This news seems significant (WaPo):
Former president Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm informed his company last week that a decade’s worth of Trump’s financial statements “should no longer be relied upon” and suggested that any recipient of the documents be alerted, according to a copy of the letter filed in New York court filings.
In the letter, Mazars executive William J. Kelly voiced new concerns about the statements, which the firm helped Trump prepare and which have come under scrutiny recently by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). James has alleged in civil filings that Trump used the statements to inflate the value of his properties and misstated his personal worth in representations to lenders.
Kelly said Mazars reconsidered its work on the documents following questions raised by James’s office in a January filing.
“We have come to this conclusion based, in part, upon the filings made by the New York Attorney General on January 18, 2022, our own investigation, and information received from internal and external sources,” Kelly wrote in the Wednesday letter, addressed to Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten. “While we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies, based upon the totality of the circumstances, we believe our advice to you to no longer rely upon those financial statements is appropriate.”
I’m neither an accountant nor an attorney, but that sure sounds like something a firm would say if it doesn’t want to be implicated in a giant scandal that’s about to explode messily all over everything in its client’s radius. There are more details in the linked article, including mention of unresolved tax issues connected to an apartment occupied by the son of a Trump Org COO who shares a name with a popular squid appetizer.
The apartment in question is relevant to an ongoing tax fraud investigation, which is revealing that these fraudsters paid each other in property and loot to avoid taxation, which understandably made Mazars flinchy. The Trump Org responded to Mazars’ announcement with this delusional statement:
“While we are disappointed that Mazars has chosen to part ways, their February 9, 2022 letter confirms that after conducting a subsequent review of all prior statements of financial condition, Mazars’ work was performed in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles and that such statements of financial condition do not contain any material discrepancies. This confirmation effectively renders the investigations by the DA and AG moot.”
LOL! You wish, lumpy! I’ve got to think the revelation that 10 years of financial statements are unreliable might break some lending contract terms, perhaps even leading to a demand for immediate repayment. Time to milk the marks harder than ever.
Open thread!
Edmund Dantes
Man if only Mazars had some expertise or ways of figuring out accounting. Shame they are some just random joes with no ability to figure out accounting.
Baud
?
Glad James stayed on as AG.
MattF
I think it may be time to look harder at the assumption that ‘Trump’ and ‘Trump Org.’ are separate entities that have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.
Mike in NC
Lock him up!
dmsilev
Also in Legal Schadenfreude, Sarah Palin v. New York Times: Judge to dismiss former governor’s libel claim in rare case
redactor
I will get excited when someone actually goes to jail.
topclimber
@redactor: Somehow, the accountants never do.
Roger Moore
As far as I can tell, Mazars is trying to walk a tightrope here. On the one hand, they don’t want to get in legal trouble for signing off on transparently fraudulent audits. On the other hand, they don’t want to get in trouble for letting people trust those fraudulent audits. So they’re kinda, sorta saying the documents are a load of crap, but honest we had no way of knowing that when we signed them. I don’t think their sophistry will help them.
MattF
@Mike in NC: Speaking of which, the Fox party line is that whatever it was that Clinton did was much worse than anything that happened on 1/6.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Nope. They are screwed.
JustRuss
“There’s nothing wrong with our work, per se, but please don’t rely on it.” Nice work if you can get it, remind me to run that one by my boss.
RepubAnon
@MattF: I expect things will start popping soon. With luck, Trump will lose the protection of the corporate structure and be personally liable for its debts.
prostratedragon
@Roger Moore: Yeah. Consider Arthur Andersen, which I think Mazar is considering right now. This might be the beginning of a salvage operation for them.
Ohio Mom
@dmsilev: When I first heard Palin was taking the NYT to court, I thought, What a foolhardy thing to do — in other words, about what you’d expect from her.
She obviously had an attorney fit for her, to string her along.
RaflW
@Edmund Dantes: Seriously. They must be under intense pressure to have done this. At least from my view (finance degree, former Exec Dir of one nonprofit and Board Treasurer of another that had annual audits) this reads to me like Mazars has realized their due diligence was ineffective or somehow compromised. A global top 10 accounting firm doesn’t want to admit that, right?
debbie
@dmsilev:
Why did he not dismiss before sending the jury to deliberate? I’d be pretty ticked off if I’d been on the jury.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
“We are shocked—shocked!—to find that financial shenanigans are going on in here!”
