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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
It's not about what he thinks he'd gain by lying. It's what he thinks he'll lose by being truthful. The only reason to lie now is because he's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/11/26/day-676/
1/ The National Climate Assessment concludes that global warming is already "transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us." The findings from the landmark scientific report, issued by 13 federal agencies, are at odds with the Trump administration's environmental deregulation agenda, which Trump claims will lead to economic growth, and its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The report predicts that the effects of global warming could eliminate as much as 10% of the U.S. economy by the end of the century, and warns that humans must act aggressively now "to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades." The first report, released in November 2017, concluded that there is "no convincing alternative explanation" for the changing climate other than "human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases." Trump recently questioned the science of climate change, saying that "I don't know that it's man-made" and that the warming trend "could very well go back." (New York Times / Associated Press / Washington Post / CNN)
https://apnews.com/f9732784135c4f4a8963daff79e2583e
Trump: "I don't believe" the climate report. (Axios)
2/ The Trump administration claimed it reached a deal with Mexico's incoming government to hold asylum seekers in Mexico while their claims are processed through U.S. courts. The incoming Mexican government, however, denied that it reached an agreement with the Trump administration, known as Remain in Mexico, and insisted that talks of a deal were premature. (Washington Post / The Guardian / USA Today / NBC News)
3/ U.S. border agents fired tear gas on migrants protesting near the U.S.-Mexico border after some of them attempted to cross using a train border crossing. The fumes were carried by the breeze toward unarmed families hundreds of feet away. Mexico's Interior Ministry said around 500 migrants were involved in the march for faster processing of asylum claims for Central American migrants, but it was a smaller group of migrants who broke away and tried the train crossing. The border was shut down in both directions for several hours. (Associated Press / New York Times / CNN)
https://apnews.com/72efa4f1822241c2817a2fb6aa191fb4
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis declined last month to approve a Department of Homeland Security request to use military force to protect border agents on the southwest border. DHS instead went over Mattis' head and asked John Kelly to get approval for the use of lethal military force. Kelly is not in the military chain of command. (Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dhs-wouldnt-take-mattis-no-for-an-answer-on-lethal-force
4/ A judge denied Trump's request to throw out a lawsuit alleging he used the Trump Foundation for personal and political purposes. The suit alleges that Trump, along with Ivanka and Trump Jr., engaged in "extensive unlawful political coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions to benefit Mr. Trump's personal and business interests, and violations of basic legal obligations for nonprofit foundations." A lawyer for the Trump Foundation tried to have the case thrown out, arguing that a sitting president can't be sued and that the Trump family didn't knowingly do anything wrong. He claimed the suit was an act of political bias. (NBC News / Reuters / NBC News / CNN)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-trump-foundation-idUSKCN1NS26Z
poll/ 59% of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling race relations. 35% approve. (Quinnipiac)
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2587
poll/ 60% of American disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president. 38% approve. (Gallup)
Notables.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kushner-pushed-inflate-saudi-arms-deal-110-billion/story?id=59418244
Trump launched 238 drone strikes during his first two years in office on Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. In 2009 and 2010, "Drone President" Obama launched 186 drone strikes on Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Once in office, Trump relaxed the burden of proof requirements for targets put in place by the Obama administration, which counterterrorism experts say explains the increase in strikes. (Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ramped-up-drone-strikes-in-americas-shadow-wars
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to take up three cases challenging Trump's decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military. The move is an attempt to bypass federal appeals courts and bring the case directly to the high court for a decision. District courts across the country have so far prevented the policy from going into effect, and the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear arguments in early December. (CNN / Reuters / Washington Post / New York Times / Buzz Feed News)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-transgender-idUSKCN1NS292
Jerome Corsi rejected a deal from Robert Mueller to plead guilty to one count of perjury. He claimed he was forgetful when investigators asked him whether he knew beforehand that Wiki Leaks was going to publish emails stolen from Democratic computers during the campaign. He said he did not want to plead guilty to intentionally lying. (Washington Post / New York Times)
George Papadopoulos was ordered to start his 14-day prison sentence today for lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe, Papdopoulos has asked to delay the start of his sentence while a constitutional challenge to the special counsel's investigation of Russian election interference remains unresolved. (CNN / New York Times / Washington Post)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/25/politics/papadopoulos-request-denied-must-report-prison/index.html
The head of Russian military intelligence died "after a long and serious illness." In March, the Trump administration sanctioned Igor Korobov, citing the GRU's involvement "in interfering in the 2016 U.S. election through cyber-enabled activities." (Meduza / The Guardian)
The Office of Special Counsel is looking into whether acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from accepting political contributions. According to the Office of Special Counsel guidance, "penalties for Hatch Act violations range from reprimand or suspension to removal and debarment from federal employment and may include a civil fine." The office has no connection to the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21/politics/matt-whitaker-2014-senate-campaign-donations/index.html
The White House deputy communications chief will continue to receive payments from his $8.4 million Fox News severance package over the next two years while being paid by the White House at the same time. Bill Shine's financial disclosure form shows he will also receive a bonus and stock options package worth about $3.5 million this year and again in 2019. Shine was accused in multiple lawsuits of enabling and helping to cover up alleged sexual harassment by Fox News executives. (Hollywood Reporter / Daily Beast / USA Today / Associated Press)
Edited by sgamer82 on Nov 26th 2018 at 6:14:14 AM
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This explains Mattis' 'no guns' thing after the fact.
