Presidential corruption …
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
1996, lawyers sued the government in a class action over the management of Indian trust accounts. They got a friendly judge who put bureaucrats through hell over the course of over a decade of litigation. Records from a century ago were a mess, to be sure, but there wasn’t any evidence that the departments were siphoning wealth.
DOJ kept taking various rulings up on appeal and would win every time. Finally, there was a trial, and plaintiffs…failed to show damages.
The best they could do was a statistical study with an estimated range of damages from negative to positive within two standard deviations, i.e., perhaps the government mess had overpaid the Indians from the fisc. The judge picks a number from the 95th percentile from the right hand tail, and awards a few hundred million.
That’s a tiny single digit percentage of the alleged claims—and even that gets reversed by the DC Circuit. So the government has all but won, and just needs to mop up the rest.
The lawsuit is a failure.
Then the country elects Barack Obama president. And suddenly the DOJ wants to settle.
And, by settle, I mean give away billions of taxpayer dollars, $3.4B to be precise (over $5B today), with over $90M to the Obama fundraisers who were the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys. Elouise Cobell, the lead named plaintiff, whose story of childhood land being swiped by an oil company because of the trusts turned out to be fictional family lore, gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumously given to her son) and lionized in the Smithsonian and Wikipedia.
People whose trust accounts were worth pennies because an ancestor’s worthless acre got fractionally subdivided among his dozens of great grandchildren received hundreds of dollars each in the settlement. Try to find *any* press coverage of what a corrupt collusive taxpayer ripoff this was. Or even suggesting this was another side to the story than what you find in Wikipedia.
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This is big boy corruption. Not the penny ante shit trump is doing,
billions in Bogus law suit settlements, billions to NGOs run by allies’ family members with some vague promise to do something for the world. From cities giving millions to criminals in corrupt settlements to presidents rewarding friends with billions, the scale is unimaginable. The only difference is professionals like Obama launder it through sympathetic sounding programs .
It is beyond strange that you think Native Americans receiving reparations for their land is a worse "crime" than Donald Trump claiming the US government owes him money for crimes he committed.
Perfect. You up wrap up the grift in a package that makes progressives feel warm and toasty ( Indians! Global warming!) , and they’ll happily overlook billions of taxpayer dollars given away for no reason.
thats the Trump playbook
And there is the pathetic deflection to something completely unrelated.
and it all happened before Trump. So what's your reasoning for that?
This is about Native Americans, isn't it? One of your favorite boogey men
No, because unlike racialists, I don't make everything about race. It's a clear cut of massive corruption which can't be defended outside racist appeals, which is what unsurprisingly happens. It's depressing how some people make everything about race and think justice is simply applying their racial hierarchy to a problem.
Well, Indians are involved and since they are more historically oppressed than the US government , they must win every case. That's the level of thought we see,
you do quite often. look at your seed where you bring up the Central Park 5. You are completely convinced they are guilty of something. And you have a way of talking about NAs that is usually quite mean and hateful
They literally admitted it in Court and at parole hearings. It takes a special kind of blindness to imagine they were "exonerated" of the crimes they were convicted of because a the one of the participants, who the juries were told was unidentified at the time of trial, was identified after trial.
As that is usually quite mean and hateful
I have to much knowledge and respect for NA's to participate in the infantilizing and paternalistic views towards NAs that progressives have adopted the last 50 years, treating them as helpless victims who lacked the agency the rest of us human adults have. So I guess if you share that viewpoint, my treating them as fully formed humans no different than any other race might appear "mean".
Sean complained quite a bit when I brought up Trumps birtherism the other day, a subject by the way in which there is no counterevidence which proves him innocent, on the basis it happened many years ago. Yet here he is a couple days later making a huge deal about the Central Park 5 case, which is even longer ago. And they were eventually exonerated. Trumps birtherism cannot be exonerated or explained beyond the fact that he wanted to build a political base out of racists.
I dont play their game.
Be honest. I said no one has ever voted for Trump because of birtherism. That was the discussion and the point remains unrebutted.
And they were eventually exonerated
Explain how simply identifying the DNA of a rapist after a trial whose DNA was disclosed to a jury during the trial as unidentified "exonerates" the defendants from that crime or the other crimes against other victims they were convicted of participating in. I'd love to hear it that logically spelled out.
Sean - you really need to read the Cobell vs Salazar case
Cobell v. Salazar (previously Cobell v. Kempthorne and Cobell v. Norton and Cobell v. Babbitt ) is a class-action lawsuit brought by Elouise Cobell ( Blackfeet ) and other Native American representatives in 1996 against two departments of the United States government : the Department of Interior and the Department of the Treasury for mismanagement of Indian trust funds. It was settled in 2009. The plaintiffs claim that the U.S. government has incorrectly accounted for the income from Indian trust assets, which are legally owned by the Department of the Interior , but held in trust for individual Native Americans (the beneficial owners ). The case was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia . The original complaint asserted no claims for mismanagement of the trust assets, since such claims could only properly be asserted in the United States Court of Federal Claims .
The fact that many individuals were unaware of the mismanagement of their trust funds is not surprising given the government’s complete lack of accountability. Despite decades of mismanagement, the government never informed its individual Indian trust beneficiaries that their IIM account balances are unreliable. During a six week trial beginning in June 1999, Interior Secretary Babbitt admitted that this information has been intentionally withheld in order to reduce the risk of lawsuits.
Total monies placed in the Trust Funds Management System technically could equal close to $176 Billion - but, due to the government's complete lack of accountability and the intentional withholding of funds, Obama's administration settled for $3.4 Billion - a pure piss in the ocean, but typical of the U.S. government's "Trust Responsibility" to the Native American tribes/nations/charters for over 200 years.
The monies weren't for the "ancestor's worthless acres" - it was/is monies from the minerals/oils and lands that the Feds had put in "Trust" - supposedly only available to Native Americans due to one of the 371 Treaties signed and voided by the U.S. government.
If you wish to discuss this subject more, I'll be happy to assist.
I'm aware of the case and the plaintiffs had no real claim after losing in the court of appeals. As Frank points out, their own expert couldn't even state for certain that the Indians hadn't already received more money than they were owed. The settlement was malpractice, or would be if lawyers did this with a client than the federal government.
Frank was not involved in the case, so I would really doubt the intent/extent of his comments or knowledge of the case on "X".
His "opinion" is, in fact, his "opinion - nothing more than guessing.
at least you finally admit trmp is corrupt
Here Sean put this on your seed too. Jeffery Clark is the asswipe that wanted to help Trump overthrow our government after the 2020 election. When Trump wanted to name him AG after the election, other DOJ officials threatened to quit en masse and Trump had to back down. This is the kind of person that is on your side.
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This is the kind of person that is on your side.
So are the facts and not a guy with a giant totenkopf chest tattoo…..
Or a miserable piece of shit who wants to murder his opponents wife and kids, or someone who celebrates 9/11 with an unindicted co conspirator.
Years of claims of imaginary Nazi "dog whistles" to demonize people as fascists and Nazis and now they are lining up to defend a guy with a literal SS tattoo on his chest. Can't make this up.
But but but...Hegseeeeeeeeeeeetttthhhhhh.
Jefferey Clark was indicted in the Georgia election tampering case. These people have absolutely no shame.
The government did something similar with the Pigford cases, giving aways billions to whoever democratic trial lawyers could push through the door, no matter how ridiculous the claim. the fraud was so bad and brazen even the New York Times picked up on that one.