A truly beautiful message:
It makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2022
Nobody listened
I confess that the crypto/bitcoin mess is a little bit mystifying to me. I found this from the Financial Times to be enlightening:
“Cryptocurrency is a giant scam, although a complicated scam . . . ” So begins Stephen Diehl’s diatribe against the crypto industry. When he published it in June, Bitcoin and other crypto assets were trembling. Since then, the collapse of FTX, the second-largest crypto exchange, has created a potentially existential crisis. Billions of dollars of customer assets seem to have been incinerated, along with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s status as an altruistic visionary. Is crypto all just a mirage?
Like Bankman-Fried, Diehl is a thirtysomething American with a nerdy manner and unbrushed hair. But while Bankman-Fried urged US lawmakers to carve favourable new regulations for crypto, Diehl pulled the other end of the rope. He lobbied for crypto to be regulated like other assets. In June he co-ordinated a letter of 1,500 technologists to senior members of the US Congress, urging them to look past “the hype and bluster of the crypto industry” and understand its “inherent flaws”.
Diehl has the grasp of programming and economics to question crypto from first principles. He has tried to sell blockchain technology — the distributed databases on which crypto is built — and believes that he could have ridden the crypto wave: “Anybody who looks like a nerd like me can probably go to the Valley and raise $50mn from some very credulous [venture capitalists] to pump a token and make a life-changing amount of money.” Instead he stood on the sidelines, blogging about crypto’s failings. That won him a following — but also harassment, including death threats. “The past three years have been hell,” he says, naturally shy. “It’s not easy being a crypto sceptic.”
Diehl’s book, Popping the Crypto Bubble, traces Bitcoin’s emergence during the global financial crisis to the post-2016 crypto gold rush, which he refers to as the “Grifter Era”. He argues that crypto is slow (it relies on broadcasting transactions across decentralised networks) and unreliable (individuals are responsible for securing their assets; when they lose passwords or die, there is much less recourse than with, say, a bank). It cannot be both a great investment, which goes up and up, and a viable currency, which offers stable value. He argues that crypto assets’ price is based largely on there being an even greater fool who believes the hype.
“After 14 years, it is still a solution in search of a problem. It’s not building a new financial system. It’s not building a new internet. It’s not an asset uncorrelated with the market. It’s not a hedge against inflation. It is a vehicle for pure, naked speculation detached from anything in the economy. It’s a casino that’s wrapped in all of these lies. When you tear back those lies, what’s left looks like a net negative for the world.” You may not be interested in crypto, but you should be. “It reveals a lot of our dark tendencies,” Diehl says. “And it’s a mirror for a lot of the political struggle in society.”
Diehl, 34, grew up in Massachusetts. He studied physics, and was an early employee at Quantopian, a now-defunct hedge fund that crowdsourced investment algorithms. He later moved to the UK with Adjoint, a software company applying blockchain technology. High street banks wondered if such distributed databases could, for example, consolidate the steps to approve a mortgage. “This is an interesting idea. Except in practice it doesn’t work very well. I worked on a few of those projects, and in every single circumstance, there’s a much simpler solution, using software that’s been around 30 years.”
Blockchain could connect actors who don’t trust each other. But in a world where banks do trust each other, “a so-called trustless network is redundant . . . If you have three high street banks and they all have data that they want to share with each other, having three databases that are automatically kept in sync is a much more complex architecture than simply having one database that they all share. “I won’t say we have a 100 per cent answer on [whether blockchain is useful]. But the answer seems to be not really.”
Last week Australia’s stock exchange abandoned an attempt to transfer its clearing house system to a blockchain-based platform — writing off A$250mn ($168mn) and seven years of work. In 2019 and 2020, when Diehl started blogging, bitcoin rose sevenfold. Crypto fans mocked non-believers with initials such as “hfsp”: have fun staying poor.
