US-Mexico talks: Agreement to avoid tariffs reached, says Trump

Mexico has agreed to take “unprecedented steps” to help stem the flow of migrants to the US in order to avoid trade tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump revealed that a deal had been reached to suspend the tariffs “indefinitely” in a series of tweets.

He had threatened to implement import duties of 5%, rising every month, unless Mexico acted to curb migration.

The tariffs were due to come into effect on Monday.

Minority rule: Michigan loophole allows activists to push through abortion bans

A state law that foregoes a vote if a proposal has signatures from just 4% of the electorate is being used by special interest groups

Tom Perkins in Detroit

Sat 8 Jun 2019 07.00 BST

Michigan is a state in which Democrats drubbed Republicans in the 2018 midterms, a Democrat governor has promised to veto anti-abortion legislation, and polling shows the population is solidly supportive of reproductive rights.

Still, it could soon effectively ban abortion.

Conservative activists here with Right To Life and the Michigan Heartbeat Coalition are planning to team up with Republican lawmakers to exploit a constitutional loophole that allows groups to use citizen ballot initiatives to dodge a governor’s veto and implement anti-abortion laws without putting them to voters.

Sudan suspension, African Union’s bold move against strongmen

The African Union’s suspension of Sudan over a paramilitary massacre of civilians this week has been welcomed by the international community. But can the bloc succeed in delivering African solutions to African problems?

Misinformation swirling around Dutch teenager’s death ignites debate over euthanasia

By Eliza Mackintosh, CNN

Updated 0800 GMT (1600 HKT) June 8, 2019

A Google walkout organizer just quit, saying she was branded with a “scarlet letter”

Claire Stapleton’s disillusionment with Google captures America’s disillusionment with Silicon Valley.

By Alexia Fernández Campbell @AlexiaCampbell alexia@vox.com 

An employee who helped organize the worldwide Google walkout last year says she’s quitting — because her managers have been punishing her for her activism.

“I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” wrote Claire Stapleton in a note she shared with her colleagues this week and published Friday on Medium. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”

CHINA BANS THE INTERCEPT AND OTHER NEWS SITES IN “CENSORSHIP BLACK FRIDAY”

June 8 2019

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT appears to have launched a major new internet crackdown, blocking the country’s citizens from accessing The Intercept’s website and those of at least seven other Western news organizations.

On Friday, people in China began reporting that they could not access the websites of The Intercept, The Guardian, the Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC News, the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, and Breitbart News.

It is unclear exactly when the censorship came into effect or the reasons for it. But Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Chinese authorities have reportedly increased levels of online censorship to coincide with the event.

Koch Bro Bill was the only one of the 4 to support Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio, hosting lavish campaign fundraisers that included such luminaries a Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary already in hot water for being a general asshole, a grifter, a mooch, and unilaterally withholding Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’s Tax Returns from exactly the same Congressional Committees that are specifically legal authorized to have them, which isn’t even his job anyway- it belongs to IRS Commissioner, Chuck Rettig.

“Koch Bro” is the lede and David Cay Johnston kind of misses it. Where Bill lives doesn’t really matter.

IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office
By David Cay Johnston, DC Report
June 6, 2019

<

Bill Koch has enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars of untaxed profits from his carbon-based businesses, having shifted profits earned in the United States to a subsidiary in the Bahamas. A 2016 whistleblower complaint prompted an IRS criminal investigation, but the IRS halted all communication with the whistleblower’s attorneys shortly after Trump became president.
…
Koch’s businesses withheld critical documents, stymying IRS auditors. We’ll also publish the contents of the June 2017 email that signaled the IRS had stopped pursuing the complaint against Koch’s businesses, five months after Trump took office.
…
Before auditing two years of Koch’s Oxbow Carbon LLC business tax returns in 2014, a team of Internal Revenue Service auditors sent routine requests for information to determine whether additional taxes were due. For simplicity we will refer to the various companies as Oxbow America and Oxbow Bahamas.

The IRS was supplied with innocuous documents. The IRS was also given a study by the Grant Thornton accounting firm that blessed Koch shifting Oxbow money abroad, based on inaccurate information Oxbow provided.

IRS auditors asked in writing for other documents they considered crucial to a proper examination. These documents would explain how Oxbow America shifted profits earned in America by mixing and selling petroleum coke to Oxbow Bahamas, where no income tax would be owed.
…
Oxbow America executives told the IRS auditors that their requests were “overly broad…burdensome and resource intensive,” the Koch Papers reveal. The papers show that Bill Koch participated in meetings, emails and phone calls in which the IRS was also told that documents could not be located or did not exist.

