ROGER FITCH
ESQ THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026
Crimes at the heart of presidential
power ... Shakedowns, extortions, insider trading, cash for pardons, revenge
... And here comes Trump's enabler, Todd Blanche ... Breaking into the backdoor
of the Treasury in broad daylight ... Roger Fitch with his
Letter from Washington
“The
founders knew the untamed frontier abounded with bullies. They also knew about
felons and cheats … they never imagined a devious, half-literate
bully/lawbreaker/cheat could be elected president – not just once, but a second
time … following a criminal conviction.” – The Gazette (Cedar
Rapids, Iowa)
“Donald Trump” conjures many things:
childhood bully; arrested development; ignorant fool; crass real estate
developer; known money-launderer; vain sociopath; malignant narcissist; sadistic thug; world’s greatest danger.
He’s the most prolific criminal in
American political history. In 18 months, he’s violated countless rules/
regulations, laws and constitutional provisions.
He’s committed/attempted to commit
hundreds of crimes, most with impunity due to the slow machinery of the law and
the connivance of a devious chief justice and partisan court majority (now,
incredibly, asked to overturn a civil $83m defamation
judgment against him).
Even so, as Paul Krugman observes:
“His
inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by
demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing
them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting
stupid wars.”
“Like a dog marking every tree on the
block, Trump is all in on a megalomaniacal project to seed the country with
permanent reminders of his squalid rule. We continue to battle back against his
list of grotesque vanity projects to disfigure Washington…” – Harry Litman
Trump’s corruption is spectacular:
he’s stuffed the public service with predatory individuals whose conflicts of interest are helpful to
themselves and the Trumps.
It’s not just the $800m shakedown of donors, the highly-improper foreign investments of his family, or previously-reported media extortions ($86 million, so far); there’s also Trump’s own crypto-scheme, his pump and dump hustle for his worthless “meme coins“, where Trump gets rich while followers lose billions.
There have been stock trades coordinated
with announcements of tariffs later ruled illegal, insider trading timed to Iran cease-fires, oil
price variations, or government [no-bid] contract awards (e.g, Trump’s purchase of Axon (Taser) shares just before the big ICE
contract tailored to Axon).
Best of all for the monumentally
greedy Trump, there are pardons to sell, without penal consequences in light of
the supreme court’s scandalous immunity grant in Trump v US (2024).
In dealing with regulatory agencies,
now under exclusive Trump control after the supreme court’s end-of-term Slaughter case (more here),
corrupt companies are now overtly offering bribes.
It’s all apiece with pardons (now
including unheard-of “corporate pardons“) that Trump has issued to dozens of unrepentant criminals, wiping out billions in
financial penalties (more here), some of which were payable to victims of
corporate wrongdoing.
One corrupt pardon cost $21.7 million in court-ordered restitution. Trump couldn’t
resist helping a casino owner with mob connections; the few million the
pardoned man and his wife contributed to Trump’s causes were a sound investment.
Most sensationally, Trump pardoned
the founders of the cryptocurrency
exchange BitMEX, after they pleaded guilty to money-laundering
charges, hours before the company (which also pleaded guilty and was
“pardoned”), was due to pay a $100 million fine into the US Crime
Victims Fund.
The compensation vanished along with
the guilt.
≈ ≈ ≈
His never-ending quest for revenge and personal enrichment aside, Donald Trump seems determined to
dismantle American democracy and destroy everything in
the US worth saving, e.g, science and scientific data, public health, work safety, food support, American history, the environment, emergency services and energy grants (both denied to Democrat states), medical care, public education (also Harvard),
independent journalism, refugee asylum (only white South Africans) and progressive law enforcement.
Trump is enabled by a
congressional Republican Party described as “a collection of arsonists
targeting every part of civil society, liberalism and democracy”, and they’ve
been helping Trump, e.g, proposing a watering down of corporate governance,
effectively destroying evidence through eliminating the shell company database that’s so useful in attacking kleptocracy.
At the same time, Trump is preserving
or reinstating everything that is harmful and destructive, primarily through
pay-to-play ploys, e.g, inhumane and mercenary immigration detention, turbocharged extractive industries, despoliation
of national estate and endangered species; gutting of consumer protection; the
deregulation of industrial pollution and, unbelievably, the abrupt loosening of
industry-accepted standards of consumer service and product efficiency.
It’s all consistent with backhanders
to the Gangster-in-Chief, his worthless family and his bottom-circling friends.
There seems to be nothing he hasn’t monetised.
≈ ≈ ≈
If Donald Trump is evil, he’s
found an exceptionally evil lawyer to help him, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Hearings on the confirmation of
someone who would surely be the worst attorney general in American history have
now been held. He carries heavy baggage, including this 73-page ethics complaint filed in New York State by 101 former federal judges. His
confirmation appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee clarified that
his first loyalty is to the president and not to justice.
It was a bad time to seek Senate
confirmation, after the IRS debacle in which Donald Trump thought he had
found a way to break into Treasury itself by a back door: the government’s
“judgment fund” set up to satisfy settlements of genuine disputes to which the
US government is a party.
Trump’s aim was to improperly
tap (and not for the first time) a fund set aside for genuine settlements by DoJ.
This clearly excluded the “slush fund” for January 6 rioters who were not even parties, and in the case
of Trump v IRS, the sham suit did not involve adverse party litigation.
Last of all was Trump’s effort to
gain an IRS get-out-of-audit card, an agreement which is foreclosed by a
specific statute forbidding
such agreements, more here.
The fact that the judgment fund is
not available to settle matters not in dispute; that the actions in question
have been barred by statutes of limitations, as well as specific statutes
against presidents interfering in IRS audits; the fact that leaking tax
information is limited to statutory damages of $1000 per person per leak, and
that in any event, court decisions establish that there is no IRS
responsibility for contractor actions; nay, the fact that it is specifically
unlawful to pay insurgents; none of this is being talked about,
Meanwhile, in an important district
court decision, DC Judge Kathleen M. Williams specifically found the
IRS “settlement” improper and sanctioned the lawyers involved, including Acting AG Blanche; the entire January 6
“slush fund” was nullified.
Harry Litman and
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky have more.
Even so, the servile Republicans on
the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted to advance Blanche’s AG nomination ignored Judge Williams’ decision,
apparently unconcerned by the still-subsisting and stunningly corrupt
sweetheart deal (see settlement agreement here) Blanche concocted with the IRS.
The agreement could save Donald
Trump $100 million in back taxes and penalties.
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