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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — December 21, 2022

By December 21, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Donald Trump’s Tax Returns To Be Released To The Public As Ways And Means Committee Reveals The IRS Failed To Complete A Mandated Audit For His First Two Years In Office 

  • Axios: House Committee Will Release Years Of Trump’s Tax Returns:  The Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee voted Tuesday to publicly release six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns. Why it matters: The returns will give new details on the former president’s personal finances that he for years tried to block — and come as he seeks another White House bid and is entangled in a number of separate investigations.
  • New York Times: I.R.S. Didn’t Audit Trump for 2 Years in Office, House Committee Says: The Internal Revenue Service failed to audit former President Donald J. Trump during his first two years in office despite a program that makes the auditing of sitting presidents mandatory, a House committee revealed on Tuesday after an extraordinary vote to make public six years of his tax returns. Mr. Trump filed returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the I.R.S. began auditing those filings only in 2019 — the first on the same day in April the Ways and Means Committee requested access to his taxes and any associated audits, a report by the panel said. The I.R.S. has yet to complete those audits, it said, and the agency started auditing his filings covering his income while president only after he left office. The revelation could transform the political context of the committee’s nearly four-year fight to obtain information about Mr. Trump’s taxes and any related audits. Its chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, had said the panel needed the data to assess the I.R.S.’s mandatory presidential audit program, but Mr. Trump’s lawyers and Republicans called that a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition.
  • Wall Street Journal: Donald and Melania Trump Reported Negative Income In Four Years From 2015 Through 2020: Donald and Melania Trump reported negative adjusted gross income in four of the six years from 2015 through 2020, with their AGI totaling negative $53.2 million during that period, according to tax data released Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee. The Trumps paid some form of taxes every year, but paid $750 or less in income taxes in three of the six years. A full set of tax documents is expected to become public in subsequent days. Over the six years, their total federal tax liability was $4.4 million. That figure includes self-employment taxes and household employment taxes, which are more like payroll taxes than income taxes. Using a narrower “net tax” number included in the documents, the Trumps’ tax liability totaled $1.8 million over the six years. Net tax is calculated after applying tax credits. It excludes self-employment taxes, household employment taxes and certain other taxes. During the years released, 2018 was the anomaly, when the Trumps reported $24.3 million in adjusted gross income, a figure that put them in the top 0.01% of households. The only other year where they reported positive income was 2019, when they made $4.4 million.

Trump’s Former White House Ethics Lawyer Reportedly Told Cassidy Hutchinson To Give Misleading Testimony To The January 6 Committee 

  • CNN: Trump’s Former White House Ethics Lawyer Told Cassidy Hutchinson To Give Misleading Testimony To January 6 Committee, Sources Say:  The January 6 committee made a startling allegation on Monday, claiming it had evidence that a Trump-backed attorney urged a key witness to mislead the committee about details they recalled. Though the committee declined to identify the people, CNN has learned that Stefan Passantino, the top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, is the lawyer who allegedly advised his then-client, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, to tell the committee that she did not recall details that she did, sources familiar with the committee’s work tell CNN. Trump’s Save America political action committee funded Passantino and his law firm Elections LLC, including paying for his representation of Hutchinson, other sources tell CNN. The committee report notes the lawyer did not tell his client who was paying for the legal services. Over the summer, Hutchinson emerged as a blockbuster witness for the committee, providing key insight into Trump’s state of mind and his actions leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Before her public testimony, Hutchinson dropped Passantino and got a new lawyer.
  • New York Times: Lawyer for Key Jan. 6 Witness Seeks to Rebut Panel’s Claim of Interference: A former lawyer for a White House aide who became a key witness for the House Jan. 6 committee took a leave of absence from his law firm on Tuesday and defended himself against what he said were false insinuations by the panel that he had interfered with his client’s testimony. The lawyer, Stefan Passantino, represented Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to the White House chief of staff at the end of the Trump administration, in the early stages of the committee’s investigation. He made the comments in a statement first reported by CNN, a day after the committee released an executive summary of its findings.

Georgia Grand Jury Investigating Trump Begins Drafting Its Final Report 

  • CNN: Georgia Grand Jury Investigating Trump Election Interference Is Winding Down And Has Begun Writing Final Report: A special grand jury investigating efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia is winding down its work, according to sources familiar with the matter. The Atlanta-area special grand jury has largely finished hearing witness testimony and has already begun writing its final report, the sources said, an indication that prosecutors will soon be deciding whether to seek criminal charges and against whom. In Georgia, special grand juries are not authorized to issue indictments. The final report serves as a mechanism for the panel to recommend whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should pursue indictments in her election interference investigation. Willis could then go to a regularly empaneled grand jury to seek indictments. “It’s a significant step, it’s the culmination of work by prosecutors and the special grand jury. But it shouldn’t be taken as any kind of guarantee of a conviction down the road,” said Michael J. Moore, former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. “It’s just the beginning.”