Did Diehl not fear missing out? “I don’t have a high-risk tolerance.” (He failed to outperform an index fund while trading his own money.) His reservations were also ethical. “The price floor for sterling is that people have to acquire sterling to pay their taxes. The price floor for crypto, if there is one, is dark money flows, money-laundering and crime.” Crypto exchanges have been hacked and gone bust before.
How serious is FTX’s collapse? “It’s the equivalent of a JPMorgan or a Citi collapsing in 48 hours. Plus they were the biggest player pushing the crypto industry’s regulatory agenda.” If Diehl is right, should all crypto assets soon go to zero? He is wary of predicting. “I think once the capacity for parabolic upsides goes away, institutional money is going to dry up . . . I fully suspect there’ll be a lot of retail interest for some time because the memes and the narratives appeal to a certain type of investor — someone who’s young, male, economically disenfranchised and who has a high risk tolerance. There’s a lot of those people. “[Crypto is the] commoditisation of populist anger and gambling and crime.”
Crypto fans’ loss of faith in the financial system is, in some ways, odd. Even in the 2008 crash, bank deposits were insured. Stocks rose for much of the past decade. “In my most empathetic reading of crypto investors, look at this country — how many young people feel that they have a chance of getting on the housing ladder? A lot of them feel that they need to invest in higher-risk assets because they need higher returns.” How much sympathy does he have? “I don’t want to see so many people getting hurt. My generation has been hit by the financial crisis, by Covid, we’re going to have the climate crisis. These people don’t need this extra suffering in their life.”
One response to FTX’s bankruptcy is that it was a centralised platform, and based offshore. A better form of (decentralised or regulated) crypto could replace it. “If you accept the thesis that the assets are a ‘greater fool’ scheme, it doesn’t matter where you’re trading it.” What if crypto’s crisis is like the dotcom bubble? Pets.com went bust, but Google and Facebook soon surged. But unlike FTX, Pets.com “would show up at your door with dog food, they were trying to do a real thing,” says Diehl.
One argument, put forward by venture capital firm a16z, is that crypto could be used to pay creators online, breaking the grip of Facebook and Google. Does that stack up? “No, because the end consumers of these products want dollars and pounds.” What if we live more of our lives online, paying for digital goods in the metaverse? “Can I not pull out my phone and pay you pounds in 15 seconds? Money’s already digital.” He argues bitcoin, in particular, is too slow to scale: it processes about seven transactions a second — “roughly enough to run a small Tesco’s, but not a national economy.” (Diehl hasn’t “fully formed an opinion” on the digital currencies that central banks plan to issue.)
Crypto was meant to democratise finance. Instead, because crypto assets are unregulated and “deeply manipulated”, hedge funds and others have managed to pump and dump. “This looks like a giant wealth transfer from a lot of really unsophisticated retail investors to a lot of sophisticated investors.” Among those whom Diehl criticises is Elon Musk, who has fanned the meme coin Dogecoin, and whose car company Tesla bought bitcoin (before selling most of it). “Elon is a clown. I think it’s a joke to him. He’s just an enabler for it. I’m not sure he even believes in it.”
Politicians have been wary of blocking crypto “innovation”. Regulators have been overwhelmed. Diehl likens the bubble in ICOs — initial coin offerings, where crypto entrepreneurs raised money for projects that mostly disappeared — to a cyber attack on the regulatory system. “Let’s create 10,000 securities violations, and the [Securities and Exchange] Commission simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to go after 1 per cent of those.” One answer is “to go after the exchanges”, the biggest players.
But so far the US response has been “incoherent”. The SEC’s chair Gary Gensler has suggested most crypto tokens are unregistered securities, “but it seems like they’re unwilling to actually prosecute that.” Sherrod Brown, chair of the Senate banking committee, called FTX’s collapse “a loud warning bell”. But many people in Congress are happy to let crypto “burn itself out like a forest fire”, says Diehl. He wants crypto to be curtailed instead, as a blow against the post-truth world. “The average person needs to be able to tell you as a matter of common knowledge why investing in assets that have no intrinsic value is a bad idea.”