Van Buren
I am convinced that Trump is not the only “billionaire” playing fast and loose with business accounting. Sure would be nice if the fats cats paid their fair share. NYS could do a lot with the money.
danielx
Response from downstairs –
@SiubhanDuinne:
One would think it unusual for a major accounting firm to fire a major well-heeled client, presuming Trump has restrained his tendency to stiff his creditors in Mazars’ case.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.*
*This phrase is the only reason – ever – to feel any gratitude to Our Lady of Stolichnaya.
RaflW
Politically speaking, if that NYT piece from the other day is to be believed and MConnell, Hogan, etc are looking to ‘move on’ from Trump, they should be sharpening knives and getting stabby.
We’ll see.
Ryan
Moreover, no one is going to be rushing in to take on that new work.
Another Scott
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@Roger Moore: Maybe they’re trying for “we did an accurate audit of the information the client gave us, but we now have reason to think the information itself was a complete work of fiction”
EDIT: Like nycsouthpaw said.
Raoul Paste
Rats: “ Abandon ship!”
Kirk Spencer
@Another Scott: So, “Please subpoena the documents on which we relied for the work we did.”? (Yes, I know that punctuation pattern is heresy. It’s clear, though, so pfft.)
Roger Moore
@debbie:
The explanation given for why he’d want to let the jury deliberate is that if they agree with him, it eliminates one possible argument on appeal. It still doesn’t make sense to me that he’d talk about it while the jury is still out.
danielx
@Roger Moore:
More like walking a razor. But as a Mazars executive, choosing between the wrath of Trump and the wrath of the IRS is no choice at all.
Nothing personal, Donnie, just business.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: A reply in that thread.
So, if I’m understanding this correctly, they were just putting their brand on some Statement without doing any work at all? And not realizing that that opens up the possibility of Very Bad Things Happening when working for TFG until 10 years later??
Real brainiacs, there. I guess that’s why they get paid the big bucks…
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
@MattF:
It’s also an “Eyes Over Here! Squirrel!” counter to the interesting recent un-redactions in the Mueller report. (No, it is not adequately summarized as “did not charge Roger Stone and Donald J. Trump Jr”, as Buzzfeed(???) and Sputnik did.)
Thread.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott: I’m interested in the downstream effects. People say most reputable lenders avoid Trump, but how many outstanding loans from less particular banks are predicated on those statements? What recourse do lenders have now that the borrower’s own accountant says the statements are crap?
MattF
Quite a mess. The rats are abandoning the ship only to get thrown under the bus. I expect Hillary Clinton (or maybe Chelsea) will end up getting blamed.
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
Good god.
Villago Delenda Est
If an accounting firm did this to a publicly held corporation, the stock price would tank.
Gin & Tonic
@Ohio Mom: I think they want to take this to the Supremes and gut libel law.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Scott: Short term revenue vs. long term disaster. Fully in accordance with the modern MBA mindset.
Baud
I wonder if Mazars have other clients and what they will do.
RaflW
@Another Scott: In an even remotely sane world, this would cause lenders to call loans. Though in the case of Deutsche Bank, is there a whole house of (possibly laundered) cards that starts to crumble if they do?
NPR, Feb 19, 2020 — Yes, two years ago. Yes, he was president then. It’s still gobsmacking what was known while he was in office:
Ken
If the rumors about the identity of those lenders are true, nuclear weapons. Though they might stick with the Novichok, pour encourager les autres.
RaflW
@Baud: From their own bragsheet: “Mazars has been featured by UpSlide as one of ‘The 9 Most Influential Accounting Firms in the World’.”
Influential of course doesn’t mean honest. Or forthright. Or morally sound. (But seriously, they appear to be in the top 25 globally, or somesuch. So yeah they have clients!)
Baud
@RaflW:
Damn. The fallout is going to be something else.
