Bill Barr and His DOJ: More Corrupt Than We Knew

Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr has been appearing on Fox News lately, apparently trying to repair his reputation by speaking out against Trump. “I think the whole idea of a special master is a bit of a red herring,” Barr told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts. “I think it’s a waste of time.”

He has talked back to those outraged by the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago with, “People say this [raid] was unprecedented, but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club”. He scoffed at Trump’s claim that he had

exorcised the classification of all the documents no matter their secrecy. Barr told the House January 6 committee Trump’s claims about election fraud were “bulls*t,” “nonsense” and “idiotic”, worrying that Trump had become “detached from reality” about voting machines designed to rig the election.

It’s been quite a turnabout. Before the 2020 election, Barr had gone along with Trump’s imagining that forged ballots would come in from other countries, that the election would be rigged, but he didn’t sign on after the election to the Big Lie. Barr had taken stock and realized that the claim of a stolen election was simply Trump trying to stay in power. On December 1 he told the Associated Press that no significant fraud had been found, earning Trump’s enmity, and three weeks later resigned to be quit of Trump’s chicanery after almost two years supporting all of it.

Barr had been a Trump loyalist, grounded in his outspoken advocacy of a “unitary executive theory”, which holds that the original intent of the Constitution gives all executive authority solely to the president. That certainly appealed to Trump. In what commentators called Barr’s audition for the attorney general job, he had written a 19-page memorandum criticizing former FBI director Robert Mueller’s inquiry as weakening the office of the president and arguing that a president could not be investigated while in office. The FBI probe into possible Trump campaign connections to Russia was for Barr a “travesty”. The FBI operated in “bad faith”, the nation “turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely hyped and fanned by a completely irresponsible press”. The Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.”

Barr had only been on the job for a month when Mueller turned in his team’s report on Russian influence in the 2016 election and Russian contacts with the Trump campaign. Barr sabotaged two years of work by the special counsel by hastily writing a four-page letter to say, weeks before the redacted report would be released to the public, that Mueller found no conspiracy “despite multiple offers from Russia-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign”. President Trump was triumphant. “There was no collusion with Russia”, he declared on the tarmac returning from Mar-a-Lago. “No collusion” and “Complete and total exoneration” became Trump’s mantra, adopted at once and repeated endlessly. Bill Barr was now branded as Trump’s lawyer rather than the nation’s. In March 2020, a federal judge sharply criticized Barr’s characterizations of Mueller’s conclusions.

The Mueller report was, of course, nowhere near so easily dismissed. It bluntly stated that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” It found that

“the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”.

Moreover, attempts by President Trump to shut down the probe were so many that they made for a second section of the report that, to outline ten instances of obstruction, ran to as many pages as the investigation proper.

MAKING OBSTRUCTION GO AWAY

This August, a federal appeals court ruled that the Justice Department could no longer keep secret a legal memo that laid out the reasons for Trump not to be prosecuted for obstruction. It found that Trump’s actions — his attempts to have Mueller fired and to shut down his investigation, the firing of FBI Director James Comey for what the memo acknowledged was Comey’s refusal to publicly state that Trump was not under investigation — none of these actions rose to the level of a crime. The memo said Trump believed the investigation…

“cast a cloud on his nascent Administration and that it was being exploited, if not outright conducted, by his political opponents to frustrate his efforts to implement his agenda”.

In other words, consideration of possible crimes was to be waived for political reasons.

This “heat map” by Quinta Jurecic at lawfareblog.com weighs, where red is flagrant and blue is benign, each Trump action against the three criteria for obstruction.

The memo by two senior department officials that recommended no prosecution of Trump is dated March 24, 2019. Barr’s signature accepting the recommendation is dated that same day. And that’s the date of Barr’s four-page letter undercutting Mueller, which in turn is just two days after Barr got the 448-page Mueller report. Which says that Barr and his team had pre-decided to dismiss the report no matter what it said.

Neil Katyal was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, has argued more than 30 cases before the Supreme Court, and is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. In a searing opinion piece in The New York Times he laid out just how corrupt this was of Barr. “Opinion” is a misnomer because he explains that Barr violated the Department’s own rules governing independent special counsels. Katyal is an expert because it was he who drafted the special counsel regulations in 1999.

