters,” The Bulwark’s Sommer wrote on Monday.

Although McCloskey’s fellow lawyer Peter Ticktin remained on the case, McCloskey himself claimed last month that he was sick with a terminal lung disease and would not be able to continue assisting January 6th rioters. Yet once Trump announced the settlement, “something miraculous happened,” Sommer wrote. McCloskey suddenly announced his health had improved enough that he could resume the cases.

“The convenient timing of McCloskey’s return to health has not gone unnoticed in the fractious world of January 6th participants, with some reparations-hungry rioters mocking him for coming back right when the money looks set to start flowing,” Sommer wrote. “Meanwhile, according to a series of bitter emails from the two lawyers that I reviewed, Ticktin appears furious that his onetime partner has returned for a piece of the action.”

Sommer quoted Ticktin as writing to his clients over the weekend, “I never stopped representing you, money or no money. I would never quit.”

Sommer argued that this feud may foreshadow the future of this settlement.

“The bad blood between these two looks like a preview of what’s ahead for the right, as January 6th rioters, other Trump world figures who faced investigations, and their lawyers scramble to position themselves for a potential windfall,” Sommer wrote. “Trump today officially settled his lawsuit against the government he leads in exchange for that $1.776 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund,’ which will purportedly be paid to the victims of ‘weaponization and lawfare.’”

As Ticktin told Sommer, “I didn’t realize finding out you can make money can cure cancer, but apparently you can.”

Sommer added in his article that “the January 6th rioters have been treated inordinately well, given that they attacked police officers, stampeded the U.S. Capitol, and interrupted congressional proceedings in an attempt to overthrow the results. They were pardoned on the first day of the second Trump administration, freeing many from their incarceration and saving many others from serving any prison time at all. Some J6ers were even refunded the restitution payments they were ordered to make.”

Making matters more confusing, according to Sommer, Trump’s Justice Department has done little to clarify matters as to who will get paid and how.

“Meanwhile, the DOJ has provided painfully little guidance as to how the new slush fund will be doled out,” Sommer wrote. “The department put out a barely-over-one-page memo Monday morning, in which it made clear that once the funds were deposited ‘the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.’”

He added, sarcastically, “Seems failproof!”

According to Forbes reporter Allison Durkee, Trump’s so-called “Judgment Fund” is only allowed to pay people or entities that are direct parties to the lawsuit — which includes only the president, his sons and a family business. As such, Trump may have to pay taxes on the amount, and other individuals cannot access the money without going through Trump and his associates themselves.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet


Doris Coulson, nursing home patient

Trump Pardoned Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Over $18 Million To Grieving Family

This story was originally published by ProPublica

When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at work at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse, and one memory never left her daughter. A code blue was called, and suddenly her mother was racing alongside a patient’s bed.

“She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR in the bed as it flew down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson said years later in court. “I realized she didn’t play at work all day.”

That was the kind of caregiver her mother was: someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life giving it to others.

After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who was buying up nursing homes across the country. The staff wasn’t supposed to serve her solid food, but they did, and she died. Doctors told the family they found scrambled eggs in her lungs.

Nine years after Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump pardoned Schwartz in a federal case in which he had admitted to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from his nursing home empire and diverting the money for other purposes. Schwartz’s lawyers argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but to save his company. The White House said Schwartz was “an example of over prosecution” and argued that a third-party entity had managed the tax filings and that serving all three years of his prison sentence would have been detrimental for someone of his age and poor health.

Behind the tax charge was a business that families and lawsuits said had left real people neglected, injured and dead.

The Coulson family sued Schwartz and his company for wrongful death. Schwartz did not appear in court to challenge the case. Six years ago, a judge awarded Amanda Coulson and her sister and brother nearly $19 million. (He later claimed he never received key filings and had mistaken the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017. He argued the company that took over the home was the proper defendant.) Schwartz never paid. Amanda has since died.

Stories about pardons are often told as stories about presidential power — who got mercy, who had access, who persuaded a president to intervene. What drew me to Schwartz’s pardon was the people on the other side of that act of grace: people like Doris Coulson and her family, whose lives had already been shattered long before the White House celebrated Schwartz’s first Shabbat with his family after Trump freed him from prison and a top Justice Department official declared him “free to rebuild.”

The pardon for Schwartz came while I was reporting on Trump’s broader clemency spree, which has favored allies, donors and other well-connected defendants, including people convicted in serious financial fraud cases.

This pardon felt different to me.

To understand the human toll, I turned to court records. In states where Schwartz owned nursing homes, I found harrowing accounts of patients suffering and insiders desperately trying to protect them as problems piled up.

The damage reached workers, too: As facilities fell apart, some employees said they were buying food for residents out of their own pockets. Others were left with medical bills after insurance premiums were taken from their paychecks but the coverage was never funded.

And yet, Schwartz still appears to have money, perhaps even great sums. Lobbying disclosure forms showed he had paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to help secure his pardon. And even after his business collapsed, prosecutors said he still had $58 million in assets, though none was in his own name.

The White House has said the president does not issue pardons at the request of lobbyists.

After the pardon, Schwartz still had to return to Arkansas in late December to serve nine months in prison for defrauding the state’s Medicaid program.

I saw his return as a chance to speak with him. The prison system said I could reach him only by mail. In the first week of January, I sent a letter requesting an interview by phone, email or in person, noting that I could easily drive from my home in Missouri to meet him.

A lawyer for the Coulson family saw that same narrow window as a chance to do something more consequential: serve Schwartz with a subpoena for a deposition and records that might help locate his assets and force payment of judgments he had ignored.

The window for both of us closed almost immediately. One of Schwartz’s lobbyists had also been hired to seek relief for him in Arkansas. Within three weeks, the parole board released him.

My letter came back as undeliverable. The lawyer had no better luck tracking him down.

That episode helped me understand the story more clearly. At first it felt like a reporting failure. The more I sat with it, the more I realized that the missed window was actually a mirror of the broader story. Even after criminal convictions, civil judgments and years of litigation, Schwartz remained elusive to the people seeking answers or accountability.

There was a machinery working to shorten his punishment. But nothing to help the victims.

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