MattF
@RaflW: The book Enrich wrote, Dark Towers, was mostly about Deutsche Bank and their ill-fated venture into go-go banking. Trump was a player in that disaster.
hells littlest angel
@Another Scott: So they just put their name on somebody else’s work? Do they do it in 10-foot high letters in gold ink?
NotMax
There’s no accounting for bad taste.
//
Roger Moore
@Ken:
Maybe I misunderstand the job, but I thought part of the role of the auditor was not to trust the client. They’re supposed to do some level of digging precisely to make sure the client isn’t pulling anything fast and loose with the numbers. An auditor who only checks the client’s work for surface-level errors isn’t very useful.
Bill Arnold
@MattF:
From that tweet, “She paid people to hack into Trump’s computers… “.
We finally have a Trump-world confession that Trump paid people to hack into the DNC’s (and Podesta’s) computers.
(This is detailed in the last page of the Steele report. :-)
geg6
@Bill Arnold:
Wowza! When did the un-redactions happen? I mean, I kinda knew all this in an instinctive way but to see it all there? No wonder Adam Schiff has his hair on fire.
Martin
@Another Scott: Yeah, that’s it quite simply. I mean, the accountant presumes they’ve been given all information, accurately. Now, there’s always a bit of a wink and a nod in there. The accountants won’t necessarily challenge you if they suspect something is missing/wrong. And I suspect Mazars is finding themselves a bit too caught in that spot. There’s not knowing, and there’s plausible deniability and those are VERY different things. I’m guessing that Mazars situation has gotten untenable.
This is as I was saying about McConnell and others going against the RNC position. The folks that are most closely plugged into the Jan 6 committee are working quite hard to distance themselves. That should be a warning. This from Mazars seems similar. I think they have Trump dead-to-rights. Question is what will come of it. Determining guilt isn’t really a problem in this country, but holding to account is.
Jeffro
Oh, they’re useful…to a client who’s up to his fat orange neck in money laundering, tax fraud, etc. They’re just not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Jeffro
@RaflW: I think they’re continuing to let SDNY, GA, and the 1/6 Committee do the hard work while keeping their own hands relatively clean.
No more than 4-5 years from now, these same GOP bad actors will be decrying the Democrats for “taking trump down”. You watch.
chrome agnomen
@MattF: trump org only brought coffee for trump once in a while
laura
When taking the time to sing the praises of Letitia James in her dogged pursuit of justice as lawyer for the people, please be mindful to save some time for shit talking her predecessor Cy Vance Jr. who made this day possible what with his strategic non-prosecutions of trump, Weinstein, Strauss-Kahn and has active pursuit of a reduction in charges against Epstein. The rot of patronage and corruption, the heady blend of arrogance and unaccountable power and the willful refusal to see criminal activity conducted in plain sight is an abomination when you compare and contrast the carcereal state and it’s unceasing grip on far too many people. Hopefully, Ms. James keeps on keeping on in dragging white collar criminals to their deserved rewards.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Thanks. I wonder if the fact he spoke out while the jury was deliberating would itself be grounds for an appeal?
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker: I think trumpov was pretty much down to unsecured “loans” from Mother Russia and his various other money laundering scams for the past 10-20 years. The reputable banks wouldn’t touch him; the disreputable ones were already fronts for money laundering anyway.
Bill Arnold
@geg6:
There have been a series of un-redactions. Marcy Wheeler has been quite carefully tracking. (I have not).
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/02/09/the-four-versions-of-the-mueller-report/
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/02/12/byron-york-corrects-his-truth-about-crimes-that-don-jr-and-roger-stone-may-have-committed/
RaflW
@MattF: Understood. But his sleazy pattern of ‘doing business’ was in plain sight. Mazars pinched their nose and cashed his checks anyway (he pays, of course, when absolutely needed. Plumbers and carpenters, not so much.)
West of the Cascades
“While we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies” is vaguely reminiscent of Emperor Hirohito’s announcement that “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
laura
Regarding the Sarah Palin suit- Clarence Thomas has made it abundantly clear that he wants to overturn FTFNYT v Sullivan, so expect a flurry of questionable suits in the coming days.
NotMax
@RaflW
“I’ve got a coupon.”