The rules call for the special counsel to decide whether an investigation had revealed crimes. The attorney general may object, but to do so must make the case before Congress. The rule is to prevent partisan political appointees, including the AG, from undermining a special counsel’s investigation. The authors of the memo recommending no prosecution were both political appointees, Steven Engel and Edward O’Callaghan, not career officials at Justice. Instead of calling on the special counsel to make the determination of whether Trump had committed the crime of attempting to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation, Barr ordered up a memo to immediately cut in front of Mueller, an immediately declared it classified to keep it from the public, brought to light only now.

“The regulations were written with an untrustworthy president in mind, more so than the problem that Mr. Barr presented, which is an untrustworthy attorney general”, writes Katyal. “But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether [Trump] committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves.”

EXPOSING THE ROT AT BARR’S DOJ

In mid-September, just days after the memo was made public, out came Geoffrey Berman’s book, “Holding the Line”. Hidden from view but now in the open is his recounting of a supposedly independent Justice Department in fact doing Trump’s bidding. Berman was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the most renowned of all DOJ outposts for the mighty it has brought low.

“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump`s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired. I walked this tightrope for 2 1/2 years. Eventually, the rope snapped.”

He leads off with his office receiving an urgent phone call from the same O`Callaghan deputized to shut down Mueller. The SDNY was instructed to bring criminal charges against Gregory Craig, formerly Obama`s White House counsel, for purportedly lobbying for a foreign government. Moreover, Berman was told to bring those charges before Election Day. Tarring a Democrat was thought to help Republicans in their bid to control the House and Senate in the midterm elections just weeks away.

Berman had had just prosecuted two Trump loyalists, Republican Congressman Chris Collins and Trump`s private attorney, Michael Cohen, so O’Callaghan’s message was that it`s time for the guys in New York to even things out. Berman refused. “I ignored the edict. But this episode was not a one-off. It was part of a pattern.”

The SDNY was also told to cease all investigative work on Trump’s payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy playmate to keep them quiet about his sexual indulgences before the 2016 election. “Not a single investigative step could be taken, not a single document in our possession could be reviewed”, wrote Berman about O’Callaghan’s edict. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen had already been convicted for the campaign finance law felony. To make it go away Barr even tried without success to get SDNY to undo Cohen’s guilty plea. New York was told to slim down the charging document and remove its references to “Individual-1”, who was of course Donald Trump. Michael Cohen often asked in interviews why he was the only one who did time for this crime. Ask Bill Barr.

The U.S. attorney in D.C. who had dutifully followed Barr’s order to prosecute Greg Craig? Barr pushed her out so as to bring in his guy, Timothy Shea. Undercutting career persecutors at Main Justice, Barr and Shea brought in a prosecutor from outside the department to review the case of former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI. They installed a clutch of outsiders to review the handling of other politically sensitive matters. They moved to drop the charges and undo Flynn’s two guilty pleas. They ordered that sentences recommended by department prosecutors be cut way back for Trump adviser Roger Stone, who had just been convicted on multiple felonies,. Four line prosecutors quit the Stone case in protest; one left the department for good.

Berman could see what was coming. Ultimately Barr told him to resign, even publicly saying that Berman had already resigned. Berman issued a newsworthy statement saying he had not resigned, would not resign. That all cases in hos office would go on unimpaired, that he would have to be fired — setting up what Berman called a “noisy” public exit that prevented Barr from slipping in his own deputy to undo SDNY’s ongoing cases.

POLTICAL REVENGE

Barr told Congress he thought “spying on a political campaign is a big deal”, that “I think spying did occur”, and questioned whether the FBI investigation “was adequately predicated”. Just two months after the release of the Mueller Report, Barr unleashed his personal animus against Mueller’s “grave injustice” by starting his own investigation. He tapped John Durham, U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to search for the “origins” of the FBI probe and whether it had broken laws in the investigation the FBI called “Crossfire Hurricane”.

