A Trump dirty trick just came to

fruition and people are missing it

tl;dr: Humpty Dumpty left a stinkbomb behind on his way out the door and
it’s a BFD, though nobody appears to have noticed it yet.

Also, for the weak-kneed, let it be known that there is some speculation in
what follows.
On Tuesday, Pro Publica dropped a bomb regarding the taxes paid (or not)
by some of the very richest Americans. Three authors (Jesse Eisinger, Jeff
Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel) collectively produced three in-depth articles,
and Pro Publica contributed editorial, including non-trivial graphical
elements, all showcasing the manner in which the ultra-rich can legally get
away with paying far less — relatively! — than the common worker bee
toward funding our society. And Pro Publica has the hard numbers, going
back some fifteen years.

The list of names (incomplete and in no particular order) is quite something

Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Mike Bloomberg
Warren Buffett
George Soros
Bill Gates
Carl Icahn
Rupert Murdoch
Mark Zuckerberg

The Secret IRS Files: Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

The publication on Tuesday set off a storm of reporting. And for good
reason. It’s a huge story, complete with hard numbers, lots of easy to
understand policy explanation, and some anecdotes about the American
oligarchy.

Plenty for the Press to to grab hold of on a Tuesday afternoon, for sure. After
all, we all have an interest in understanding how they get away with it, and in
trying to grasp what these huge figures represent in terms of wealth locked
away from society. Look around yesterday’s news and you will find all these
angles covered.
Pro Publica is not, understandably, prepared to admit to how they came to
possess the files. They're also not saying when they received them.

But there was clearly a lot there. Tuesday's publication represents —

conservatively — many months of work.

Are you seeing it yet — the buried lede that isn't there?

Tuesday evening, Rachel Maddow was speaking about the recent revelation
that the DoJ — in the last days of Humpty Dumpty's so-called administration
— had secretly obtained the phone records of several reporters for The
Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times concerning stories they'd
written in 2017. We know that it happened because it was the DoJ which
revealed it to those news organisations. However, we don't know whether
there is an investigation into how that came about, and Maddow quite rightly
is calling them on it.

But then she took a rather undeserved swipe at the DoJ in regard to the Pro
Publica leak:

We're also watching closely, now, in terms of how the Justice Department
is going to go after reporters' sources. After this kerfuffle with the
Washington Post reporters, and the CNN reporters, and the New York
Times reporters. Just today, new threats from the Biden administration
that they have opened a massive leak investigation into the source
behind this big, bombshell story from Pro Publica, about the richest
Americans radically underpaying their taxes compared with regular
Americans.

Of course, unauthorized disclosure of private or stolen information from

the IRS is a big deal. But, so is using the power of the criminal law to try to
pry reporters' sources out of them.

Whoa, now. Threats? Threats that they're going after the reporters to find
the source of the leak?

Putting aside for a moment that honking big lede that’s been dangling
somewhere out of sight, let's see what the government had to say about
this.

White House Press briefing of June 8, 2021

Q On a separate issue — there was a report this morning about,

basically, IRS records showing that very wealthy Americans have evaded
paying income tax, almost altogether in certain circumstances. One, do
you have any reaction just to that as a factual matter? And, two, are you
concerned about that just from a leak standpoint?

MS. PSAKI: Well, let me take the second part first because I think that’s
important. Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government
information by a person with access is illegal, and we take this very
seriously.

The IRS commissioner said today that they are taking all appropriate
measures, including referring the matter to investigators. And Treasury
and the IRS are referring the matter to the Office of the Inspector General
— the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the FBI, and the
U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, all of whom have
independent authority to investigate.

So, obviously we take it very seriously. I’m not going to comment on

specific unauthorized disclosures of confidential government information.

I can tell you that, broadly speaking, we know that there is more to be
done to ensure that corporations, individuals who are at the highest
income are paying more of their fair share, hence it’s in the President’s
proposals, his budget, and part of how he’s proposing to pay for his
ideas.
Please forgive me if i missed any threats to go after Pro Publica. This was an
unusual take, among the few stories which mentioned in more than a passing
way the expected investigation into this leak.

And investigate, the government should do. Not, one hopes, by going after
the journalists, but by sweeping through Treasury and the Internal Revenue
Service to understand who was responsible for this. That much was
mentioned by most reports, but there was something deeper that I found
missing in all this reporting. And it’s a doozy.

Donald Fucking Trump had one of his minions put those records into
Pro Publica's hands because he’s a vengeful menace.

This is a big fucking deal.

This leak has his greasy fingerprints all over it. Which craven dumbass did he
convince to do it for him? And, did the dumbass who did it use someone else
as a go-between? How many people are involved?

Trump used his awesome power in ways that we always assumed he would,
including blackmailing some of the richest and most powerful people in the
United States. Or, if not outright blackmailing them, simply being a spiteful
prick. This is Donald Trump's demented revenge for being a life-long, failing
piece of shit, essentially.

This isn’t boo-hoo for the billionaires, btw.

I want to know who reached into those IRS files. Who did they
subsequently give them to? Who spoke with Trump about it? The
content of the Pro Publica bombshell is its own separate thing. (Do go read!
It’s fascinating reporting that every tax-payer ought to see and understand.)
But I want to know who was involved in this conspiracy. And, I want it to be
widely understood just how spitefully that spiteful prick really conducted
himself whilst in office.

So, yeah — bring on the fucking investigations!

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden made that explicit.

(Typically, the minority chair, Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), used this to try to scare
voters about Biden's attempts to make it harder for the very rich to hide their
wealth. Because everyone knows that the teeming masses of republican
voters have all got $millions hidden away offshore.)

Some US billionaires had years where they paid no taxes

Wyden also said that the IRS needs to investigate how the taxpayer data
was disclosed.

"There appears to be a massive, unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer

records. The source of this information is unclear," he said. "Given the
IRS's responsibility to protect taxpayers' data, it has a responsibility to
investigate the source of this disclosure."

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said at the hearing that he can't talk
about the ProPublica article but can confirm that there is an investigation
"with respect to the allegations that the source of the information in that
article came from the Internal Revenue Service."

Whatever happened at DoJ involving those phone records being accessed in

2020 must be investigated. But so must this IRS leak. Given that the former
occurred under a corrupt president and his odious attorney general, it's
unfair to assume that any "massive leak investigation" — which clearly must
occur — will likewise resort to breaking the law. Fretting that it might
necessarily involve some of the same wrongdoings of the last guy is about
as on point as Mike Crapo trying to use this to scare poor republicans into
giving a damn about protecting billionaires.
Donald Trump used the power of the presidency to see to it that some
of the people whom he most envy-hates were publicly taken down a
notch. Some of them did not do his bidding, and some of them didn’t, to
his liking, do enough. And, some of them, he’s just straight up jealous
of. That’s a pretty fucking big story.

I moan about people posting here about something and whining about how
“nobody is covering it!” But that’s not what this is. Rather, my hope is to
shine a bright light on the grim shadow looming over this story. I did take
some time to look around at various sources (that aren’t behind paywalls). If
i’ve missed any that have caught this angle, please do include a link in the
comments so that i can update.

stevemb points out in the comments a practical reason for this ratfuck: