Along with all the other bad news donald trump's been getting this month, this week revealed the US House Ways and Means Committee voted on making trump's federal income tax filings available to the public.
You might remember a while back, trump lost his fight to keep his tax returns private when the Supreme Court - even stacked with Far Right Republicans - said "Haha, no." As I noted at the time:
Although Reuters didn't go into the reason(s) why the Ways and Means were looking at trump's taxes, if I recall from other sources it was because the Committee was digging into trump's many violations of the Emoluments Clause. trump had been using his properties to entice and squeeze as much money out of the government (forcing the Secret Service to reside at his hotels at double-billing!) and foreign lobbyists since Day One. It had been this long going after trump on this open grift - delayed either by Republican control of Congress or trump's control of the Justice Department - that only now have the courts cleared this matter.
Problem is, the current Democratic control of Ways and Means is going to end in a month: Republicans won a narrow victory to control the House, and there is no way the MAGA wingnuts running the GOP caucus is going to expose their God-Emperor trump to public scrutiny. If there's anything the current committee can use the tax returns info they now have, they better make it quick before Christmas...
Ah, yes. They did. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, that felt goooooood.
It turns out I was wrong on the reasons why the Ways and Means wanted to examine trump's tax returns. The House committee wasn't so much looking at if trump was violating the Emoluments Clause, but if the Internal Revenue Service was doing their job in automatically auditing trump as sitting President Loser of the Popular Vote.
Turns out there's an Executive standing order - due to Richard Nixon's brush with tax dodging back in 1973 - that mandates the IRS audit the President every year he's in office. And it turns out the Ways and Means' worries were legit: Turns out the audits were not happening to trump (via Dustin Jones at NPR):
The House Ways and Means Committee in its own report said it found that only one audit was started while Trump was in office and no audits were completed.
This is in violation of standing IRS policy.
"The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies," Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement. "However, our review found that under the prior administration, the program was dormant. We know now, the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency. On the same day this Committee requested his returns."
This raises a few questions. Above all, the question "Who gave the order to stop auditing trump?" This is something either the IRS head (who was originally an Obama appointee up until 2018) or the Treasury Secretary (trump ally - and corrupt SOB - Mnuchin) interfered.
There's a bit of irony here in that - of all the Presidents and candidates for that office - trump is the only one since the Nixon era who both refused to publicly reveal his tax returns and then refused to let the IRS audit them. All the while excusing his refusal by claiming he was being audited (oops, he really wasn't) as though that would have stopped him (it wouldn't have. Presidents released their tax returns every year even as they were being audited by the rules).
Even as the tax experts start poring over the actual numbers in trump's filings, these failures of accountability are troubling signs that serious reforms towards transparency and Congressional oversight are needed. As Steve Benen notes over at Rachel Maddow's Blog on MSNBC:
In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, a series of ethics reforms were created, including an automatic audit of every sitting president’s taxes, every year, regardless of circumstances. A president need not be suspected of any wrongdoing; the reform was simply created to help bolster public confidence.
Most modern presidents, eager to appear forthcoming, released their tax returns to the public anyway. Trump — the only modern major-party presidential nominee to refuse to disclose his tax returns — used the post-Watergate reform as an excuse to justify secrecy.
Indeed, even after taking office in 2017, the Republican refused to release the materials, insisting that he couldn’t because he was under audit. Even at the time, the argument didn’t make sense: Trump was free to release the documents anyway, as other modern presidents from both parties had done.
But we now know that the underlying assumption was also wrong: The automatic, mandatory audit didn’t happen.
This is important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Trump lied. For another, there was an apparent breakdown in the system that warrants additional scrutiny: If the IRS was required to audit the then-president as a matter of course, there should be some kind of explanation as to why this didn’t happen.
But let’s also not miss the forest for the trees: The whole point of the congressional exercise, the foundational basis for Neal’s initial outreach to the Treasury Department nearly four years ago, was a Ways and Means Committee investigation into the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program.
The former president, his lawyers, and his GOP allies insisted that there was no “legislative purpose” to the inquiry, and the committee’s work on the issue was little more than a political fishing expedition.
Those complaints have now collapsed. The committee set out to scrutinize the IRS’s presidential audit program and it found a problem with the IRS’s presidential audit program...
The political conversation about Trump’s secrecy has been going on for years. The policy conversation about the IRS and presidential tax returns is just getting started.
It seems unlikely that with the Republicans less than a month away from controlling the House will follow through on any reforms to fix the IRS on this matter. To Republicans, their only idea to reform the IRS is to abolish it before it holds the rich accountable for what they haven't paid in back taxes. You would think that with a Democrat currently in office - hi, Joe! - the Republicans would be eager to make it hurt by forcing Biden to humble himself before the Taxman. But the GOP knows full well that Biden - who has released his tax returns, just like Obama and Dubya and Clinton and so on - won't be bothered or embarrassed by that. Only trump - who wants to hide the reality of his business failings - would be hurt by such reforms.
It's doubtful any reforms are forthcoming, not until there's sensible (Democratic) leadership in both houses again.
What is forthcoming is the likely exposure of trump's "creative accounting" showing up in his federal tax returns. As the recent criminal trial revealed, trump's own company has been caught "cooking the books" as it were at the state level. And trump is facing a New York state civil trial that's revealing even more questionable tax behavior regarding his property values and sources of income.
It's now a question if trump tried pulling the same stunts with the IRS. Given his arrogance, the odds favor trump being that reckless.
Dude. Even the Joker didn't try to fuck with the IRS.
This is how they got Al Capone.
trump is toast.
1 comment:
Fergus wasn't lying about being under audit: there is an ongoing audit from before he was president that he could end up owing $100 million over. (Hurry up with those extra billions of dollars in funding and those thousands of agents.)
There was a lot of talk about how Richie Neal didn't have the balls to release those returns.
Perhaps he heard and was like, "Oh yeah? Watch this."
The goddamn Republicans called it a fishing expedition, but with Fergus it was more like shooting fish in a barrel. He's like all crime all the time. Crimes fall out of his pockets when he sits on the couch.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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