“Um, that’s a Post-it note with ‘90% off’ scrawled in Sharpie.”
MattF
@West of the Cascades: But… Trump’s lawyer says that statement means all his clients are innocent! Reminds me of the old Mae West line ‘I was pure as the driven snow… but I drifted’.
CaseyL
@debbie: Seems to me the opposite: the jury doesn’t know what he said, so it can’t affect their deliberations. His grounds for dismissal are that the evidence didn’t reach the high standard (“actual malice”) needed to prove defamation of a public figure.
I agree with @Gin & Tonic: that this is set up to go to SCOTUS, who will then rule that actual malice isn’t necessary to prove defamation of a public figure. Hell, SCOTUS might even rule that factual truth is no defense against a defamation charge! Say something bad about anyone rich/famous/powerful, true or not, and you’re screwed.
The Dangerman
10 years. Huh. Does that have anything to do with Statute of Limitations?
Trump could have spent the rest of his life playing golf and chasing porn stars, but, no, he wanted to get back at Obama for being mean to him. I hope he ends up having to clean highways for the rest of his life.
topclimber
@Another Scott: Thanks for finding this. My google fu found only 20 different iterations of the same story with no details about what level of statements were involved.
Compilations are known to be the lowest level of auditor scrutiny. If folks were lending money to Trump based on documents that were basically just presenting TFG’s bogus numbers in the correct accounting format, that is on them. The accountant’s letter would clearly say they are compilations, not audits.
I am spitballing but it sounds like some of Mazar’s work might have been reviews. These procedures are more stringent than compilations–the CPA firm basically says they couldn’t find any material issues, but they only run limited analytical tests a few other procedures and say that nothing in their limited review tipped off the alarm bells. Analytical tests might find a huge sudden change in year-to-year property values, for instance, which should prompt more CPA investigation.
So Mazars is saying, gee whiz, we didn’t know what TFG was doing until the NY AG dug deeper. Now that they know, their limited “review” assurance is gone. Their accounting asses may well be covered. No way have they ruled out material discrepancies, just like Mueller never exonerated Trump.
Why anybody who did business with Trump did not insist on a full-fledged audit that looked at actual transactions is most likely either proof of their incompetence or perhaps that said investors were in on the scam.
Full disclosure: retired after 15 years as a NYS CPA to move onto other fields, and never did many audits, though I did help clients prepare for them. But the points above are Auditing 101, at least a couple of decades ago.
Baud
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This belongs as a rotating tag.
Cacti
You’ve just described the business model of LegalZoom.
Martin
@Roger Moore: To the contrary. You pay extra for that kind of service. The parties trust Mazar because they don’t trust Trump. The auditor doesn’t need to be in on the crimes, they just need to not work too hard to find them. And because the IRS and most other agencies don’t have the resources to perform the kind of colonoscopy that they ought to be performing, the auditor turns into a form of reputation laundering. The IRS can pretend everything is fine, because they trust Mazar and can check their ‘due diligence’ checkbox. Mazar can do the same.
Baud
Mallard Filmore
@Gin & Tonic:
I would look at this as trying to STRENGTHEN libel law, so that you can sue for someone besmirching a fraudulently maintained reputation.
Ken
We should compile a list of all the ways people are finding to say “Everything Trump touches dies.”
Roger Moore
@topclimber:
Interesting. It’s a completely different context, but someone from a government agency I interacted with made a distinction between an audit, an inspection, and an investigation. In an audit, they ask for a standard set of documentation and make sure it’s all been handled correctly. In an inspection, they don’t have a standard list of things they’re looking at, but they’re targeting a set of things they decided on in advance. In an investigation, they don’t come in with any preset plan. They start by looking at the standard stuff, but they’re allowed to dig wherever they think they might find something interesting.
grannymc
@Roger Moore: I believe these were compilations, not audits. Trump Org would never have survived a proper independent audit, and I suspect all the senior partners at Mazar knew this, but proving that they knew the financial statements they were compiling were total bullshit is going to be very hard.
Spanky
@The Dangerman:
I hope they make him rake forests.
