How Is the Trump Presidency Not a Criminal Enterprise?

Donald Trump's move to steal $1.8 billion from American taxpayers to give to the January 6 insurrectionists goes far beyond what anyone could have imagined even from the king of kleptocracy. Destined to receive what the Trump
His banner is installed at Trump's very own
Department of Justice.


regime regards as restitution will primarily be the nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol that day in 2021.

Incited by Trump, they assaulted and overwhelmed the Capitol police, beating them with pipes, flag poles, a fire extinguisher, resulting in 140 injured and five dead, one from trauma, others by suicide.

The mob broke into the building, hunted fleeing Congress members through its hallways, threatened to hang Vice-President Pence — all with the intent to overturn the democratic election of Joe Biden. For a spectrum of crimes, they either pled guilty or were convicted by juries and sentenced by judges in courts of law and were rightly imprisoned.

On the first day he returned to office for a second term, Trump pardoned all of them and commuted their sentences, releasing all from prison. There followed a vindictive purge of Justice Department attorneys for the sin of being assigned to investigate and construct cases against the rioters; some 200 attorneys were fired and thousands quit.

Not disgrace enough, Trump now intends to financially reward them for attempting to upend constitutional democracy and keep him in power. Here’s Trump’s version:

”This is reimbursing people that were horribly treated, horribly treated, it’s anti-weaponization. They’ve been weaponzied. They’ve been in some cases imprisoned wrongly. They paid legal fees that they didn’t have . They’ve gone bankrupt. Their lives have been destroyed. And they turn out to be right.”

How did they not bring this upon themselves? That they were “right” for Trump means he should have urged them to fight on that day while he stole the presidency.

At the outset, Trump had called January 6 a "heinous attack" that had "defiled the seat of American democracy". But that changed as he created an inverted world in which the thugs became “patriots” and those imprisoned were deemed “political hostages”. To commemorate their heroism, Trump stipulated the exact amount of the fund to be $1,776 as only befits those patriots such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

The $1.8 billion may be far less than the $10 billion damages lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service that is the precursor of the fund, except there was no possibility of him and his family collecting anywhere near that absurd amount, not least for no proof of damages to Trump businesses which have profited handsomely from deals that have burgeoned under this corrupt president from those seeking influence.

The suit charged that the I.R.S. failed to prevent a contract worker from leaking Trump tax returns to The New York Times and Pro Publica for which he was sentence to five years in prison. It made for the ludicrous situation of the president suing his own government with his D.O.J. obliged to defend the I.R.S. against plaintiff Trump. The foul smell caused Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida (Trump lawyers had filed the suit in Florida hoping sycophant Judge Aileen Cannon would be assigned the case) to summon both sides to appear three days ago for oral argument over the question of whether the two parties were in an adverse relationship, as required by law. Both sides seemed to be working together to collusively settle the lawsuit. That would perpetrate a fraud on the public. The impending embarrassment was enough to cause the Trump team to fold, evidently. By the way, the suit was past the five-year statute of limitations making it ludicrous to begin with.

In its stead, the Trump camp created the $1.8 billion pool of money that would come from the Judgment Fund, a reservoir of money Justice taps to compensate those with successful claims against the government.

Trump’s lawyers didn’t just move to dismiss the I.R.S. case, they settled too, on their own, without any judicial proceeding or customary court approval or even its knowledge. The fund was created out of thin air. It takes money without congressional appropriation. It will violate the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which reads:

"But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States"

There’s was a court case in Colorado which ran for five days with plenty of witnesses, the state’s supreme court concurring, that established legally that January 6 was indeed an insurrection.

Any court should find that the fund's handouts to allies of the president have no relation to the suit against the I.R.S. about leaked tax returns. It is an illegal settlement. It is outright theft.

Subsequently, we learned of the by-laws:

• A five-member panel chosen by the attorney general, but with Trump able to fire them at will, would decide who gets how much.

• Names of recipients would be secret as would the amount each receives.

• Recipients needn't declare the money on their tax returns. It will be tax-free.

