Kook North Carolina ambulance-chasing lawyer Sidney Powell has a big money problem. After lying her ass off about Dominion Voting Systems for months, the company sued her for defamation to the tune of $1.3 billion. Yesterday her attorney's tried getting the suit thrown out by claiming that her crackpot assertions were obviously insane and should have been ignored-- "reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process... All the allegedly defamatory statements attributed to Defendants were made as part of the normal process of litigating issues of momentous significance and immense public interest." The motion to dismiss refers to Powell's statements as "inherently improbable" and "impossible."
“Reasonable people understand that the ‘language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact,'” her motion to dismiss argues. “It is likewise a ‘well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.'”
When Powell repeated her conspiracy theories on Fox News, Fox Business News and The Epoch Times, her lawyers claim, she was just informing the public about the ideas that she was advancing in her lawsuits.
...In addition to potentially staggering liabilities, Powell may be fighting for her law license. The state of Michigan and the city of Detroit have both asked a federal judge to refer Powell for disbarment proceedings, arguing that she defrauded the court by lying about witnesses and violated rules of professional ethics in an attack on U.S. democracy. Cataloguing Powell and Wood’s “lies,” “unhinged conspiracy theories,” and “fraud on the court,” Detroit created a detailed list of Powell and Wood’s courtroom and extrajudicial antics-- such as pining for martial law, fundraising through shadowy dark-money entities, and marshaling a secret witness code-named “Spyder” who later told a reporter that the legal team made him submit a false declaration.
All the cases she brought were thrown out of court-- including the US Supreme Court. Powell isn't the only one with big money problems. Dominion also filed $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. All three of them should probably plead insanity. Maybe Trump should too.
But there's a more serious money problem I'd like to discuss-- ours. Yesterday, we looked at how the wealthiest Americans have been cheating on their taxes and defrauding the government, especially over the last decade. Trump, in particular, did all he could to encourage and enable that kind of behavior-- not just by example, but also by decimating compliance officials at the IRS.
But there was more of that according to the Senate Finance Committee and reported today by Brian Faler for Politico. There will be a public hearing on the findings Thursday but yer bottom line is that "the average tax rate on U.S. corporations fell by more than half, to 7.8 percent, in the wake of Republicans’ 2017 tax overhaul... In a report sure to inflame the debate over corporate taxation, the official Joint Committee on Taxation also said businesses continue to make extensive use of offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to reduce their tax bills.
The report is a rare look inside the tax lives of multinational corporations in the aftermath of the 2017 tax law. Unlike outside researchers, JCT has access to companies’ private tax returns, giving them an unusually clear view into what they are doing.
The agency was only able to look at tax year 2018, though, because there is a yearslong lag in what companies report paying. Because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law in December 2017, it is unlikely many companies were able to make substantial moves in response to the law by 2018.
Still, the analysis provides some insight into the early effects of the legislation, which slashed the corporate rate, gave companies big deductions for investments and rewrote much of the U.S. tax system dealing with companies operating across borders.
The average tax rate actually paid by companies fell 51 percent-- to 7.8 percent, from 16 percent the previous year, the report says.