That seems like common sense to me. But then I sound like an old fogey most of the time. Better coming from someone like him.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Mary Peltola won a very decisive victory over the Queen of the Arctic. And the queen is very unhappy about it:
Will this be the last we’ve seen of her? Lord I hope so.
Don’t it?
A timorous Thanksgiving
This battered republic has survived yet another circuit of Sol. That, despite its best efforts to self-destruct through bad faith, bad policy, and unreasoning fear.
Heather Cox Richardson acknowledges the seven mass shootings in so many days and the over five dozen dead and wounded in what feels like a cold civil war. Indeed, this Thanksgiving holiday grew out of the hostilities that triggered war between the states. That fact gets lost in the gauzy story of Pilgrims and Wampanoags sharing a harvest celebration in 1621:
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
The royalist strain is as persistent in American culture and politics as the paranoid style. Loyalists made up about 20 percent of the population during the Revolution. That figure reflects a similar proportion of those sentiments extant today.
For more than two and a half centuries, these United States have struggled and shed blood to live up to the Declaration and to our nation’s mission statement. The Civil War and the years since make plain that even from the beginning of the republic many of its people signed onto that mission in bad faith. For in their hearts they believed, as Richardson writes, that “some men were better than others” and “that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it.”
“Whenever somebody says it’s time to move on, let’s heal and move on, that’s always a mistake.” — historian Steven Ross
To secure those “blessings” to themselves, many of our countrymen work even now to subvert the Constitution — under cover of law, if possible, in spite of the law if they can get away with it, and by force of arms if all else fails. All while waving the Stars and Stripes and flags of insurrection side by side without irony. Confederates were more forthright about their loyalties.
Richardson concludes:
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
Here we are, in that struggle still, facing neighbors who for all their red, white and bluster want none of it except as theater they can applaud, stand up, and walk away from.
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast is a chilling reminder that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That listening to solemn urging to move on and not look back is a grave mistake. Listen. “We don’t have a full understanding of what we’re living through now, if we don’t understand the parallel moments from the past,” historian Nancy Beck Young tells Maddow in the podcast’s final episode.
The U.S. moved on from Reconstruction. Freed black people in the South paid for it with 100 years of Jim Crow. The U.S. moved on from fascist sedition during the Second World War among armed citizens and members of Congress. We are reliving those moments 75 years later because America moved on.
Give thanks today that we made it this far. Once again, what happens next is in our hands.
If you want a list of MAGA leadership, that is it. Of course, it’s missing one very important name: Donald Trump. I suspect Tucker would not want the designation — he’s a “free thinker” but he and Steve Bannon are the two most important intellectual influences on the movement. Needless to say, Trump is Dear Leader. I have no doubt that he will turn up on video to thrill the crowd.
I’m reminded of this:
The NY Times with a scoop today:
The Justice Department is seeking to question former Vice President Mike Pence as a witness in connection with its criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Pence, according to people familiar with his thinking, is open to considering the request, recognizing that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation is different from the inquiry by the House Jan. 6 committee, whose overtures he has flatly rejected.
Complicating the situation is whether Mr. Trump would try to invoke executive privilege to stop him or limit his testimony, a step that he has taken with limited success so far with other former officials.
Mr. Pence was present for some of the critical moments in which Mr. Trump and his allies schemed to keep him in office and block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. An agreement for him to cooperate would be the latest remarkable twist in an investigation that is already fraught with legal and political consequences, involving a former president who is now a declared candidate to return to the White House — and whose potential rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination include Mr. Pence.
Thomas Windom, one of the lead investigators examining the efforts to overturn the election, reached out to Mr. Pence’s team in the weeks before Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed a special counsel on Friday to oversee the Jan. 6 investigation and a separate inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Garland has said that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, will not slow the investigation.
