Remember the decades of tax fraud? Yeah.
by digby
I’d honestly forgotten about this.
Can we all just appreciate for a moment that the older sister of the sitting President of the United States just retired so as to avoid an inquiry into a decades-long tax fraud scheme she participated in *with the President* (who is still in office) https://t.co/0BCKPw0ZNF— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) April 11, 2019
President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.
The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.
The author of that tweet added:
One of the hardest things to convey to future generations will be the fact that we once had a president who just had so many scandals—any one of which would have ended previous presidencies—that none of them actually stuck because they were so hard to keep track of.
This is a key observation. The tsunami of information is tough enough. But Trump has an overwhelming number of scandals and they serve to make the public and even many critics just throw up their hands.
He was impeached for using taxpayer money to bribe the Ukrainian president to sabotage the election for him. That’s very bad, to be sure. And the echoes of the 2016 election and the Russian interference that lend it the gravitas it has. But it’s the tip of he iceberg. The outright graft and public corruption, the nepotism, the cronyism, the history of tax fraud and money laundering as well as the long list of sexual assaults and other grotesque personal behavior are all now pretty much just secondary concerns.
I think many people believe that all this will come out in the wash in the election and we’ll look back on this as some sort of temporary tear in the matrix. The problem is that this tear has permanently weakened the matrix. We may not see another president with the unique combination of Trump’s personal flaws. But from now on, any corrupt authoritarian knows how he can manipulate the system to enhance his own power.
Unless Trump is held accountable in a much more meaningful way than this impeachment and a small loss in those electoral college states I’m afraid that we will not put this genie back in the bottle. We simply haven’t grasped the magnitude of the damage he’s done.
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