1/ Today Mueller filed a status report indicating that "Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel's Office on a variety of subject matters."
2/ The purpose of the status report is to keep the judge in one of Manafort's cases updated on the status of what is happening with Manafort's cooperation, so she can know when to begin to start the process of sentencing him.
3/ In this case (in the District of Columbia), Manafort pleaded guilty shortly before trial was set to begin and agreed to cooperate with Mueller. As Mueller points out in the filing, he was required to "fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly" cooperate.
4/ This meant that Manafort couldn't cooperate against some people and not others. He also couldn't hide certain information or lie about certain information while truthfully providing other information. Cooperation with federal prosecutors is an "all or nothing" affair.
5/ Today's filing indicates that Mueller believes he can prove that Manafort lied on multiple occasions. It's worth noting that we knew of at least one unusual issue with Manafort's cooperation—Trump's lawyers said Manafort's lawyers were updating them on Manafort's actions.
6/ That is very highly unusual, because typically flippers are completely on the government's team. Today's filing could mean that Manafort was trying to protect Trump, or he could be trying to shield another person or entity, or trying to hide wealth from prosecutors.
7/ You might be asking yourself—why does it matter so much to prosecutors that a flipper cooperate 100%, on all matters, in a truthful way? As it is, flippers are witnesses that it is hard for juries to trust. For instance, Manafort has already been convicted of fraud.
8/ The government needs to be assured that what he's telling them now is complete and accurate, and that they can represent to a jury that they could trust what Manafort has to say. Clearly they are not able to do that at this time. So what does this mean for Manafort?
9/ Manafort is now in a worse position than if he didn't cooperate in the first place and just pleaded guilty. Mueller can now invalidate the cooperation deal and has indicated in the report that he *has* broken the deal.
10/ So on top of pleading guilty, Mueller will "file a detailed sentencing submission" that "sets forth the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement." So the judge will learn of Manafort's efforts to deceive Mueller and the FBI.
11/ When sentencing a defendant, judges have very broad discretion to consider nearly everything. Federal law mandates that judges consider "the history and characteristics of the defendant" and the "nature and circumstances of the offense." Those are very broad factors.
12/ You can expect the judge, who has already had some harsh word for Manafort when he violated his bond conditions, to take this conduct into account at sentencing. It undercuts Manafort's acceptance of responsibility and demonstrates his lack of respect for the law.
13/ (As it turns out, promoting "respect for the law" is another sentencing factor the judge must consider under federal law.) So you can expect a very harsh sentence for Manafort. Some of you may wonder—could Manafort now change his mind and reverse course?
14/ The short answer is "probably not." Today is not the first time Manafort's attorneys were made aware of Mueller's views on his cooperation. There was a prior status report that asked the judge to delay the report until today, suggesting this issue was being discussed.
15/ In addition, Manafort's attorneys were involved in drafting this report and said Manafort "believes" he has provided truthful information. So now let's get to one of the questions may of you are asking (including @marty_lederman): Isn't Manafort expecting a pardon?
