Here’s some Christmas Eve entertainment for you. By perhaps making Mike Johnson unelected as speaker (not a done deal but a real possibility), last week’s Trump/Elon drama may leave Republicans Jan. 6ing themselves this year this time. Ironic! This Roll Call article gets into the details. But the gist is that if they can’t elect Mike Johnson (or someone else) between January 3rd and 6th, they can’t properly constitute themselves to officially receive the electoral votes. There won’t be a properly constituted or sworn-in House, at least not in the way it’s been done for the couple centuries-plus. The Roll Call article makes clear there are probably workarounds, maybe, largely because the constitution leaves it to the House to make up its own rules. So the House can probably, maybe(?), make up a new rule to resolve the problem. But it won’t be pretty.
Billy Long, Trump’s Nominee To Lead The IRS, Touts A Credential That Tax Experts Say Is Dubious
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named his nominee to head the IRS, touts his expertise in tax matters.
He advertises his credential as a certified tax and business advisor, and he adds CTBA to his name on his X profile. That profile encourages people to message him to “save 40% on your taxes.”
But tax experts told ProPublica that they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. The designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. That is in stark contrast to the 150 credit hours and the rigorous exams required to become a certified public accountant, a standard certification for tax accountants.
In most tax cases, only lawyers, CPAs and enrolled agents — federally authorized tax practitioners — can represent taxpayers at the IRS.
“The cost of relying on tax advice from somebody that is solely focused on minimizing the tax liabilities that you have — as opposed to somebody that’s focused on both minimizing the tax liabilities and complying with the tax law — can be extraordinarily high if you are found to be in violation of the standards,” said Nathan Goldman, an associate professor of accounting at North Carolina State University.
Excel Empire’s three-day certification course has been advertised for as much as $30,000; its upcoming session is advertised at $4,997. Matthew Pearson, one of its founders, said this summer in a podcast that about 135 people have earned the CTBA designation, which the firm designed to help people without tax backgrounds to become advisors.
Nina Olson, a prominent taxpayer advocate, said that the modern tax industry has seen “a proliferation of different groups and entities that are providing tax advice” and that consumers have no way of knowing who is competent.
“It could just be that you’ve taken a very short course, and paid a large fee for that course, and that gives you the ability to put some initials after your name,” said Olson, who served as the IRS’ national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. She is now executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes fairness and access to justice in tax systems.
Tax experts said that Long’s years of experience as a real estate agent and as an auctioneer — before spending a dozen years in Congress — pales next to the deep experience in tax policy or management of the people who have held the job. For instance, the current IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, previously served as acting IRS commissioner and held leadership roles at the Office of Management and Budget. He also worked in the private sector as a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.
Long’s experience in the tax world has been more narrowly focused. In the two years since he left Congress, he worked to bring in customers for at least two firms that marketed the employee retention credit — a pandemic-era benefit designed to support businesses that kept workers despite revenue losses or disruptions caused by COVID-19.
The credit also attracted fraud, eventually landing on the IRS’ “worst of the worst” list for tax scams. Two Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday announced an investigation into the firms, noting Long had neither a “background in tax preparation nor any credential as a licensed accountant, attorney or enrolled agent.”
Worth up to $28,000 per employee, the credit was available for the 2020 and 2021 tax years and has been widely used by both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations across the country. However, the IRS raised significant concerns about aggressive promoters pushing ineligible businesses to file questionable claims. Red flags included inflated payroll numbers, claims for all quarters without proper eligibility or citing minor government orders that did not directly impact business operations.
The IRS says it has recovered over $1 billion from businesses that voluntarily reported improper claims. And it has launched hundreds of criminal investigations to try to recoup what it says could be billions of dollars more.
In a prepared statement in November, Werfel said businesses should review their claims and see if they were misled by firms marketing the tax credit.
“They should listen to trusted tax professionals, not promoters,” he said.
In a 2023 podcast discussing his work for the two firms, Long joked that he had a hat bearing the name of the credit glued to his head. He said his work marketing the tax credit had caused some clients to question their CPAs’ advice.
“Hey, this auctioneer, real estate broker, former congressman told me I’m going to get $1.2 million back,” he said. “Uh, you’re my CPA. Why didn’t you tell me that?” And he said the response of CPAs would be: “That’s a joke. That’s a fake deal. That’s not true. You’re going to have to pay all that money back. You’ll get audited.”