Officials at the Justice Department declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Pence also declined to comment.
The discussions about questioning Mr. Pence are said to be in their early stages. Mr. Pence has not been subpoenaed, and the process could take months, because Mr. Trump can seek to block, or slow, his testimony by trying to invoke executive privilege.
One would hope that any patriotic citizen, much less a man running for president, would not hesitate to cooperate with the Department of Justice. But Pence has kind of a funny history on all of this:
Yep, he said that. He went along all the way up to the line and it was only then that he backed off. He came very close to doing it and I suspect that if it hadn’t all fallen on his shoulders he would have happily gone along. He is not a hero.
Poor Kev. He’s got his hands full. And his answer is to appease the MAGAs.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) announced he would not vote for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for speaker next year, joining the small but mighty chorus of MAGA-aligned detractors in his caucus who are refusing to bend the knee – at least not before throwing a minor fit.
Norman told Politico Tuesday he is a “hard” no against the Minority Leader, shutting down previous reports that he might just vote present or not attend the speakership vote at all.
The South Carolina congressman is the fifth Republican in recent days to announce his opposition to McCarthy’s speakership bid, joining fellow conservative Freedom Caucus members Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Matt Rosendale (R-MT) and Bob Good (R-VA).
They’re setting McCarthy up for a fight for his political life, as the Republican leader will have to continue aggressively campaigning through the new year — when he will need to get 218 votes in House elections to secure his role as speaker. But new names keep getting added to the “no” list.
Norman said the main reason for his opposition is the way McCarthy is planning to address the national debt.
“Economic security is national security,” Norman said. “I was not happy with the answer Kevin gave me about balancing the budget. I don’t care who the speaker is. It could be Mickey Mouse, but if we have our way, we’re gonna have some firm economic mandates.”
“By the way, you will hear of many more who will take our position. …It’s not business as usual in Washington, D.C,” he continued, acknowledging that Republicans’ inability to take back the House by a healthier margin is a key factor in he and his colleagues’ detractions: “Do you think we would be having this discussion if we’ve had a 30 seat margin? No.”
With their new, slimmer-than-expected majority in the House following the midterms, every Republican vote counts and is important for McCarthy’s bid. It’s the reason he’s spent the past week testing out a variety of different methods to woo the far-right, MAGA loyalists in his caucus. A big one: punishing Democrats for their various, perceived offenses over the last four years.
Just a couple days ago, he vowed to remove Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from House committees under his leadership.
And while pretty much everyone is having a much-needed break over the Thanksgiving week, McCarthy is on the road pulling a political stunt in hopes of fending off more opposition to his speakership.
On Tuesday, he visited the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, touring the site with other House GOP members and Border Patrol. While he was there, he called for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign over his handling of the migrant crisis at the southern border or face an impeachment inquiry next year, according to Fox News. The move is a clear carrot for the more rabid members of his caucus who will soon head up the House Homeland Security Committee.
“I am calling on the secretary to resign. He cannot and must not remain in that position,” McCarthy said at a press conference in El Paso. “If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action and every failure to determine whether we can begin an impeachment inquiry. The American public deserves more, deserves better and expects more within their government. Enough is enough. We will do whatever it takes.”
(House Republicans on the homeland security panel have already made it clear that Mayorkas will be a major target of Republicans’ new-majority ire.)
And this all comes as McCarthy makes promises to key far-right members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose support will be crucial for his bid. Last week reports surfaced that McCarthy promised Greene he’d allow the House to tackle some of her favorite pet projects, like investigating current-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Justice Department over conspiracy theories that rioters arrested for their participation in the Jan. 6 attack have been mistreated, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Good luck Kevin. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that when you give these MAGA weirdos an inch they take a mile. You’re about to find out.
Here we are, yet again
Karen Tumulty Pumpkin Cake A few years back on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake and received a very nice note from journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it very much. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty Cake. It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good.