Bill
@laura:
Alvin Bragg is the successor to former Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance Jr. Letitia James was preceded as state AG by Barbara Underwood, who finished Eric Schneiderman’s term. Before Schneiderman, the office was occupied by those other paragons of virtue, Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer.
Baud
Compilation vs. audit.
Very interesting. This blog is knowledgeable.
mrmoshpotato
@The Dangerman:
In the middle of fucking nowhere in Alaska so the traffic isn’t fucked up.
Roger Moore
@Mallard Filmore:
A good distinction. What they’re trying to do is to gut protections against libel, which would have the effect of strengthening libel law. I kind of doubt the Supreme Court would go along. Thomas has said he’s interested in reversing Sullivan, but I don’t think any of the other justices have said something similar. That doesn’t mean nobody is interested, but at the very least the Court as a whole hasn’t telegraphed an interest in reversing the ruling.
The Dangerman
@Spanky: Raking forests is certainly apropos, but I want to see Trump try to avoid the shit being tossed at him by passing cars doing 70 or so.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud:
For us back in the cheap seats, what does this mean?
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Usually it means that they have legal interests that are not aligned, like for example if Mazars will argue in response to a lawsuit that it’s Trump’s fault, not theirs.
Martin
@Roger Moore: I’m not sure how to solve it. Was talking to my dad this morning about that. We were talking about the threats to election workers. The thing is, there were tens or hundreds of thousands of threats. You overwhelm the system. Who has jurisdiction there? The local police for the election worker? The local police for the person who made the threat? Is it the FBI because it’s interstate? None of those parties have the resources to chase these people down, collect evidence, lock them up, indict them, and all that. So, we push back on Facebook to do that, and of course they’re not going to – they aren’t law enforcement. They can moderate, but that isn’t going to accomplish the desired goal. So, we let them get away with it. Some journalists have chased down the people who made the threats. But apart maybe from their boss firing them, they won’t be held accountable.
From the FAA, just last year:
5,981 Unruly Passenger Reports
4,290 Mask-related Incidents Reported
1,105 Investigations Initiated
350 Enforcement Actions
So, 350 enforcement actions from a bit over 10,000 incidents. 3.5%. Not very reassuring.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Short answer: He said/she said.
;)
Gin & Tonic
Canada’s Minister of Finance (and Deputy PM) Freeland: “This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice: if your truck is being used in these protests, your corporate accounts will be frozen.”
Brachiator
@The Dangerman:
Well, Trump might not have to worry about catching Covid. Don’t they use bleach when they are cleaning up those highways?
NeenerNeener
@SiubhanDuinne: Just to continue a conversation from down below about ESG….according to my RWNJ sister, it’s not just about grading corporate sustainability. It’s also about grading how racist and wasteful individual people are, and because of The Great Reset the rich liberals will be using ESG to decide who will have all their property seized for having scores too low. I told her that sounded like rich persons fan fiction and she claimed that China already does this. Like Monty Python’s Flying Sheep sketch… once my sister gets an idear in ‘er ‘ead there’s no shiftin’ it’ so I started looking for a way to get out of the argument and go play Wordle.
Baud
@NeenerNeener:
Does your sister have anything nice I should put dibs on?
A Ghost to Most
Shorter Mazars: We never thought his leopards would eat OUR faces.
Chris Johnson
@Bill Arnold: Loving this Eric Garland stuff. Or more like hating it: but this is exactly what I’ve been saying for years, including when I get all paranoid and run around accusing folks of being Boris Badenov. THIS is what I knew was happening. And it sure was (and IS, but Putin’s got ’em on different beats now)
topclimber
@Baud:
Sample compilation statement by CPA:
Management is responsible for the accompanying financial statements of the Baud 20xx campaign which comprise the balance sheets as of December 31, 20XX and 20XX-1 and the related statements of income, changes in stockholder’s equity, and cash flows for the years then ended, and the related notes to the financial statements in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America….We did not audit or review the financial statements nor were we required to perform any procedures to verify the accuracy or completeness of the information provided by management.
We do not express an opinion, a conclusion, nor provide any assurance on these financial statements.
Sounds like your campaigns should go for compilations. OTOH, beware of free accounting advice.