But he said the firms he worked for had never seen the IRS turn down one of their claims.
There is no evidence that either Excel Empire, Long or the firms that he worked for — Lifetime Advisors of Hudson, Wisconsin, and Commerce Terrace Consulting of Springfield, Missouri — engaged in wrongdoing. In the same 2023 podcast, Long emphasized he and his colleagues had helped only taxpayers who were entitled to the benefit.
Neither Long, Lifetime Advisors nor Commerce Terrace Consulting responded to requests for comment.
If Long is confirmed and succeeds Werfel, he’ll have the power to influence how Americans pay their taxes and how the federal government collects revenue. Trump has promised to end IRS “overstepping,” while Republicans have said that they would slash billions of dollars in funding passed under the Biden administration to modernize the IRS and enhance tax enforcement.
The IRS and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
During his time representing Southwest Missouri in Congress, Long pursued legislation to abolish the IRS and establish a national sales tax. Billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump advisor, recently asked on X if the agency’s budget should be “deleted.”
Like Long, members of Excel Empire suggest that accountants don’t feel it is their role to save their clients money because they prioritize compliance over planning and are too busy during tax season to discuss strategies. The company’s website claims the firm has saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Edward Lyon, who is listed on Excel Empire’s website as chief tax planner and tax attorney, writes on his personal website that the seven most expensive words in the English language are “My CPA takes care of my taxes.”
Lyon elaborated on a podcast last year, noting that accountants “generally are rule followers,” but when it comes to lawyers, “we are trained to understand the rules but we’re trained to stretch the rules and bend the rules and poke at the rules and do an end run around the rules. It’s a much more proactive focus.” Still, he has consistently emphasized that his company acts “legally, ethically and morally.”
The company’s co-founder, Pearson, once described Lyon on a podcast as the “preeminent proactive tax attorney in the country.” Lyon and Pearson declined to comment.
The Ohio Supreme Court suspended Lyon’s law license in 2005 for failing to meet registration and fee requirements on time, and he hasn’t regained it. He also does not appear to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor.
Despite this, Lyon says he has trained tens of thousands of tax and finance professionals. As the author of several books and a column, he claims to be one of the country’s most widely read tax strategists and commands speaking fees of $15,000 and first-class travel arrangements.
Lyon has also developed several tax certification programs. On the Excel Empire website, some officers, including Pearson, use a title created by Lyon: tax master.
Appearing on another podcast, Lyon discussed how small businesses can be used as tax shelters. As an example, he asked the host, Heather Wagenhals — who also carries the CTBA title — if she had a swimming pool at her home, where she records her show.
“I do,” Wagenhals said. “That’s why I picked this one.”
Lyon responded: “All right, so I’m gonna rock your world in five words, ready? On-premises employee athletic facility.”
“Oh my God!” Wagenhals said.
Lyon added: “It’s really there in the tax code, and nobody’s told you that.”
In another podcast, Pearson brags about firing an accountant who balked at his request for advice about how to use a new Corvette “to keep from paying taxes.”
Olson said that attitude was disturbing and that simplistic answers can create problems for taxpayers in IRS audits and in the courts. “A swimming pool in someone’s home, even if employees are working in the home and using it, still would require the court to look at the percentage of employee use versus personal use — and they would look really closely at that,” she said.
Biden Blocks Trump From Carrying Out Death Row Killing Spree
President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of all but three death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, briefly citing Donald Trump’s bloodlust as a motivating factor.
“In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” he said in a statement.
He did not commute the sentences of Dylann Roof of the 2015 Charleston church massacre, Robert Bowers of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. In his statement, Biden pointed to the exception for “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder” in his administration’s moratorium on federal executions.
The move comes on the heels of his granting clemency to 1,500 people who were serving out their sentences in home confinement and issuing pardons to 39 more earlier this month. He’s also issued sweeping pardons for low-level marijuana offenses, and for members of the military convicted for having gay sex.
Biden’s pardon powers came under intense scrutiny when he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who had been awaiting sentencing on federal gun charges and tax evasion.