• 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.

Most astounding of all, in return for Trump canceling the suit against the I.R.S., the agency will drop all pending claims and terminate any audits of past tax returns of Trump, Trump family members, and the family company, the Trump Organization. You and I, every one of us, is subject to audit should the I.R.S. so choose, but not the Trumps. The Trump family lives beyond the law. About the settlement, Trump said,

“I have to tell you I know very little about it. I wasn’t involved in the whole creation of it and the negotiation.”

This was a lie. Trump lawyers would not have been allowed to settle the suit without Trump’s knowledge and approval.

With so many Trump and Republican attempts to rig this fall's election, the Democrats' paranoia is understandable for viewing payoffs to militias as buying the loyalty of shock troops to be sure Trump cult loyalty stays baked in and can be counted on to violently rout protesters as the election nears. The message is: violence pays.

Vice President Vance allays our concerns:

"Is a dollar of this money going to the Trump administration? No. Is a dollar of this money going to Donald Trump personally? No. Is a dollar of this money going to Donald Trump's family? No."

When Trump tapped Vance to be “in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States”, one thought convicting the perpetrators of swindles was his assignment. Instead Vance is now saying the fund is to reward those who broke the law,

"…to make sure that people who were mistreated by their government get a little bit of compensation because of it.”

Mistreated? It was just a little mischief at the Capitol?

A little bit? The fund is of a size that, with money to spare, each of the 1,600 could be showered with a million dollars. But we know of no plans to compensate the Capitol Police (to the contrary a $5 million settlement was paid to the family of Ashli Babbitt, shot dead while trying to break into the House chamber with lawmakers present).

No money for Donald Trump? You sure of that Mr. Vance? Trump had already surpassed himself in audacity by his outlandish claim that he should be paid as recompense for the costs of being prosecuted. He demanded $230 million. And along comes a fund with a provision for secret payouts.

The White House is calling it the Anti-Weaponization Fund. There was no Justice Department weaponization. That’s always been a lie. But for the right-wing the Biden administration had committed the unforgivable offense of prosecuting Trump and the criminals who attacked the Capitol. Trump’s call to combat — "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore" – was simply free speech as was the rioters’ attempt to block the transfer of power and the bloodshed that followed. The indictment of Trump and the hundreds of cases against the attackers were weaponization and “mistreatment”.

In the second federal case, Trump had repeatedly broken the law, stealing hundreds of boxes of documents and devising several maneuvers to obstruct their return. Both were, of course, legitimate cases that had to be prosecuted — law enforcement, not lawfare.

Buy the Justice Department reeks of putrefication under Trump. Its press release says the fund will "hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare". Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says:

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”

The weaponization that for him should never happen again is prosecution for criminal acts.

In the second federal case, Trump had repeatedly broken the law, stealing hundreds of boxes of documents and devising several maneuvers to obstruct their return. Both were of course legitimate cases that had to be prosecuted. Or was Jack Smith at fault for being late to understand that Donald Trump is above the law?

If the Anti-Weaponization Fund goes forward and Democrats triumph in 2028, they should be fully prepared with a criminal indictment against Trump. The attempt to illegally keep the presidency was his own aggrandizement, as is handing out rewards to those who attempted to facilitate his crime. The latter ties to the former to keep the limitations statute alive.

The charge says the motives and context of Trump's actions are entirely outside the Supreme Court’s boundary of immunity. The payments are not official acts; they are personal. Trump should be prosecuted for history’s most astronomical embezzlement.

For that matter, Trump has already broken so many laws that we'd argue for a Democratically controlled D.O.J. to mount half a dozen cases of Trump's most egregious law-breaking to make clear to the dumb half of the American people what he had done, to march the cases through courts furious at Trump's disparagements of their existence, and then to watch the Supreme Court, as Trump appeals each case, repeatedly make itself the fool, sanctioning crimes by striking down each case, one after the other, on the grounds that their idiotic immunity bestowal gave Trump the right to be a criminal.