trump and His Cronies Aren't Even Hiding the Theft Anymore

This is how corrupt trump's administration is: he sued his own government for billions of dollars so he could then weasel out of the lawsuit and claim an imaginary settlement for a mere billion to pay off his foot soldiers among the insurrectionist ranks (from Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin at ABC News):

The Justice Department announced Monday that as part of a settlement agreement in President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the attorney general is establishing an $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration. 

The announcement came after attorneys representing Trump informed a federal judge in a court filing earlier Monday that the president was dropping his suit against the IRS.

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, subsequently ordered the case closed -- signaling that she does not plan to challenge the controversial settlement. 

In a brief order issued Monday, Judge Williams said she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing the case. She noted that the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, so there is no "settlement of record" -- leaving her with no authority to adjudicate the private settlement. 

Do you see it? There's no official settlement of record. There's no paper trail the legal system is supposed to rely on. And yet, there's a billion dollars that Congress never approved of getting set up in a slush fund that I doubt will have any real oversight to where it gets turned into a funnel of illegality where even more money gets siphoned off to gods know where.

As thought making the payment amount symbolic to make it say 1776 like it's for FREEDOM on our nation's 250th birthday is going to patch things over. GODDAMN THIS IS CORRUPT.

This is Paul Krugman over at the National Memo:

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

If there's any true justice, trump's move here should get tied up in the courts - especially over that fact that there's no judge-approved agreement on record - long enough for the Democrats to win back Congress this midterms well enough to guarantee they will use their Article I constitutional powers to block trump and his cronies from stealing one more nickel from our nation's coffers.

This is why the Republicans are so desperate to gerrymander the hell out of congressional districts, this is why the Republicans are so desperate to suppress voter turnout to keep their Senate seats safe from statewide anger. They're not that stupid to ignore the polls showing how unpopular they've gotten among even independent voters (and even enough registered Republicans willing to flip their ballots).

Voter turnout still matters: that's the good news. The Republicans can't rig enough barricades and tip enough scales to stop all of us angry at them and trump. Everyone needs to understand the mission this midterms: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS. VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE BALLOT.

We can save this nation from an eternal void of Far Right grifting and greed, if we show up and vote goddammit.