NeenerNeener
@Baud: Yes, but it’s probably all her husband’s name. Although if she’s going up against the wall he will be too.
Jeffro
That’s AWESOME (and smart): hit ’em where it really hurts!
In other news, this is worth pointing out to the American public before any of this BS gets going here: they’re using trucks because they have no numbers
Yup! It looks impressive (sorta) but we’re talking a handful of loons here. And paid loons at that.
Anyway…FOLLOW THAT MONEY, U.S. & Canada!
Cameron
@Jeffro: 4-5 years? 4-5 days after a conviction, more likely. If they don’t start screaming immediately, the goldfish will have forgotten they’ve swum around the bowl already within a month.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
The first step obviously has to be to try. One of the reasons we’ve had so little success holding powerful people to account is because it’s rare for anyone to actually make a serious effort. I would suggest we should spend less time and effort chasing down two-bit drug crimes and more going after powerful and well-connected people. We need to acknowledge there’s a white-collar crime epidemic, and it needs to be treated a least as seriously as we treat blue-collar crime.
That isn’t the only problem, of course. Part of the problem is that the courts have gradually gutted laws that might be used to hold the powerful to account. Police have qualified immunity, a legal doctrine made up by the courts and massively expanded into a near-impenetrable shield for all kinds of official misconduct. Elected officials are so protected from charges of bribery that you practically need a check with a memo describing what they were bribed for to convict. Again, this is something the courts have done. It’s one more reason we need to have a liberal Supreme Court.
Baud
@topclimber:
I can do that on my own for free.
Cameron
@The Dangerman: If it’s paper, he’ll probably eat it.
MagdaInBlack
@MattF: I have been seeing that all day: that something proves Hillary is guilty. I’ve yet to see what that “something” is. I must have missed a memo?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MagdaInBlack: I tried to read this article about it and I still don’t get it.
Martin
@grannymc: It’s not a proper audit. It’s a kind of self-regulation. I didn’t cheat the government, this licensed accountancy also say I didn’t cheat the government, therefore you can safely conclude I didn’t cheat the government.
The assumption is that the CPA who signed off on this would face jail time if they lied. That’s how self-regulation operates. Pay the CPA enough, and they might be willing to take that risk. Self regulation isn’t bad, it’s a good first pass because you can apply it to everyone simultaneously, but it’s hardly a substitute for a proper regulatory system. It’s a good supplement to one, though.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Clouds and shadows?
MagdaInBlack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thank you.
Eta: as soon as I saw the name Mark Levin , it all made sense. Meaning, it’s all crap. ?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@redactor: You and me both.
topclimber
@Baud: Some free management advice, too: Learn to delegate.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Dangerman: With the internet out there, odds are good that the traffic will not be moving at 70mph. Much slower, because so many people will want to throw shit at him.
Villago Delenda Est
@MagdaInBlack: Go to Wonkette. Read this.
phein63
@Jeffro: I’m an internal auditor (not financial). Our clients are strictly Federal agencies, and our job is to alert them to anything that might get their leadership in legal hot water. If their staff lies to us, then the commander/director/secretary is on the hook. We always stress that during in-briefs, and it usually results in the leader’s representatives issuing strong directives to be honest with us. In the very few cases where staff wasn’t upfront — and it’s pretty easy for us to tell, we are the freaking experts — we let leadership know and it can get pretty ugly.
Of course, in Trump’s case, he’s the one who isn’t honest, so what would one expect from his staff?
Martin
@Roger Moore: The IRS might prove illustrative here. The IRS doesn’t audit the rich – it’s too hard, too expensive. They audit the poor and middle class. They can audit thousands of normal people for the work needed for one billionaire.
That’s the trouble with ‘try’. If you can’t do it properly, you have to choose who to do it with, and that almost always hurts little people.
And yes, the courts have gutted laws, but the courts are also underfunded. If you have to drag cases out for months because of caseloads, I have some bad news for you – you will never catch up. You have this constant incentive to make cases go away, and the guy showing up with his public defender is a lot easier to fit in the schedule than the rich asshole who shows up with an army of lawyers.