In The States 

NEVADA:  Nye County Appoints Election Denying MAGA Extremist Michelle Fiore As Justice Of The Peace 

  • Nevada Independent: Nye County Commissioners Appoint Michele Fiore As Pahrump Justice Of The Peace: Nye County commissioners have appointed former assemblywoman and Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore to serve as a Pahrump justice of the peace. The unanimous decision came after commissioners spent about four hours interviewing candidates, including asking how they felt about allowing guns in courtrooms. In making the motion to approve Fiore, a commissioner cited the former lawmaker’s ambition, knowledge and recommendation from former President Donald Trump, as well as Fiore’s plans to build in Nye County. “I just want to thank you so much from the bottom of my heart, and promise you that I will not disappoint you,” Fiore said after the decision. Fiore was a Republican lawmaker in the Assembly before serving a term on the Las Vegas City Council and losing a bid to be state treasurer last month. A gun enthusiast, Fiore appeared in a campaign commercial shooting beer bottles with the labels “vaccine mandate” and “CRT” (critical race theory). A public commenter who called in after the decision said Fiore’s appointment would put Pahrump on the map and be national news. “I think the left is gonna go berserk,” said the commenter, who identified herself as Amy Nelson.

PENNSYLVANIA: Allegheny County’s Midterm Certification Delay Has Alarming Implications For 2024 

  • Vox: A Pennsylvania County Delayed Certifying The Midterms. That Has Scary Implications For 2024:  More than a month after the midterm elections, Pennsylvania still hasn’t certified its results of the 2022 election. Recount requests are holding up a process that has been playing out in sometimes dramatic fashion at the county level — producing at least one scene that should set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about election deniers refining their strategy ahead of 2024. The state’s counties were supposed to certify their results by November 29 under Pennsylvania law, but nine of them missed the deadline, including Allegheny County, which encompasses Pittsburgh. As of Monday afternoon, all but one county ended up certifying the results, but not without a fight. The state can only certify when all the counties have done so. An impeding factor is the “significant increase in the number of unsupported recount petitions,” said Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State. A total of 172 precincts across the state were subject to recount petitions this year, seemingly as part of a broader effort by right-wing groups like Audit the Vote PA to undermine confidence in the results.

What Experts Are Saying

Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): “The four House members the Jan. 6 Committee referred for ethics investigation because they ignored requests and subpoenas are likely to be leaders in retaliatory counter-investigations. This is a good reminder that they do not remotely have clean hands.” Tweet

Barbara McQuade, former US attorney and professor at the University of Michigan Law School: “The Justice Department ‘will make its own independent assessments of the evidence, that which the committee has developed as well as evidence DOJ develops on its own.’ ‘I think DOJ would seriously consider charges for conspiracy to obstruct an official and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on evidence in the public domain,’ she said. ‘Inciting insurrection strikes me as less likely because of potential First Amendment defenses.’” Grid News 

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in Trump’s first impeachment: “Prosecutors make decisions based upon the evidence and the law…While this [criminal referrals] is not binding, it’s certainly not symbolic because the Jan. 6 committee has imposed an enormous amount of evidence on the prosecution.” Grid News 

Ryan Goodman, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law: “On Monday, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol released an executive summary of its final report, which focuses primarily on former President Donald Trump’s alleged criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The committee, however, also presented new evidence of criminal efforts to interfere with its investigation – on the part of some witnesses, their attorneys, and others associated with the former president. It is the kind of evidence that may have far-reaching implications including bolstering Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6th and Mar-a-Lago investigations.” Just Security: How Jan. 6th Committee’s Revelations of Interference in Their Investigation Can Enable Special Counsel Smith 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “A major theme that emerged in the committee’s work was obstruction of justice. One of the big, marquee charges the committee referred Trump on is an obstruction count, one aimed at a specific proceeding: the certification of the vote. The obstruction theme that pervades the committee’s work is different from that specific charge. It is the type of obstruction that Trump’s supporters used to say, dismissively, is merely a process crime. It is the type of obstruction that involves concealing evidence during an in-progress investigation. That can happen in a lot of different ways, and federal prosecutors see all of them: witnesses become “unavailable” to testify, or they have tragically bad memories when called to the witness stand. Some witnesses lie; others refuse to disclose or hide evidence. Different kinds of obstruction seem to crop up with regularity as part of the former president’s chronic efforts to escape responsibility for his actions. He seems to threaten or cajole witnesses, or have others do it for him, regularly.” Civil Discourse: Unfit for Any Office

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Associated Press: GOP’s usual embrace of Trump muted after criminal referral

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: EXPLAINER: How Trump ignored advisers, spread election lies

CBS: Trump aide testified he saw Trump “tearing” documents; Meadows also once told him, “Don’t come into the room”

NBC: Government funding bill gives DOJ extra money for Jan. 6 prosecutions

Politico: What Comes Next After the Jan. 6 Report?

Punchbowl News: Jan. 6 cooperating with DOJ special counsel

Reuters: The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines

Opinion

New York Times (Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn): A Plea to Liberals on the Supreme Court: Dissent With Democracy in Mind