Three years later — half again longer than Mueller’s inquiry — Durham has come up with next to nothing. With his grand jury about to expire, there have been a meager three cases: against an FBI attorney for altering an email to help a FISA application go forward, for which he was sentenced to probation and community service; against a lawyer for lying to the FBI that he was not connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for which he was acquitted; and against Igor Danshenko, who was found to be the principal source of Christopher Steele’s bogus dossier, and whose trial for five counts of lying to the FBI begins in October. (Durham will reveal that the FBI hired Danshenko as a paid informant for three years despite his being untrustworthy, which is treated as a “bombshell” at Fox News for reasons unclear. Is it news that the FBI pays informants? Because Danshenko has been linked to Russian intelligence services? Didn’t that make him all the more valuable?)

Along the way, Durham was silent but Barr would sully the FBI’s reputation by fabricating that he was “troubled” by what Durham had found when Durham had found nothing.

Given all that is coming out about how Barr conducted of the Department of Justice, one comment of his stands out. He said to Congress that he joined the Trump administration because “I became deeply troubled by what I perceived as the increasing use of the criminal justice process as a political weapon”. He certainly put an end to that.

An Armed I.R.S. Is Coming for Us, Republicans Warn

In 2016, an analysis by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported that the “tax gap” – the amount of taxes Americans owed but failed to pay – reached almost half a trillion dollars a year for the years 2008 through 2010, an average annual loss of $458 billion. By so reporting, the IRS was presumably angling for increased funds so it could go after tax cheats.

But Republicans in Congress, saw opportunity to go on the warpath, naming the closing week of April “IRS Week”, and devising half a
dozen measures to penalize the tax agency for doing so poor a job of tax collecting. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch said the IRS must “get smarter about guaranteeing tax compliance”. California’s Kevin McCarthy, now House Minority Leader, called the agency “a picture of government corruption and incompetence”. House Speaker at the time, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, even faulted the agency for enforcing “a tax code that no one can understand”, a tax code that his Congress itself had created, not the IRS.

But now that Democrats have passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides the IRS with $80 billion across 10 years, shouldn’t we expect Republicans, after all that vitriol in 2016, to rejoice that the IRS can finally afford to go after “wealthy tax cheats”? Of course not. Those on the right howled in protest.

“Stop Biden’s shadow army of 87,000 IRS. agents,” intoned Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, falsely amplifying what had only been a Treasury Department proposal from 2021 contemplating what the IRS could do with additional funding. Whatever the undecided number, it will be offset by 50,000 due to retire over the next five years.

Republican candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake, who believes that Trump won the 2020 election and keeps company with QAnon adherents, showed her preference for fantasy saying that it was no coincidence that “they hired 87,000 IRS agents the day before” the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago — 87,000 already hired and in a single day, she thinks. And even before the IRA had been signed into law.

Chuck Grassley, the Iowa senator running for his eighth six-year term at age 88, told Fox News viewers that IRS agents might be coming with loaded “AK-15s” and “ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa.”

Kevin McCarthy warned of a “new army of 87,000 IRS agents” who “will be coming for you”.

That the 87,000 will all be armed was the total lie advanced by Fox News some 40 times, nine times by Tucker Carlson, who hosts the network’s most watched program. Only 2,100 agents — those who must deal with dangerous offenders engaged in illegal activity such as narcotics and money laundering — are authorized to carry weapons on the job.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl), in charge of the GOPs midterm Senate election, wrote an open letter advising the “American Job Seeker” not to apply to the IRS because when Republicans take over again, the funding will be clawed back, returning the IRS to today’s crippled state. He had earlier said, “We will immediately do everything in our power to defund this insane and unwarranted expansion of government into the lives of the American people”.

Florida Governor Run DeSantis asked whether “the Regime” is getting more IRS agents to “wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.”

Others, on social media such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social, labeled IRS agents “thugs” and “terrorists” and likened them repeatedly to the KGB and a “new Gestapo” that will “hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers”, according to one Fox News hysteric.

STARVE THE BEAST

In that 2016 outpouring of outrage, there was no mention that legislators in the House and Senate had cut the IRS budget every year from 2010 through 2015 by $1.2 billion, causing the agency to shrink by 17,000 employees. Republicans have a long history of animosity toward the IRS. Their expressed mission is to protect the middle class and small businesses from what they would say are the predatory practices of the agency. Unexpressed is that they do their utmost to hobble the IRS so as to protect their campaign donors, the wealthiest Americans and big business, from scrutiny and audit. That, and the counterpart of delivering tax cuts such as the 2017 legislation that greatly favored the topmost income brackets and slashed corporate taxes by a jaw-dropping 40%.

