We jump to conclusions about people’s guilt, sometimes, in spite of our justice system being based on the presumption of innocence. We jump to these conclusions, in part, because some citizens are presumed much more innocent than others in our impartial justice system.
Just because all of former president Trumpie’s phone records and burner phones from January 6th are lost, and all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th were deleted, apparently after they were requested by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, and just because the former president recently phoned a witness who is about to testify to the J6 Committee, for a reason none of us knows, it doesn’t mean there is anything funny going on. Trump and his people view the law as a transactional thing which presumes everyone innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is no trial, there is always reasonable doubt. If you can influence public opinion and stop the trial before it starts, or work closely with the jury in case, God forbid, there is a trial, you are innocent!
Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon (for crimes committed while Giuliani’s police commissioner) who spent time in the can, was in the January 6th Willard Hotel war room? He’d been pardoned, washed clean as a newly baptized baby. So had Flynn, Bannon, Stone, Manafort, Jared’s father, Jack Johnson, Susan B. Anthony and dozens besides.
The AG of Texas, Ken Paxton, has been under federal indictment for felony securities fraud for SEVEN years. No trial yet, presumed innocent. Nothing stopped him from using his office to submit a far-fetched emergency legal challenge to the US Supreme Court arguing that the voters in Texas had been victims of massive anti-Trump voter fraud in states that swung to Biden in 2020. Lyin’ Ted Cruz and other elected Republicans in national office signed on to the Hail Mary case, which was quickly dismissed (for lack of standing or the slightest legal coherence) by even the 6-3 Federalist Society majority. They clearly had bigger fish to fry, like eliminating privacy rights, which are, like, totally unenumerated in the actual text of their sacred originalist Constitution.
How long ago did the IRS give Trumpie a controversial $70,000,000 tax rebate for massive business losses? Pretty long ago, they’ve been auditing that giant rebate for years, are apparently still puzzling over it. Two second search result:
Between 1984 and 2004, he used actual losses, loss write-downs from previous years, and other accounting dodges to pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes. From 2005 to 2007, this latest Times scoop reveals, he did finally pay about seventy million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. But then, in 2010, he demanded a full refund for those tax payments. And the I.R.S. acceded to his request: it paid him $72.9 million, including interest. This 2010 refund seems to be at the center of an auditing dispute between Trump and the tax authorities that has dragged on for almost a decade. It also appears to be the money that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was referring to in his 2019 testimony to Congress, when he recalled Trump showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury and remarked that Trump “could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.” [1]
Again, if you are powerless, you will immediately be liable to pay in full whatever fines and penalties the IRS imposes. There is no negotiation, no discussion, no appeal and the fines and penalties continue to be stacked on top until you pay every dime. If you are a smart cookie like the Orange Polyp? Hah! Different story, baby.
Those protesters of police killing of unarmed Blacks, assembled at Lafayette Square? Terrorists! The full force of Bill Barr’s ragtag federal law enforcement army forcibly drove them from the street so the president, who was screaming for governors to “dominate the streets!”, could look strong and stroll for a photo op with a bible. None of the arrested protesters was charged with anything, after being gassed, charged by feds on horseback, handcuffed and thrown into paddy wagons to be dragged in for processing. The “peaceful tourists” who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, as was their patriotic 1776 right to legitimate political discourse? Allowed to leave the crime scene in peace, back to their hotels, back to homes all over the country the next day. 800+ were later rounded up and arrested, at the cost of tens of millions in investigation costs and DOJ work hours. Many of these outraged pawns will spend time in prison, but not one person who sent them into a rage over the bullshit claim that Blacks stole the presidential election from them, incited them to come and be wild, paid for their hotel rooms, is on trial for anything, or even indicted for anything.
The impartial administration of justice at the Department of Justice that Merrick Garland is intent on restoring, almost two years in, after four years of an openly lawless Department of Justice shamelessly carrying out a giant, vindictive two year-old’s every whim?
(cue the crickets)
[1]
In the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Trump’s businesses, some of which he had greatly overpaid for when he bought them, racked up more than a billion dollars in losses, and four of them ended up filing for bankruptcy: three casinos in Atlantic City and his Plaza Hotel, in New York. In 1995, as he emerged from this wreckage, he declared a tax loss of more than nine hundred million dollars, which the I.R.S. allowed him to use in subsequent years as an offset against any profits his businesses made. So even in years when the Trump Organization did well, his loss carryovers reduced his tax bill to zero.
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