We can’t seem to hold people to account for bad faith either. Texas drops some new regulations the day before the deadline to send out ballots deprives anyone from legal recourse. That happens constantly now. So the court lets the new regulation stand because disrupting the election is too problematic, but are the state agents punished for obviously trying to deny people their right to challenge unfair laws? Nope. And the lawyers who are great at running out the clock? No accountability there either. I hear so and so is negotiating with the committee to testify. Negotiate? Da fuck man. You show up when the committee tells you to show up and make your case then. You and I don’t get to negotiate with the IRS when we’ll pay taxes, we do it when told, and we do it as told.
Brachiator
@MattF:
I don’t get it. Why is Fox News even bothering? Are they going to cycle through all the Democrats they hate in order to try to distract from Trump’s problems?
What I continue to find fascinating and appalling is that Fox News and the Republicans cannot find the courage to cut Trump loose. No matter what he has done, no matter what outrage he may promise in the future, he is still their guy.
cain
@laura: That cuts both ways as we can now go after Fox News and everyone else with lawsuits as well. I certainly wouldn’t mind Hillary going after NYT.
Other MJS
@MattF:
Stop the presses; that’s awesome!
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
Thanks for the link. That is helpful to unpack the wingnuttery of the day.
MagdaInBlack
@Villago Delenda Est: Ok. it’s the usual high pitched screeching over nothing.
I’m kind of looking forward to Don Jr’s coke fueled crowing about this.
Dan B
@Jeffro: Good news is the convoy communications sites got hacked. They migrated to another but the “trusted moderator” was a double agent. They kept getting Ram Ranch, a gay anthem, on their feed. There were as many disruptive messages as genuine, many were clever fakes that steered the truckers to wrong sites like one promising to get the to the money that had been raised for them. One asked if the Ranchers could get their money. Ha!
Roger Moore
@Jeffro:
So it’s the same thing as the truck parades and boat parades for Trump. An unkind person might make a comment about them loving big vehicles because they’re hoping to compensate for their anatomical inadequacies.
Rand Careaga
@Roger Moore:
A relative has a side gig consulting for architectural firms who design or modify campus libraries. “They pay me to tell them things they don’t want to hear, to spare them lawsuits down the road,” he says.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jeffro: Or perhaps a handful of Loonies?
mvr
Sounds like today was a good day.
SiubhanDuinne
@NeenerNeener:
That … makes my head hurt.
But thanks for following up on ESG.
geg6
@Brachiator:
I, too, do not understand why they are so afraid to stand up to him. They have to know by now that this cannot possibly end well for them either way. At least if they cut him loose, they might have a chance to eventually rehabilitate themselves if they put their minds to it. Sticking with him is a disaster for them as much or more as it is for us.
Ramalama
@Gin & Tonic: Canadian news channels talked w/ economists about the stability of Canada landing & keeping work/trade from Fortune 500 companies. The protests were not only costing hundreds of millions of dollars by the X (week maybe) but billions in future if said companies decided Canada was too risky to do that kind of business with.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: you got mail
raven
@Brachiator: because he fucks with libs PERIOD.
Ramalama
@Cameron: It’s the only way to get fiber into his diet.
Rand Careaga
@Roger Moore:
Like this?
laura
@Bill: well hell. Cy Vance still a shite-bag or nah?
Jeffro
Multiple reasons:
Anyway, they’ll do anything they can to hang onto that dark energy and try not to get burned by it. Like I said upthread, it won’t be long before, after much HARD work by the J6 Committee, SDNY, GA, etc, the GOP establishment pivots to decrying how the dastardly Dems “took trumpov down”
Roger Moore
@Rand Careaga:
With a financial audit, it’s more than that. If you don’t bring in an outsider to audit the books, your accountant can rob you blind before you figure out there’s a problem. A serious audit needs to consider the possibility the accounts are a fiction concocted to hide the accountant’s embezzling. It sounds as if what Mazars was doing wasn’t an audit, but that’s what a real audit needs to do.
Jeffro
@Roger Moore: Yup.
I thought it was odd that all through trumpov’s reign of error, I’d see pickup trucks flying big-ol MAGA flags up and down Rt 29 and I-95 on the weekends. Not the kind you clamp into your side windows…the kind they jack into their back bumpers or truck beds.