All other federal departments cost money; the IRS is the one division that makes money for the government. But Republicans have time and again taken steps to prevent that from happening. Budget cuts see to it that the IRS cannot afford to go after industrial titans and the wealthy, which requires sophisticated staff able to grapple with tax lawyers and accountants who have erected thickets of obscurity to make befuddled IRS agents surrender.

• Between 2010 and 2021 the IRS budget was cut 19%, resulting in a 21% reduction in staff — a 31% reduction of enforcement staff — cutting in half the number of criminal investigations it could afford to open.

• “The last time the IRS had so few auditors was 1953”, Bryce Covert at Slate tells us.

• The workforce of about 75,000 is the same size as in 1970.

• Audits fell by 42% between 2010 and 2017, reaching a 40-year low in 2019 made all the worse when factored against the 50% population increase over the period.

Worse still have been new tasks regularly dropped on the IRS by Congress without a second thought to how the shrunken department can handle them:

• the changes of the 2017 tax cuts,

• the order by Congress to stand up overnight complicated transfer-payment programs such as the child allowance,

• having to distribute three rounds of stimulus payments to practically everyone in the country in 2020 and 2021.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that only 10% of phone callers got through to the IRS in this year’s tax season. These added burdens coupled with pandemic staffing shortages have led to huge backlogs of unprocessed paper tax returns. There were 35 million in May of last year, down to 24 million this March. Even with the 500,000 the IRS is processing every week, according to a Wall Street Journal tax column, that’s 48 weeks of work with the current staff level.

OBSTACLE COURSE

The IRS has had to pull this off with hopelessly obsolete systems kept that way by the Republican budget cuts. It is still a paper-based system without even the use of scanners. The tax savvy circle relevant items on returns with red pens. Others keystroke the numbers into the system.

Of the IRA’s $80 billion, $25.3 billion has been allotted to back office functions such as replacing computers still running COBOL, a programming language created in the 1950s with few left who know how to read the code. Entirely new systems need be created where we can file tax returns online with data already filled in from companies reporting our transactions to the IRS. A May 2021 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that 42% of printers and copiers at three IRS tax-processing centers were unusable or broken. Mail-processing equipment is “20 years old and has not had any significant technical upgrades in more than 15 years,” the IG reports. The equipment often slices through returns that staff must then tape back together. Describing the disarray, one employee told The New York Times, “A surprisingly large amount of time has been used looking for carts to put files on and staples for stapling files together.”

HANDS OFF THE UNDER $400,000

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has spelled out priorities to Commissioner Charles Rettig that the IRS is to “fully resolve the inventory backlog and make significant improvements in taxpayer services,” “overhaul an information technology system that is decades out of date,” and invest and train employees “so they can identify the most complex evasion schemes by those at the top.”

The tax gap runs to about 15% beyond taxes actually collected, is the estimate. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more vigorous enforcement could bring in $200 billion over the next ten years. The IRS thinks much more lies out there for the taking; in 2018 their estimate was that $125 billion a year is left on the table.

That’s been the cost of the IRS not being able for lack of staff and funding to go after wealthy individuals and large corporations in search of tax cheating. Time magazine reported that the audit rate for Americans making more than $1 million a year dropped from 8.4% in 2010 to 2.45% in 2019. Audits on Americans reporting $5 million or more in income fell to 2.35% in 2019 from 16% a decade earlier.

To keep the IRS focused on the upper income tiers, Ms Yellen also instructed that:

“[A]ny additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”

We’ll see how that goes, but as editorial and opinion writers have noted, almost all historical auditing for many years has been targeted at the under $400,000 earners, not those above, so they will hardly be getting a free ride. To give them their due, the GOP is worried that, should investigating the rich prove too difficult or yield too little of expected revenue, the IRS might fall back on the easier targets of low- or middle-income taxpayers which would make their alarmists correct.

