RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/18/its-the-culture-of-the-irs-to-target-the-most-vulnerable-taxpayers/

The Senate recently passed the inappropriately named Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 (yes, a Sunday). Aside from the fact that even non-partisan analyses show the bill will have a negligible impact on actual inflation, one specific provision is raising red flags. In the plan, the Internal Revenue Service gets a fresh $80 billion in funding, with $45.6 billion of that slated for “enforcement” measures. This will involve the hiring of more than 87,000 new IRS agents. If past is prologue, it’s reasonable to expect this spells bad news for lower income Americans.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates this new investment in the IRS will generate an additional $203.7 billion over the next 10 years. A sum that large certainly casts doubt on the notion that this will only impact the super-wealthy.  It is especially concerning given the agency’s rates of audits across socio-economic classes in recent years.

According to IRS audit data, the most frequently audited county in the United States is Humphreys County, Mississippi. This rural county near the Mississippi Delta is known for catfish farming and has an average income of $18,000 per resident, making it among the poorest in the nation. Yet, Humphreys’ residents get audited far more often than those in cities such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-manhattan-d-a-s-trump-organization-case-ends-with-a-whimper/

Allan Weisselberg, the 75-year-old former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, is pleading guilty to the fairly piddling tax-fraud charges on which he was indicted by the office of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg last July. The case was always obviously not about Weisselberg or the accused crime, but about showing some progress against Donald Trump and either (1) obtaining Weisselberg’s cooperation against Trump or (2) punishing him for not cooperating. Under the plea deal, Weisselberg is likely to spend only a few months in prison, and he will not cooperate.

What does this all mean? For Bragg, it likely means that his office is closing up shop on an overreaching, overzealous, overpriced witch-hunt of an investigation, and putting his resources to some better use. Some diehard enthusiasts of the perennial “walls are closing in on Trump” narrative note that Weisselberg may now be unable to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against testifying, but how far does that get anyone? If Weisselberg were questioned about matters other than the small-beer tax issues he’s pleading to, he could still invoke the privilege unless granted immunity — but then, he could have been given immunity a long time ago if he was seen as an enthusiastic cooperator. The most that is likely to be accomplished would be to compel him to testify in the civil proceeding pursued by the New York attorney general’s office, but the exposure in that case does not present a realistic path to sending Trump to prison or making it impossible for him to run for office again. Anything else is noise; voters already assume that Trump is the kind of guy who cuts every corner on his taxes and in his business accounting that he can get away with. And Weisselberg is highly unlikely to be in position to incriminate Trump on anything bearing on the 2020 election or January 6.

Yet again: Maybe the legal system can finally find a silver bullet against Trump. But it still does not look that likely.

Let’s review why the collapse of the Manhattan D.A.’s case was inevitable. In March, the New York Times published the resignation letter from special assistant D.A. Mark Pomerantz to Bragg arguing for prosecuting Trump. As Charlie Cooke explained at the time, it is shameful in our system of justice to have a prosecutor do this kind of hit-and-run public argument where he accuses someone of a crime without even detailing the charges or walking through the supporting evidence, let alone making his case to a jury of the defendant’s peers. But taking the letter at face value, here is what Pomerantz said:

I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_incredible_shrinking_merrick_garland.html

Maybe Attorney General Merrick Garland is the modern Inspector Javert, the French policeman who chased poor Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.”  I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison, but it sure looks to me like AG Garland has become obsessed with former President Trump.  Or maybe the White House told him to get obsessed or else.

Maybe it’s better to go to legal scholar Jonathan Turley for a description of the man.   

This is how Mr. Turley sees it:  
In the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” the character Scott Stuart is caught in a thick fog that causes him to gradually shrink to the point that he lives in a doll house and fights off the house cat. At one point, Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

If one image sums up the incredibly shrinking stature of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is that line in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.
It looks like things have grown more complicated for AG Garland, as Mr. Turley further explains:  
It is not that Merrick Garland is absent but that his presence often seems immaterial.
That’s correct.  He is there, but we can’t see the shrinking man.

Mr. Garland seemed like a good choice with he was nominated for Attorney General.  I mean that he’d be an attorney general who would avoid politics and stick to the job.  Unfortunately, he just can’t control his department’s leftist impulses, from targeting parents at school board meetings to overlooking the Hunter Biden scandal altogether.

And now he authorized, or we understand that he did, sending the FBI to a former president’s home.   

Apparently, no one at DOJ advised him of the blowback from a such a decision.  He seemed totally lost when he read from the TelePrompTer and sort of explained what he did.

Yes, the AG is shrinking faster and faster.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/doj-scrambles-find-non-existent-evidence-intent-jonathan-emord/

Under pressure from President Biden to find a way to prevent Donald Trump from becoming America’s 47th President of the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland unleashed an army of FBI agents to scour Mar-a-Lago in search of something, anything that might fill in the enormous gap in DOJ’s case against the former president: The glaring absence of evidence of specific intent needed to bring any charge against former President Trump.  

While DOJ can snow a grand jury into believing lame evidence credible and succeed in indicting just about anyone (not difficult when the prosecution runs the show unopposed), it cannot be sure of a conviction from a court without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of the specific intent necessary to prove its case. That evidence rarely exists and proof of it is, indeed, a very tall order. Short of planting evidence or making things up (in other words committing the kind of government corruption and fraud as occurred in the deceitful manipulation of evidence by DOJ and FBI in support of the Russia hoax or, more recently, in the FBI fabricated Whitmer kidnapping plot), DOJ is destined to hit a very high, virtually impenetrable burden of proof that will dash its partisan dreams to pieces.