Biden’s protection of his son, his (infuriatingly) tacit acknowledgement that Hunter wouldn’t be safe under the Trump administration, extends to this clearing out of death row. Trump has advocated for expanding the use of the death penalty, and killed a whopping 13 federal inmates during his first term, the most of any president in the modern era.
Democrats have, lately, lost their footing on the threat of a Trump restored to full power, beaten down by their election losses, convinced that normal people can no longer be moved by his brutality. Biden only alluded to Trump’s thirst for violence in a passing quip, and never spelled out why he felt compelled to shield Hunter from the vengeance of Trump’s Justice Department.
Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to communicate Trump’s thuggishness empowers him to act with impunity. But Biden’s clearing of death row, like his pardon of his son, was indisputably an act of grace for people who would have been in grave danger under the coming Trump regime.
The Best Of TPM Today
Anti-Abortion Officials Continue Deputizing Angry Men To Turn Over Their Partners In New Legal Foray
Ethics Committee Finds ‘Substantial Evidence’ That Gaetz Committed ‘Statutory Rape’
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
What We Are Reading
Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media — Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr, The Washington Post
Palantir and Anduril join forces with tech groups to bid for Pentagon contracts — Tabby Kinder and George Hammond, The Financial Times
The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky — David Gelles and Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times
Event Update
Just an update: There are currently 47 tickets remaining for TPM’s first live podcast taping, which will take place on January 15th in Washington, D.C. You can get your tickets here. Remember, tickets are $75 but if you are a Prime or Prime AF member, tickets are $50. If you are an Inside member, they are free. (You should have received a discount code via email. If not, feel free to email me directly Joe at talkingpointsmemo dot com.)
Hope to see you there, and happy holidays!
Ethics Committee Finds ‘Substantial Evidence’ That Gaetz Committed ‘Statutory Rape’
The House Ethics Committee released a long-awaited report Monday, stating that it had found “substantial evidence” that former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) violated House rules and laws “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Continue reading “Ethics Committee Finds ‘Substantial Evidence’ That Gaetz Committed ‘Statutory Rape’”Enemies Lists, Then And Now
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
The Nixon administration’s enemies list inspired bipartisan revulsion. Its purpose was, in the immortal words of President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
The revelation of the list’s existence during the Watergate hearings of 1973 provoked conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley Jr. to use the f-word in print. Yes, Buckley called the enemies list “an act of proto-fascism. It is altogether ruthless in its dismissal of human rights. It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”
But that was then. Now, Donald Trump has announced his intention to place in charge of the FBI someone who published an enemies list in a 2023 book.
Kash Patel’s “Government Gangsters” includes a list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” which he describes as “a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president.”
Was hard for me to find the list of people Kash Patel included in his book “Government Gangsters” as Deep State officials who need to be targeted so here it is in one place. pic.twitter.com/j9I7FWNzoZ
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) December 2, 2024
Despite that description, the list does not include anyone who tried to keep Trump in office illegally after he lost in 2020. It does, however, include a number of high-level Trump appointees who chose not to help him in that effort to overturn democracy.
Targeting fellow Republicans follows Nixonian precedent. The top name on an early draft of Nixon’s enemies list was a Republican who worked in the Nixon White House on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.
The story of that aide, Morton H. Halperin, demonstrates the dangers of enemies lists to their makers as well as their targets. I tell this story in my book “Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate.”
The man who knew too much
Morton Halperin committed no crime.
To Nixon and Kissinger, however, he was the man who knew too much. They mobilized the police power of the state against him, because they feared what he could reveal about them.
Kissinger, as national security adviser, had told Halperin about the secret bombing of Cambodia. The waves of B-52 attacks on North Vietnamese infiltration routes was no secret to the Cambodians, but Nixon and Kissinger kept it from the American people. The New York Times, however, soon found out and ran a front-page story about the bombing campaign.
Looking for the leaker, Nixon had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tap Halperin’s phone. The wiretap never produced any evidence against Halperin, but Nixon continued it even after Halperin resigned from the White House and became an adviser to the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie.
At that point, the Halperin wiretap became a way for Nixon to spy on top Democrats, including former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, who had served as an adviser to Democratic Presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Hoover reported to the White House on a conversation Halperin had with Leslie Gelb, another Muskie adviser, about an article Clifford was writing for Life magazine criticizing Nixon on Vietnam.