After initially finding grounds for a criminal investigation more than two years ago, the IRS appears to have abandoned it.

Another Koch Papers document directs Oxbow America’s executives to “do whatever possible” to conceal profitability data the IRS auditors requested.

The IRS audit team never saw many requested documents. Without having seen these important documents, the IRS closed its audits in 2014, accepting the 2011 and 2012 business tax returns as filed.

Near the end of the audit, Charles Middleton, then the company’s chief tax executive and a specialist in international transactions, grew suspicious about assertions that the requested documents were too hard to find. One day he sat down at an Oxbow computer. He logged into a database that Oxbow America had paid a vendor to create.

With a few keystrokes Middleton located all the documents. Middleton promptly notified Koch and other top executives.

The reaction was swift.

“When I suggested Oxbow take action to correct the false statements and amend the fraudulent 2010 tax return, I was immediately removed from the audit team and prohibited from having further contact with the IRS,” Middleton wrote, not saying who issued the order. His attorney, William Cohan, said such action would not have occurred unless Bill Koch directed it or agreed to it.

Once the IRS formally closed the two audits, Oxbow America fired Middleton. The company, in a statement, said Middleton was fired for cause without specifying the reason.
…
The documents include internal discussion about whether the tax strategy is lawful and the prospect of massive penalties if IRS auditors understood how profits earned in America were siphoned out of the country. Some executives and advisers expressed concern that even if the strategy might work legally, it was not being done with the precision required to lawfully slip profits past the IRS.

Middleton calculated that our federal government is now due $350 million in taxes, penalties and interest for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Shifting Oxbow America profits out of the United States continued at least through late 2015, the Koch Papers show. There is no reason to believe the tax practices stopped.

Assuming the strategy is still in place, my analysis of the Koch Papers and other documents indicates that our federal government is owed hundreds of millions of taxes, penalties and interest.
…
Middleton’s whistleblower claims detailed what he says were “tax crimes” both in the offshore tax strategy and hiding documents from IRS auditors. His first claim was filed in 2016, his most recent in May 2018.

“Substantial false, fraudulent and misleading information was provided to the IRS” about shifting of American profits to the Bahamas, Middleton told the IRS Whistleblower Office in 2016.

The Koch papers estimate that the shift would eliminate $21 million annually in federal income taxes. Other documents cite $40 million to $50 million annually of taxes that would not be paid if the strategy worked. Any fraud penalties would add 75 percent to those sums.

“Oxbow fraudulently withheld material documents properly requested by the IRS” during the audit of its 2011 and 2012 tax returns and, Middleton wrote, “Oxbow knowingly made false statements to IRS personnel.”

“I was the Senior Vice-President of tax for Oxbow at the time of the audits,” he added. “When the false statements were initially made, I was unaware they were false. I subsequently discovered documents that established with 100% certainty that Oxbow willfully made false and misleading statements.”

“Oxbow’s response to many of these” document requests “was to deny the existence of responsive documents despite the fact that many responsive documents existed and Oxbow’s senior leadership … were aware of these documents,” Middleton wrote, naming Bill Koch and four other senior executives.

Middleton listed 15 documents. He called them “a small percentage of the documents fraudulently withheld from the IRS. The total of documents withheld numbers in the hundreds or thousands. I have enclosed some of these documents with this submission; there are many more in my possession and on Oxbow’s computers.”

Few, if any, of the documents are protected by attorney-client privilege, he wrote, referring to broad claims of privilege the company made during the audit to withhold documents from the IRS. One key document, Middleton wrote, was written by a nonlawyer and was widely distributed within the company, which would invalidate any claim of attorney-client privilege.

One of the many pregnant observations in Middleton’s report is that “Oxbow chose to ignore the advice” of one of its outside lawyers, who was also terminated. A consultant report stated that the “Rotterdam tax people are very aware of DUTCH law and fear that when a contract transfer is made Oxbow may be exposed to significant tax exposure in Holland.”
…
The whole claim to tax-free profits rests on the assumption that the Bahamas was the main center of business activity and that Oxbow Bahamas is a Swiss company doing business in Nassau.

The Swiss government issued a formal ruling that Oxbow Bahamas isn’t subject to Swiss tax because it doesn’t do business or make any money in Switzerland. Middleton says that means it cannot benefit from the United States-Swiss tax treaty, an issue that the IRS has never tested in court even though many companies rely on that treaty to reduce or eliminate taxes on their profits.

