An appeals court Tuesday sided with a lower court judge who determined Trump colluded with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in bringing and later dismissing a case seeking $10 billion in damages from the IRS.

Florida-based U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in July found that the lawsuit that served as the hook for the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund amounted to collusion as the two parties were never truly averse. She also sanctioned two Trump attorneys in the process.

The president, who sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, struck an agreement with the IRS in late May to dismiss the case, with the DOJ then creating an “anti-weaponization” fund to provide payments to those who claim to have been wronged by the government.

  • Pratai@piefed.ca
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    43 minutes ago

    Let’s all place bets on how long it takes for nothing to be done about this.

  • BerryDingles@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    Anyone know who the two sanctioned attorneys are? They need to be named and shamed. Tared and feathered

  • switcheroo@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    And, what? No one is going to actually DO anything about all these crimes! Is everyone waiting and hoping the Dems take back a few branches before finding their spines again???

    • Skeezix@lemmy.world
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      14 minutes ago

      Dems aren’t going to find any spines. They might put on a dog and pony show about impeaching the Turd. But the attitude will generally be “let’s forget the past”. Dems like their grift, they just prefer it on the down low. The dems will throw you a bone here and there to keep your focus off the grift. Unlike the republicans who beat you with the bone and brag about the grift.

  • DementedSociety@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    This is cartoon comic level villain shit. How this disgusting pig is president and not a prisoner will forever be the stain people point to historically as the major turning point in the downfall of the USA.

    • likebudda@reddthat.com
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      7 hours ago

      It’s been 10 years but the 2016 republican primary cycle was absolutely bizarre. Presumptive favorite Jeb fizzling out before he started and the rest of the field of very established politicians being unable to handle an infant of an opponent. It took Russian interference and Comey’s bizzare skullduggery to put the nail in Clinton’s coffin and even then she won the popular vote by over 2%. Sitting in a liberal bubble, I’ve been gobsmacked by his support and his “wins.”

      • NABDad@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        If the Republican party had ranked choice voting for the primary, Trump wouldn’t have had a chance.

        During the primaries, my far, far right wing father said if it was between Trump and Bernie in 2016, he would have voted for Bernie. He knew Trump was a piece of shit.

        At the time he was a single issue voter. Just gun rights. That’s all that mattered.

        The DNC didn’t understand how hated Hilary is on the right or how motivated they would be to see anything win rather than her. Once it was Trump vs Hillary, my dad was a hard core MAGA idiot.

        After Trump was elected, my dad was still a single issue voter, but the issue became 100% just Trump.

        Dad won’t be voting in the mid terms this time around. If he does, it means someone committed a felony.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          No offense to you, but the fact that anyone thinks gun rights is the most important issue could use a second amendment solution for themselves.

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            7 minutes ago

            The GOP survives off of 2 single-issue groups. Gun rights groups and Pro Lifers are by far the most important single-issue voting groups in the country, and the GOP has a strong hold on them. Not because they hold a majority view (most people want stronger gun control and access to abortion), but because almost nobody is single-issue on the other side.

            Imagine a hypothetical world where Joe Biden had been pro-life (because of his Catholocism) and Donald Trump had been pro-choice (because he thinks fetuses are children and murdering children makes him giggle), but their stances on other issues were unchanged versus reality.

            Very few pro-choice people would have swapped to voting for Trump. But millions of pro-life people would have flipped to Biden.

            It’s similar with guns.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          Merrick Garland was Biden’s fault.

          The guy regularly speaks at Federalist Society events.

          His name was put forward by Orin Hatch(R-UT) during a time when Republicans refused to even hold hearings for Obama’s court nominees.

    • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
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      10 hours ago

      The turning point was Nixon not getting prosecuted for his crimes.

      And then Reagan not being punished for his.

      And then Bush Jr being allowed to steal an election, then lie about Iraq being an imminent WMD threat, invading it and to top it off, legalizing fucking TORTURE.

      You have the blue dog democrats literally stealing the DNC out from the will of the voters.

      (And I know I’m sure as shit missing things. )

      THEN you have the orange moron and his crap. Which you all voted for a second fucking time.

          • NABDad@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Failing to convict Andrew Johnson during his impeachment was a double-whammy.

            It prevented the U.S. from holding the southern traitors accountable, and it emboldened future presidents.

            We desperately need to remove a president through impeachment, if only to prove to future presidents that it can happen. However, since it didn’t happen for Trump, it probably never will.

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Indeed. Saying that kind of thing only helps to validate morons like donnie claiming 2024 (or 2016) were a “landslide” for donnie.

          What actually happened was all kinds of fuckery by Republicans (they have done this for decades) and foreign actors to get just enough people to sit out or be disenfranchised, then drive just enough dumbasses to go vote for donnie (or, just as idiotically, some useful idiot like Stein. 🙄 ) to have just enough of an edge over normal Americans that do show up to vote, especially in “battleground” states.

          This idea that donnie ever had majority support is retconning. He’s never reached 50% in job approval and that’s not surprising.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Thank you for expressing a reality based take. Sometimes I feel like I’m the crazy one for being in touch with reality

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        9 hours ago

        (And I know I’m sure as shit missing things. )
        THEN you have the orange moron and his crap. Which you all voted for a second fucking time.

        One thing you’re missing is the Electoral College, which means that morons in Wyoming have votes that count three times anybody else’s. Because 49% of voters (who are themselves only 65% of the population - so 31% of the population overall) voted for him a second time, and that’s assuming that his quote about Elon Musk was just offhand bullshit and not outright admission of voting fraud:

        “He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers… And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good. Pretty good. So thank you to Elon.”

        • tmyakal@infosec.pub
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          8 hours ago

          The Electoral College would be tolerable if the size of the House wasn’t arbitrarily limited. If Wyoming’s population of ~580k is one district, then California at ~39.5m should have 69 districts instead of 52. Overall, the EC should have something like 150 additional votes to distribute.

          • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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            8 hours ago

            If the House were to use the representation it did when it was artificially limited in 1929, the House would have roughly 1500 members and gerrymandering would be effectively useless.

            The 435 number seems random because it is. That’s simply how many representatives there were at the time when it was made permanent. That artificial limit effectively makes it a second Senate, defeating the purpose of its existence.

            Congress can fix it at any point. The Permanent Apportionment Act was passed by a simple majority. It can be repealed or replaced with a simple majority as well. But that would dilute every member’s current massively outsized power, so they won’t.

          • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            Also, it might be tolerable if the Senate were representative, too. Or at least if states were right-sized to actually represent all the people in them.

            California has sixty-six times the number of people in Wyoming.

            Both states get 2 Senators.

            That is just absurd. There is just no other way to look at it. There is no reasonable way to think that we need to offset the needs of 39 million people as a “state” with the needs of 590 thousand people as a “state”, and they get treated as the same thing.

            There needs to be some threshold at which we start adding more Senators to states with so many people in them. That, or we start, at least for the sake of Senators, combining states together into one, and they get two among them.

            I love the idea of combining Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota and I think they’d still have less people than California. Give that gigantic landmass 2 Senators.