For cake
* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs
Icing
* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.
Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.
Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.
Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.
Icing:
Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.
Easy as pie (easier, actually.)
Gotta love it:
He’s very upset
Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day started at 10 a.m. in Manhattan civil court, where his family company is fighting the New York Attorney General’s $250 million lawsuit that accuses the company of widespread bank fraud. Justice Arthur F. Engoron, who had to repeatedly step in during the AG’s three-year investigation to force the Trumps to testify and turn over documents, has finally lost his patience.
The judge, clearly exasperated and wincing from the bench as he spoke, scolded the company for its delay tactics.
“You can’t keep making the same arguments after you’ve already lost,” Engoron told the company’s lawyers.
He set the civil trial for Oct. 2, 2023, which means that Trump’s namesake company might be stripped of its ability to do business in New York in the midst of his next presidential run.
The Mar-a-Lago mess
Then at 2 p.m., a panel of federal appellate judges in Atlanta indicated they are inclined to completely unravel Trump’s attempt to block the FBI, which is investigating the way he kept more than 100 classified records without permission at his oceanside Florida estate. At issue is whether it was appropriate for a MAGA-friendly federal judge—whom Trump himself appointed while he was president—to insert herself into the FBI’s investigation and take the unprecedented step of blocking special agents from reviewing the government records they’d seized.
Although questions still circulate over how Trump gamed the system to land District Judge Aileen Cannon, appellate judges on Tuesday squarely focused on the damaging precedent they could set by allowing her to keep the case—and continue making peculiar, one-sided rulings that limit a law enforcement investigation before there’s even an indictment.
“We would have to be concerned about the precedent we create that would allow any target of a federal investigation to go into a district court and have it entertain this… and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation,” one of the judges said on the call.
These appellate judges also seemed to lose their patience with the outlandish tactics now being employed regularly by Trump’s cadre of lawyers, who insert Fox News and Newsmax political rants into legal briefs and court appearances.
Halfway through the half-hour hearing, Appellate Judge “Britt” Cagle Grant interrupted Trump defense lawyer James Trusty to stop him from referring to the FBI’s Aug. 8 search as a “raid.”
“There’s not a situation in this country where a sitting president authorized the raid of a former president’s home—” he began, before being asked if the term “raid is proper.” He quickly apologized for using what he called a “loaded term,” only to use it again minutes later.
That appellate hearing ended abruptly, without judges breathing any life into Trump’s side.
“We really can’t predict how judges are going to rule based on who appointed them,” Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson noted. “Trump appointees in general are more concerned with a conservative agenda than they are with handing Trump a win… they’re very much aware this is about setting precedent in other criminal investigations.”
SCOTUS steps aside
Minutes later that afternoon, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s attempt to block Democrats on the House’s Ways and Means Committee from getting copies of his personal tax returns from 2013 to 2018. Supreme Court justices made the decision without even authoring an opinion.
Trump managed to be the only American president in recent history to refuse to make his taxes available for public scrutiny, raising widespread concerns about graft and corruption. This Supreme Court order opens the door for Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), who leads the Ways and Means Committee, to get them from the Internal Revenue Service under the guise of determining “the extent to which the IRS audits and enforces the federal tax laws against a president.”
The question now is whether Democrats in Congress will be able to actually get them before Republicans take control of the House in January—and what they’ll do with them.
“Look, you play with fire long enough, you’re gonna get burned, and he’s made a career out of dodging liability with a bevy of lawyers and accountants, but someday you gotta pay the piper, and I think all of those things are catching up to him,” said Jared Carter, a Vermont law school professor.
The Mogul’s ‘Me Too’
Immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump lawyers were on a phone call at 3 p.m. with a Manhattan federal judge trying to brace for a new lawsuit claiming that the real estate mogul raped a journalist at a city department store in the mid-1990s. These allegations first surfaced when advice columnist E. Jean Carroll wrote a memoir, which led to Trump trash-talking her from the White House. Trump’s comments led to a defamation lawsuit—and a recent Trump deposition under oath that still isn’t public.