Oxbow America’s operations earned $229 million of profit in 2009, the year before the Bahamas gambit began. By 2015, the parent company reported losing money in the United States.

The tax avoidance work appears to have been very sloppy.

Oxbow Bahamas did not pay for its offices, about 1,200 square feet in a Nassau shopping center where three to five people worked, some part-time. The office and staff are much too small to handle just the invoicing and record keeping for hundreds of millions of dollars of petroleum coke deals, never mind all the other work that keeps more than 300 people employed by Oxbow America.

Not even a pound of petcoke was produced in the Bahamas. Most of the millions of tons of petcoke, one of the dirtiest carbon fuels, came from American oil refineries, was processed and mixed in the U.S. and sold by American sales agents.

Middleton told the IRS that much of the executive time recorded on the books of Oxbow Bahamas books was really golfing trips and that one key executive spent at most 15 days a year working there, while another worked from New York.

“I’ve always wanted to be the biggest real estate man to come down the pike,” Leona Helmsley.

Thus the need for Congressional Investigation to gather the information necessary to draft legislation and inform debate, the inherent Article I subpoena power to compel testimony and the production of documents.

Giuliani is so screwed.

House Dems Preparing Investigation of Rudy Giuliani for Ukraine Shenanigans
by Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast
06.07.19

Top congressional Democrats are actively discussing opening a probe into Rudy Giuliani for his overseas political and consulting work, including a recent attempt to uncover dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a source with direct knowledge tells The Daily Beast.

The contours of a potential probe are still under consideration. But it would likely look at whether Giuliani’s relationships with foreign politicos interfered or intersected with American foreign-policy efforts.

Asked about the prospect of lawmakers investigating his foreign work, President Donald Trump’s lawyer had a defiant response: Bring it on.

“If they want to come after me, I gladly accept it, because we could just make the Biden stuff bigger news,” Giuliani told The Daily Beast. “Do it! Give me a chance to give a couple speeches about it and hold a press conference. I’d love that… I think it’d be a fun fight. I’ll just compare it to all the things they’re not investigating… If they want, we can have a big fight over this.”

The former New York City mayor insisted there was “nothing illegal or unethical about” any of his overseas trips or foreign work in the Trump era, and accused Democrats on Capitol Hill of “trashing the Constitution” and potentially engaging in the “biggest misuse” of congressional power “since Joe McCarthy.”

The news of a potential Giuliani probe comes as Democrats on the Hill are attempting to ramp up their investigations into President Trump. Several congressional committees, including judiciary and oversight, have called on former Trump officials to cooperate in their investigations. But the White House has stonewalled those efforts, refusing to acquiesce to witness-interview and document-production requests.

In response, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY) plans on introducing a resolution next week that would allow committees to sue the Trump administration and witnesses from the Mueller probe who do not comply with subpoenas, according to Democratic aides.

Giuliani would be, perhaps, the highest-profile investigative target to date. The president’s lawyer ultimately canceled his trip to Ukraine amid a backlash from Democrats and some disapproval from Republicans. But prior to that, he’d been open about his plans to go to the country to help uncover information on the origins of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and to encourage investigators to look into whether Biden had influenced a case that had been brought against his eldest son. As The New York Times first reported, Giuliani was seeking information on the involvement of Hunter Biden in an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. During the Obama administration, Vice President Biden had pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office controlled the inquiries into the company, on which Biden’s son had a seat on the board.

Giuliani, much of pro-Trump media, and President Trump himself had tried to frame the Biden story as a major political scandal. But it has since fizzled out. A Bloomberg News report noted that testimony from a former Ukrainian official and internal documents did not match the timeline or narrative that Biden had intervened to benefit Hunter. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close [the] cases,” the former official said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
…
In addition to Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine, congressional Democrats are also said to be interested in the trips he has taken to Armenia and Romania.

Giuliani sent a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in August 2018 recommending changes to the country’s anti-corruption program. The contents of that letter diverged from the official State Department stance on the issue. He told Politico that he was paid for writing the letter by a global consulting firm. In October 2018, Giuliani appeared in Armenia, reportedly invited there by an Armenian businessman who lives in Russia. At the time, Giuliani said he was in Armenia as a “private citizen.” He spoke at a conference alongside a sanctioned Russian official.

Shenanigans. That’s one way to put it I guess. Felonies? Disbarrable Acts? Torts?

The thing to remember about Giuliani is he’s mean to the bone and he’s also stupid.