From the warrant released by Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt on August 12, we see in attachment B the legal predicate offered by Justice for the search: 18 USC §§ 793, 1519, and 2071. For want of evidence, each statutory section fails in Trump’s case when evaluated fairly, and never should have been accepted as adequate justification under the Fourth Amendment for the unprecedented issuance of the warrant against a former President on the eve of his announcement of a second candidacy for that office. That want of evidence, of course, did not stop DOJ because the entire unprecedented pursuit is one driven by political motivations, not objectivity.  DOJ is not investigating a crime for which it has probable cause; it is trying to discover fragments of proof that can be woven into a tale of criminality to, at a minimum, place a cloud over candidate Trump’s head or, in their ideal scenario, justify preventing him from becoming the 47th President of the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dobbs-and-kennedy-rulings-intensify-lefts-war-bruce-thornton/

“Finally, the great paradox is that these champions of reason and science are promoting unscientific ideas such as the notion that biological sex is really a fluid “gender” created in a child’s mind by mental states. These dubious ideas, passed off as science, are weaponized by the “woke” in service to their attempt to aggrandize power for themselves and their faction. Or they are the expressions of what can only be called a cult, true believers who passionately and uncritically accept bad ideas, and persecute or “cancel” heretics who challenge them––the same tyrannical behavior that has characterized political religions like fascism and communism.”

The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the states’ power to settle controversial issues upon which the Constitution is silent has the usual “woke” suspects hyperventilating over religion’s dangerous power to undermine “our democracy.” This war on religion, now in its third century, is predicated on dubious ideologies, ignorance of the role of faith in the Constitution and America’s Founding, and an evangelical faith in the power of “science” that lies at the heart of our progressive technocracy.

As such, the hysteria over Dobbs is really about the power and authority of progressives who are threatened by religion and institutions of civil society.

Two examples of the “woke” panic about faith allegedly driving the Supreme Court’s decisions appeared last week. As National Review’s Isaac Schorr reported, a Politico scribe managed to completely misunderstand and garble the Justices’ argument in Dobbs, which she claims “marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-the-washington-post-and-the-nuclear-story-11660671636?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant. Now a new report makes the theory of a significant security threat even harder to credit.

The Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha report from Washington:

Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.
The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week. In a story published on Thursday and updated on Friday, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris reported for the Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it? The Post report continued:

The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18810/self-interest-politics

“Government is itself an art,” wrote the late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”[1]

Of course a leader should be able to do both – “making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness” – but what if there are leaders or the people around them who are, as Frankfurter noted, “those who pursue self-interest through politics”[2]?

As previously asked on these pages, are union moguls, lobbyists and advisors, power players and profiteers trying to do end runs around US election laws (here and here) and the Constitution (here and here)?

Anonymous “dark money” groups are still trying to “shape” our elections without disclosing where the money is coming from.

According to Bloomberg News, “‘Dark money’ helped pave the way for the Biden campaign” – to the tune of $145 million.

Big Tech has just been found to have been acting as a “state agent” of the federal government in curtailing free speech with which the government did not agree. Twitter just settled a lawsuit by the journalist Alex Berenson after he showed the court that orders to Twitter to ban him had come from the White House.

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-gutting-and-rebuilding?utm_source=email

Wrap Up Time

It’s time to wrap up our gut-and-rebuild discussion.  I apologize for the delay, but August happens.  Also, before we get back to it, I published a column in yesterday’s Epoch Times that’s a small taste of what I’ve got coming.  Watch this space after Labor Day for an essay series on America’s spiritual crisis and the new religion of Wokeism.

To get back on track, our basic theme here is that America is in deep trouble.  We live in a world far too complicated and interconnected to navigate without relying upon experts and institutions.  Yet all of our important institutions and most of our experts are corrupt.  In other words, we have to trust them but we can’t trust them.   That’s bad.

As things stand, our corrupt institutions seem to be pushing us towards totalitarianism.  If that push generates enough of a backlash, we could end up with two violent factions—one fighting for the totalitarianism and one fighting against it.  That thought makes me—and I hope you—unhappy.  I’m not a fan of either thought control or violence.  I think both are worth avoiding.  These days, that sort of attitude can earn you a reputation as a hard-core right winger.  That’s bad, too.

The only workable remedy is thus to develop superior institutions and experts.  Given how badly most of them have already rotted, however, the only way forward is to gut them, reuse what we can, and rebuild from the ground up.  We’ve explored some of what that would mean in the public sector and some of what it would mean in the private sector.  Now we’re down to the last piece: The role of electoral politics.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-democrats-inflation-reduction-act-delivers-five-winning-issues-gop

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a reckless political stunt meant to show the left that Attorney General Merrick Garland will keep the heat on former President Donald Trump. It was unprecedented, seemingly unnecessary, and infuriating to the millions who saw the heavily armed agents’ 10-hour search vividly spotlighting our uneven application of justice.

The raid was also incredibly stupid. Among other things, the furor completely overshadowed passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats are hawking as President Joe Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment.

Combined with photos of the Biden family – complete with compromised son Hunter Biden — jetting off  for a lavish vacation at a mansion owned by a rich Democrat donor, the White House political messaging machine appears, as usual, clueless.

If Biden couldn’t stick around to sign his big bill, how important could it be?

On the other hand, diverting attention from the Inflation Act could prove a blessing for Democrats, and for President Biden. The bill is riddled with pitfalls – at least five — for the president’s party, giving Republicans much campaign fodder for the months ahead.