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Senate Republicans Rush to Immunize Money Launder-in-Chief’s Tax Crimes
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Overnight, Todd Blanche tweeted out documentation showing what he promised John Cornyn (and with him, Thom Tillis) to get their endorsement to be the top law enforcement officer in the US. One document purports to rescind the Terrorist Slush Fund, attempting to moot the lawsuits in Floyd v. DOJ (the EDVA one moving towards discovery), but remaining silent about the Trump v. IRS case Trump appealed on Friday.
Another unsigned document describes that DOJ interprets the tax immunity provision to apply to Trump, his corporate person, and his spawn retroactively, but no one else.
The documents have little legal weight (and I would be surprised if Blanche submitted the declaration in Floyd that Judge Leonie Brinkema has demanded).
But as David Kurtz presciently described, it meets the terms of John Cornyn’s demands, and Cornyn’s spox has signaled this is all it took for the Senator to cave.
Cornyn seems to be aiming to keep the immunity deal intact but to limit it to the retroactive immunity everyone already understood to be part of the deal, not prospective immunity, which an expansive interpretation of the loose language of the agreement might have allowed. Cornyn also apparently wants to make sure no one else gets the benefit of the immunity deal other than the parties to the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Org.
At this point, you should be saying WTF?
[snip]
If the reporting on Cornyn’s demands is correct, then Trump, Don Jr., Eric, and their company still get the $100 million gift from the President’s own administration to himself. And locking that in has the political (though not legal) effect of Senate Republicans publicly ratifying the corrupt bargain by voting to confirm Blanche.
In another worrying sign that Cornyn isn’t really asking for much, both sides seem perplexed that things haven’t gotten worked out yet and confident that they can iron out whatever differences remain over the precise language.
“It’s not a big ask,” Cornyn said yesterday, in what may be the understatement of the week.
Many outlets, such as the NYT, are under-reporting the value of this benefit to Trump.
Still, even in its new form, Mr. Blanche’s order for the I.R.S. to abandon any audits of Mr. Trump’s previous tax returns is an unprecedented and potentially illegal benefit to a sitting president, worth potentially tens of millions of dollars in lower taxes and avoided penalties.
In addition to the hundreds of millions disclosed in the tax returns that Charles Littlejohn leaked to the NYT, Trump spent the transition and first term of his Administration — the period covered by this tax amnesty — accepting billions of dollars in bribes.
Worse still, this immunity comes in the wake of Friday’s court filing from Capital One, disclosing that they cut Trump and his corporate persons off from banking in 2021 because of signs they were laundering money.
To the contrary, those documents and Plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (“AML”) reasons. The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance. Capital One never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure, and it permitted Plaintiffs several months (and granted several extensions) to find new banking services, which they did.
In short, just days after learning that their liege has recently been laundering money, the Senate GOP is rushing to sanction DOJ’s illegal decision to pardon Trump for those crimes.
The post Senate Republicans Rush to Immunize Money Launder-in-Chief’s Tax Crimes appeared first on emptywheel.