But now that New York’s new adult survivor’s law will soon allow victims to sue their abusers, Trump will face the same kind of legal action that ruined Bill Cosby. This lawsuit isn’t expected to raise any new issues, but it will target Trump directly—and his wallet.
Given that Trump already testified behind closed doors, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, thinks it could go to trial as early as February—kneecapping Trump’s nascent 2024 presidential campaign.
Alina Habba, the same Trump defense lawyer who sparred with a state judge earlier in the day, surprised the court by revealing that she’s not even sure if she’ll continue to represent Trump on the Carroll case.
“I have not even been retained on that matter,” she said. “I do not know if I’m going to be retained on that matter.”
At that, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan revealed he—like so many other judges that day—had run out of patience, too.
“Your client has known this is coming for months, and he would be well advised to decide who’s representing him in it,” he admonished in a sharp tone.
Betrayed by the bookkeeper
Just when it seemed as if things couldn’t get any worse for Trump on Tuesday, the former president’s longtime trusted personal accountant plunged a knife into his back at 3:55 p.m.
Donald Bender, who stuck with Trump and the Trump Organization even as he worked at several different iterations of accounting firms, ended up testifying against the former president’s eponymous family company in Manhattan criminal court. That’s where the New York County District Attorney’s Office has the Trump Organization on trial for dodging taxes by allowing its full-time executives to avoid taxes in two different ways: paying themselves as “independent contractors” and getting untaxed corporate perks to minimize their on-the-books salaries.
Earlier in the trial, prosecutors established how the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, reduced his taxable salary by diverting it to a high-end corporate apartment, luxury cars for him and wife (who wasn’t even a real employee), and tuition for his grandkids at an expensive private school. Prosecutors laid out how Weisselberg’s son, Barry, also received these kinds of perks. And they showed how the company controller, Jeffrey S. McConney, was in on it.
Bender prepared taxes for the Weisselbergs and the Trumps—including company executives Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric. He was technically a witness for the Trump Organization, claiming incredulously that he had reviewed all the books but somehow had no idea executives were doing this for years. But prosecutors tore that down as the sunset’s orange glow began to fill the courtroom.
Susan Hoffinger, Manhattan DA’s chief of investigations, asked what he would have done had he known about the executive compensation scheme sooner. Unlike the Trump Organization employees who testified before him, this accountant wasn’t going down with the ship.
“I would’ve called Jeff McConney and said, ‘What’s going on?’” he testified.
“I would have probably been very concerned,” he said.
“We would have had serious conversations about continuing with the client,” he added.
The global accounting company where Bender maintains his practice, Mazars USA, did just that earlier this year, when it decided to ditch the Trump Organization—and disavow any of its financial statements.
Decisive steps will be taken in each of these cases in the coming weeks. The Manhattan jury will come back from its Thanksgiving holiday break and soon start deliberating over whether the Trump Organization broke the law and dodged taxes. The New York AG will start sharing evidence with the Trump Organization, potentially revealing to the Trumps whose testimony exposed the company’s financial mischief. And Carroll’s lawyers will push to initiate a trial.
On top of it all, these cases are playing out as Trump faces a new and very real threat of criminal indictment from the DOJ’s special counsel, Jack Smith, who was appointed last Friday by Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into Trump’s mishandling of classified materials, his attempts to obstruct that investigation, and the former president’s attempts to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election.
The words Trump lawyer Alina Habba uttered at the start of the day could be repeated by Trump’s legal team in every courtroom from here on out.
“My client shouldn’t be in this position. We shouldn’t be in this court—and yet we are.”
Oh, and then there’s the Fulton County DA’s Grand Jury which interviewed Lindsey graham this week about Trump strong arming state officials to steal the election for him.
I sure hope at least one of these cases proves out or Trump will be elevated to true God-like status.