Never before happened in American history. I mean, at least in the past 40 years that I can account for. Just weird.
I mean, I know these kkklowns would do it for free, but you have to wonder…it wouldn’t take much $$$ to get a handful of loons in key counties and states to get out there and run around for a few hours every weekend like that.
Total fascist shit, and they probably bought it for (relative) pennies.
RaflW
@topclimber: “Why anybody who did business with Trump did not insist on a full-fledged audit that looked at actual transactions”
This is a country that ran up billions in “liar loans” before the 2008 implosion. And slicing and dicing those loans into Credit Default Swaps so that the lies could be resold for profit and leave others holding the bag.
Yeah, lots of Trump’s creditors knew he was bad, but didn’t plan to be toting the note when the music stopped.
WaterGirl
@phein63: Your first comment had to be manually approved, but now that I have done that future comments will show up for everyone right away.
Another Scott
@topclimber: Thanks very much.
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
@Gin & Tonic: ““This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades.”
Hopefully they’re looking for any sort of cross-border impropriety as well. (Particularly from US sources.) I mean, you never know when a donor or three might get indicted for things. Right, Ms. Collins?
White & Gold Purgatorian
@Jeffro: Trump is very good at stroking the ego of his minions and needn’t have paid them any actual money. Most of those folks would have done it for the free flag and a title, like “Freedom Driver” on a little card they could print out. Heck, give them the card and most would buy the flag themselves and rig up a way to mount it on the truck.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
There are auditors and accountants.
An accountant fills out forms and theoretically has an understanding of the law. But they are not checking the provided information, in theory. A good accountant will say something if the information is strange or rather unusual.
An auditor is supposed to check the provided information for accuracy. But if the client lies well enough and the auditor doesn’t check well enough then a lot can slip through the net. And of course, unless the auditing system is secure enough, and not paid by the subject, like say the IRS/courts, then the reality is how much is going to get by is often quite different.
Another Scott
ObOpenThread: Meanwhile, … Pravda.com.ua (via KyivIndependent) (translation by Google):
(ORDLO)
“We didn’t invade – we were invited!” – VVP, probably.
:-(
Grr…,
Scott.
Dopey-o
Remember when Hillary’s email server was hacked by the Russians? Neither do I, because Hillary hired top-level IT staff who built a bullet-proof server.
If Hillary’s IT team hacked Trump’s servers, they would have left very little evidence. I haven’t seen any signs that Dunham’s team has any CS competence.
different-church-lady
@Dopey-o:
There’s probably a bunch of Trump voters who will remember it quite clearly if you just inform them about it for the first time.
different-church-lady
Can we has “You wish, Lumpy!” as a rotating tag line, please, pretty please?
No One You Know
@Bill Arnold: Thanks for the link! Fabulous (and sickening) read, with occasional euphonies like “Brooklyn neckbeard techbro” to lighten the slog.
Winning quote appears to be the Russian state’s conclusion that “all the primaries are purchasable.”
Second: Russia thinks it’s at war with the U.S., and has been for years.
Cold War just got colder.
yellowdog
@prostratedragon: IIRC Arthur Anderson just changed their name and are still in business.
Robert Sneddon
@No One You Know:
Russia (the old Imperial Russia as well as the now-defunct Soviet Union) has been getting invaded regularly by Western powers for the past 250 years or so. The Russian people have good historical evidence that it remains in a Cold War with the current dominant Western power and its NATO lackeys. Convincing them otherwise would be a good start, sabre-rattling to make them think America wants to park its tanks in Red Square is counter-productive.
prostratedragon
@yellowdog: Only partially. Accenture is the consulting business, now based in Ireland. Accounting, their main business, is dead. Enron was not the only fiasco of that time that they had a hand in.
Downpuppy
@prostratedragon: Other than Enron, Worldcom, Sunbeam, Waste Management, & Baptist Foundation of Arizona, Andersen didn’t have any major audit failures in their last years.
prostratedragon
@Downpuppy: Oh, forgot about Sunbeam and didn’t know about the Baptist foundation. Busy little beavers back then, weren’t they?