The president and treasury secretary need to keep watch. If this does happen, if there’s little success in reining in the rich who evade taxes, if the tax burden continues to fall on the middle and lower classes, if inequality continues in perpetuity, still more of an angry public will give up on democracy in abject disgust.

Here’s a More Equitable Way to Lighten the Student Debt Load

President Biden’s plan to waive $10,000 to $20,000 at an estimated cost of $300 billion across 10 years has expectedly drawn hosannas from Democrats and harangues from Republicans.

The view from the left is that the debt load of $1.6 trillion is a crushing burden weighing down one generation going on two that cries out for relief. With 7.65% in payroll taxes already taken from their paychecks (double that for the self-employed), another $400 or so drained from their bank accounts every month to repay their loans, former students are economically crippled well into adulthood.
Because interest accrues faster than ability to pay, the average 35-year-old borrower owes $42,600, says Education Data Initiative. Young people forestall marriage, postpone having children, can afford only used cars, can’t get a mortgage to buy a house. As well as stunting lives, student debt is a serious drag on the nation’s economy.

Beyond alarm at yet another huge addition to the national debt transferred to taxpayers, the conservative position is that, however ill-conceived is the government program of handing out money indiscriminately to youths to spend at colleges of questionable quality, however misguided are students for taking out loans in tens of thousands of dollars for dead-end courses, debt is nevertheless a grown-up obligation that students must face up to.

Still, debt forgiveness that benefits only those who currently owe raises profound issues of inequity, an unavoidable argument. Canceling debt makes fools of those who struggled for years to repay all of their obligation, or those who worked their way through college to avoid debt only to see cancellation give others a free ride at government expense, or the tens of millions who forsook college, apprehensive of the debt burden, but who would be asked through their taxes to magnanimously pay for others who enjoyed the privilege of a college education.

Mr. Biden’s plan is no sure thing. It is sure to be held up by legal challenges. So there is time and opportunity to consider a more equitable way

No one brings up the real burden: interest charges. America wants a well-educated workforce, whether in liberal arts, engineering, law, medicine, trade skills — any and all. Education is virtually the national mantra, universally cited as the path upward, the route to a better life, and essential to U.S. competitiveness in a challenging world. It’s why there is a government student loan program. So why does the government make education so costly by charging interest on student loans?

The answer is that it makes money, which makes the federal government something of a confidence artist, peddling the virtues of education, making it easy for the young to take and spend loan money on a frivolous curriculum — there being hardly any guardrails — and treating students as a profit center by charging interest.

And at what rates! Among all borrowers, 5.8% is the average student loan interest rate and we see in the table that rates
have run to over 4% in years when the federal funds rate was virtually 0%. How can this not be called exploitation of the young by Congress and the federal government?

“Congress has a hard time changing programs that make money for the government”, said a Wall Street Journal article. Shaming Congress for profiteering off youth with a millstone that never should have been imposed could right this wrong.

Rather than a one-time, lump-sum cancellation of a tranche of debt, only for debt to rise again, elimination of interest provides a way to benefit every borrower — and in proportion to their debt. Here’s how it could be done:

1. Cancel further interest and reverse past interest charges for everyone. Apply the entire payment history of each borrower to principal — the face value of one’s loan — as if interest charges never existed. Other than refunding the difference to those whose accumulated payments exceed principal, no dollars flow. It’s an accounting entry. Spread on both past and future payers, wiping out interest fairly benefits all.

2. With interest charges absent as an inducement to repay promptly, convert all loan repayment to a percentage of income (with stern penalties for evasion) until loan principal is paid in full. Low-income and public service workers will see their monthly payments sharply reduced. That should be consideration enough to end the special forgiveness programs whereby the government currently cancels debt after a certain number of years.

3. Waive the tax on forgiveness of debt on the grounds that interest charged to the young trying to get an education is an obscenity that should not have been levied in the first place.

The loan program faces steep costs in any event. In 2020 the Education Department estimated that $435 billion will eventually be written off owing to the forgiveness programs and to those who have no prospects for repaying. Given that eventuality, it makes sense to make the structural change of doing away with interest charges that benefits all and increases the likelihood that some millions of those having difficulty will be able to pay after all.

Sep 3 2022 | Posted in Education | Read More »