Tag: Trump abuse of U.S. laws

Trump puts GOP in tough spot with remarks on foreign ‘dirt’

President Trump has put Republican lawmakers in a tough position by saying that he would be willing to accept damaging information a foreign country such as Russia or China might offer about his 2020 Democratic rival.

Republicans were left shaking their heads Thursday over what many of them saw as a sloppy gaffe by the president, who didn’t appear to understand that what he was suggesting was against the law.

Several GOP lawmakers quickly denounced Trump’s comments, hoping to bury them and allow the controversy to blow over as soon as possible.

View the complete June 14 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Trump lawyer calls on Treasury to reject Democrats’ demand for tax returns until Justice Dept. weighs in

An attorney for President Trump on Friday told the Treasury Department it should not turn over the president’s tax returns until it receives a legal opinion from the Justice Department, calling on Treasury to deny Democrats’ demands for six years of the president’s records.

William S. Consovoy, the attorney, attacked the request from Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, as a “gross abuse of power,” arguing that it risks encroaching on taxpayers’ privacy.

Consovoy’s letter is one of the early moves in what is expected to be an extensive legal fight over who has the authority to release Trump’s tax returns.

View the complete April 5 article by Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

A Perfect Symbol Of Today’s Republican Party

The following commentary by Gene Lyons was posted on the National Memo website August 21, 2018:

2016 Republican National Convention delegates. Credit: Mike Segar, Reuters

How much power it will retain after November remains in doubt, but the Republican Party as historically understood is vanishing before our eyes. What remains is the Party of Trump, an authoritarian cult of personality.

As I write, the President of the United States has been engaged in a barefaced effort at jury-tampering in a trial directly affecting his personal interest. While a jury deliberated eighteen counts of tax evasion and bank fraud against former campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump daily assailed the prosecutors as “thugs” and their case as a politically-motivated fraud.

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