What family corruption in the White House really looks like

[temporal1]

JH:
.. I hope you encourage everyone to vote against Biden as part of your anti-war stance.

There might be a CO or two on forum after all.

[Bootstrap]

It is MOST DEFINITELY a crime if any of it happens while you are holding any kind of public office at all with the Federal government, formal or informal.

Here is the US Office of Government Ethics summary of the law in this area: https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/Resourc ... f+Interest

The basic criminal conflict of interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208, prohibits Government employees from participating personally and substantially in official matters where they have a financial interest. In addition to their own interests, those of their spouse, minor child, general partner, and certain other persons and organizations are attributed to them. Assets and other interests, such as employment interests, may also present potential conflicts under other criminal and civil statutes, as well as the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch. To assist ethics officials in preventing conflicts of interest, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has developed a series of guides on identifying potential conflicts of interest that can arise from various types of employment interests, investment interests, and liabilities.

The law is long and very extensive in this area.

Well yes, but then it's not generally called influence peddling. That term usually applies to people who are not in public office.

[Bootstrap]

If Kushner were guilty of taking bribes, evading paying taxes, entertaining hookers, using sex club memberships as tax write offs, you can be sure the IRS would've sent in an army of armed IRS agents, kicking down doors, arresting Jared and Ivanka.

I doubt it.

Donald Trump was the President of the United States of America and he used his office to try to overturn a presidential election, encouraging people to attack the Capital to prevent votes from being counted. By the end of the Trump Administration, civil war and insurrection were things people were regularly talking about as real possibilities.

That's as grave an offense as any. Much more serious than the things the Trump children or Hunter Biden were doing. Corruption exists, and it's a real problem, but using your office to try to overturn an election is the kind of thing none of us have seen in our lifetime.

And the IRS generally doesn't have much of a chance against this kind of thing. Congress should be funding the IRS teams that take on ultrawealthy elites who don't pay their taxes and know they can get away with it. But they are campaigning against the IRS instead, which is what their ultrawealthy lobbyists want them to do.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ultr ... lth-audits

The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.

The wealth team embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012, eventually determining that he owed about $1.2 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

How did a case that consumed so many years of effort, with a team of its finest experts working on a signature mission, produce such a piddling result for the IRS? The Schaeffler case offers a rare window into just how challenging it is to take on the ultrawealthy. For starters, they can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.

Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team. “We are nowhere near a circumstance where the IRS could launch the types of audits we need to tackle sophisticated taxpayers in a complicated world,” said Steven Rosenthal, who used to represent wealthy taxpayers and is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

[Josh]

It’s utterly absurd to claim the IRS is “outgunned”. Their budget is $14 billion; the Department of the Treasury’s budget is $3.4 trillion. They have the resources to prosecute anyone they want to.

We do have courts that prevent unjust prosecution, though, and they often agree with taxpayers and don’t allow the IRS to just do whatever it wants.

[temporal1]

Color me shocked that politicians and their families make money off of their positions of power.

Trump is unusual in having less money after leaving office than he had when he entered it.

(i believe) the U.S. was set up based on the concept of selfless servanthood, i.e., “PUBLIC SERVANTS,” doing PUBLIC SERVICE.
It wasn’t intended to be for personal profit. There was no intent to create profitable lifelong careers, the thinking was about men sacrificing (being uncomfortable) part of their regular life for the good of the people. Naturally, one would serve, then return to their more desirable “real lives.”

The founders knew history and scriptures, they weren’t naive about selfish human nature.
They did their best, knowing they were working against the odds, with no guarantees of success, short term or long term.
They were experimenting, and hoping.

Possibly one oversight was not setting term limits for Congress.
This opened doors for creation of what is now known as CAREER POLITICIANS, not selfless public servants.

The concept of selfless servitude today is scoffed at, not on the mainstream radar. PRIDE has replaced selflessness.

The fruits of pride and idol worship are evident everywhere.

Jesus was the ultimate servant, i believe the concepts of public servants and public service in the U.S. are founded in this very Truth.
Why else, or how else, would a country be based on principles of servitude?! Without Jesus, this makes no sense in human reasoning.

Not a theocracy, but strongly influenced by Christianity. (i can’t) get around the idea of PUBLIC SERVANTS without believing Jesus was/is at the core of the thinking. MARK 9:35 https://biblehub.com/mark/9-35.htm

God uses all for His purposes.

It’s fair to ask questions of the elected and how their wealth was acquired in office. Not just presidents.
If they hadn’t gained in office, would they have continued to “serve?” .. public office should not be appealing to the ambitious.
It should be a time of sacrifice “for the good of all.”

[Grace]

And the IRS generally doesn't have much of a chance against this kind of thing. Congress should be funding the IRS teams that take on ultrawealthy elites who don't pay their taxes and know they can get away with it. But they are campaigning against the IRS instead, which is what their ultrawealthy lobbyists want them to do.

Are you talking about the Biden Family? We know the ultrawealthy Hunter didn’t pay his for 2014 and 2015. And whether the rest of the Biden family paid “their fair share” of taxes on the 50 million they received from foreign nationals, remains to be seen.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/go ... ing-scheme

[Bootstrap]

And the IRS generally doesn't have much of a chance against this kind of thing. Congress should be funding the IRS teams that take on ultrawealthy elites who don't pay their taxes and know they can get away with it. But they are campaigning against the IRS instead, which is what their ultrawealthy lobbyists want them to do.

Are you talking about the Biden Family? We know the ultrawealthy Hunter didn’t pay his for 2014 and 2015. And whether the rest of the Biden family paid “their fair share” of taxes on the 50 million they received from foreign nationals, remains to be seen.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/go ... ing-scheme

Sure. We know that Hunter Biden, like the Trump corporation and like Donald Trump himself, cheated on his taxes. We know that it almost always takes a VERY long time for the IRS to do anything that involves someone like the Trumps or the Bidens or anyone ultrawealthy.

"Remains to be seen" ... under a system of "innocent until proven guilty", is that the best way to say "we don't know one way or another"? Do you really think you and I are ever going to know who has cheated on their taxes and who has not? Mostly, this kind of thing comes out only for a very few very public figures.

[Bootstrap]

Elephant in the room.

In American politics, "corrupt" often means "a political enemy", someone that one of the political tribes has agreed to hate on. Often, calling the other side corrupt and hammering on them can be a way to hide your own corruption. That can happen on either side. And we can often feel smart just by believing the people we hate on are corrupt.

But wisdom, I think, means waiting for the evidence, or even just letting the people responsible handle these things. We are not investigators or courts or jurors. We do not have the inside scoop. Our cynicism and readiness to believe in the guilt of others is not any kind of evidence of anything.

I think there is rather good public evidence of corruption for both Hunter Biden and the Trumps. I think that's good enough that I would like to see it go to investigations and to court. But that's not up to me. I am not playing on their teams. I am not on the jury.

[barnhart]

I would feel vaguely positive if both Biden and Trump were somehow disqualified before the election.

[Josh]

I would feel vaguely positive if both Biden and Trump were somehow disqualified before the election.

It would be an improvement. Up next would be a large fraction of Congress. We could start with every Congressman who entered Congress of modest means yet is now a millionaire.