There was nothing remotely illegal about criticizing the president, of course, but the FBI director sent the information to the White House anyway.
“This is the kind of early warning we need more of,” chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman wrote White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. “Your game planners are now in an excellent position to map anticipatory action.”
The FBI is not supposed to be a political intelligence operation, secretly helping the president plan moves against his critics. In this case, it was.
The keepers of Nixon’s enemies lists – there was more than one – added the names of Gelb and Clifford.
Conspiring against ‘enemies’
Nixon didn’t fully weaponize the state against Halperin until the 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, a top secret Defense Department history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Nixon persuaded himself that Halperin and Gelb were part of a conspiracy that was leaking the papers as a warmup to leaking Nixon’s own damaging secrets during his 1972 reelection campaign.
This wasn’t true. Halperin’s and Gelb’s involvement with the Pentagon Papers was innocent. Halperin oversaw the study as deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Johnson administration, and Gelb was the study’s day-to-day supervisor as director of policy planning and arms control.
They let Daniel Ellsberg read it in 1969, when he was doing work on Vietnam for the government, but they didn’t know he was going to leak it. Not even Ellsberg knew it at the time; he decided much later. Ellsberg leaked the papers without informing Halperin or Gelb.
None of this made a difference to Nixon. He hated Jews, intellectuals and Ivy Leaguers, and Halperin and Gelb were all three. So was Kissinger, of course, but Nixon made exceptions for those who continually demonstrated their devotion to him.
Having convinced himself that Halperin and Gelb were conspiring against him, Nixon resolved to conspire against them.
Ordering a break-in
Nixon ordered his aides to break into the Brookings Institution, where Halperin and Gelb then worked, because he believed – mistakenly – that they were keeping classified documents there.
To commit this and other crimes, Nixon created the Special Investigations Unit, later known as the Plumbers. The Brookings burglary did not take place, but the Plumbers did break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist seeking evidence of a conspiracy. They came up empty-handed.
Being on Nixon’s enemies list did not break Halperin. He went on to testify as a defense witness in Ellsberg’s trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers and became director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office. If, as the saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, perhaps a civil libertarian is a Republican whose phone has been tapped.
Nixon’s illegal wiretaps and Plumbers operation ultimately became part of an article of impeachment against him. The House Judiciary Committee passed the article by 28 to 10, with seven Republicans joining the committee’s Democratic majority on July 29, 1974, less than two weeks before Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and conviction.
Enemies list: ‘Fascist’ tool
Things are different now. In Trump’s first term, the vast majority of congressional Republicans proved unwilling to impeach or convict him. He will begin his second term armed with a Supreme Court decision declaring him immune from criminal prosecution for most “official acts.”
Almost all of Nixon’s abuses of power could be described as “official acts,” which should give everyone an idea what the Supreme Court has unleashed on the republic.
Though circumstances are different, Nixon’s enemies list does have a lesson to teach us today. An enemies list isn’t a weapon against “the Deep State.” An enemies list was a tool that a president used to create a deep state of his own.
Nixon’s Plumbers operated above the law, outside the U.S. Constitution, and beyond accountability to anyone other than him. Nixon used the government as a weapon against the targets of his hatred.
This is why conservatives like Buckley abominated the enemies list: “It is fascist in its automatic assumption that the state in all matters comes before the rights of the individual.”
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Anti-Abortion Officials Continue Deputizing Angry Men To Turn Over Their Partners In New Legal Foray
A 20-year-old woman in Collin County, Texas arrives at the emergency room to address severe bleeding. A health care provider tells the man she’s with that the woman had been nine weeks pregnant.
Continue reading “Anti-Abortion Officials Continue Deputizing Angry Men To Turn Over Their Partners In New Legal Foray”The Musk Who Stole Christmas
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
It’s five days before Christmas, and Elon Musk — the unelected billionaire who seems to lack even a Schoolhouse Rock! level of civics attainment — is trying to tank another government spending bill.
Continue reading “The Musk Who Stole Christmas”Springtime for Billionaires
As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.
Continue reading “Springtime for Billionaires”State of Play on Capitol Hill
I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.
Here’s the chain of events I see.
Continue reading “State of Play on Capitol Hill”