16/ I thought Manafort was expecting a pardon before he pleaded guilty. In fact, his decision to go to trial in the Virginia case (resulting in a guilty conviction) seemed logical to me mostly if he expected a pardon. The plea deal suggested that Manafort wasn't counting on one.
17/ Could Manafort have been promised a pardon in exchange for lying to the special counsel? Sure, but offering anything of value to someone in exchange for the commission of a federal crime is itself a federal crime.
18/ What if it wasn't a quid pro quo, and a pardon was hinted at by Trump's lawyers but not explicitly in exchange for anything? That would be a much harder case to prove as well as a case that might involve a legal challenge because it is, as far as I know, unprecedented.
19/ Could Manafort have lied in the hopes of obtaining a pardon? Yes. Could he nonetheless receive a pardon? Sadly, yes. He would still be subject to state criminal prosecution, although lying to the FBI is not a state crime. There are relevant state crimes like tax evasion.
20/ Regardless of whether Manafort cooperated, or tried to cooperate, a pardon could have come nonetheless. Trump seemed to have a very positive view of Manafort before the guilty verdict in the Virginia trial.
21/ But Mueller still knows everything Manafort told him. Would he use Manafort as a witness? He could try, but would have to immunize him and potentially get state immunity depending on what he asks. Most likely what Manafort told Mueller will be useful solely to generate leads.
22/ Lastly, Manafort did hurt himself in another way—by committing new crimes in late 2018, he opened himself up to prosecution for those crimes up and until late 2023 if he isn't pardoned for lying to the FBI and Mueller during his cooperation.
23/ If Trump loses in 2020, you could imagine a Democratic administration deciding to prosecute Manafort for those crimes, if the pardon only covered the crimes that he was already convicted for. /end
This is a stunt for publicity. I'm not impressed.
Cox leads in CA 21!
(Link is to the Fresno Bee.)
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I'll admit not knowing all that much about tax law, or how the house of reps works exactly, but I think all they are passing is a mandate for what gets passed thru the house.
Its not a new law that needs both houses to sign off on it, it is making it a rule that any tax provision that fits that parameter now needs to get 3/5th of the house's vote to pass thru the house. I don't think the republican controlled senate has any control over that.
I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?Somewhat less sanguine, while the gubernatorial candidate John Cox lost the state miserably, he did actually win in many congressional districts that Republicans lost
. To me this sounds like some of the pickups in California House seats are ephemeral; once Trump is gone Democrats will lose them all again. It also sounds to me like it wasn't just Trump that was the problem for Congressional Republicans in California but also other Congressional Republicans and their fake tax cuts, economic growth that only helps a selected few and so on.
Swanpride's making a fortune off those cookies, I say. Lucky her.
That said, it's about time some real setbacks start rolling in for the GOP. Especially given that under Trump it's effectively the party of the White Backlash and Racial Hatred.
A rather interesting article about Hate Crimes in the United States since 2008 -
The State of Hate
.
It's not surprising with Manafort. He can't accept any level of failure or consequences to his actions so he keeps trying to dig himself out of his current problems and does so by doubling down on the same crimes he's done. So he went from a very posh prison cell to a crappy one and now potentially is going to lose whatever plea deal he has.
I also assume he thought since Trump isn't going to be impeached he might be rescued.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I really do think he's lying because he's afraid of the consequences if he doesn't. Manafort was working for Russia even before Trump's Presidency was a thing on the horizon. He doesn't answer to Trump, he answers to Putin.
Bad things happen to people that try to roll over on Putin.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 27th 2018 at 8:13:15 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.@Swanpride and any others that may be interested:
The two NY Congressional races seem to have been settled during the past week and it looks like a split: Brindisi defeated incumbent Republican Claudia Tenney, (Brindisi is likely to be a conservative Democrat, and received several endorsements from local Republicans who were put off by Tenney’s tendency to shoot off at the mouth) and Republican Chris Collins appears to have narrowly kept his seat in the other election, although I’m sure Democrats are already eyeing the seat since Collins will go on trial for illegal stock market trading before the next scheduled election.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |@Septimus: its interesting, because the article points out that the Rep controlled Congress passed few bills representing campaign promises by Trump (they passed other things). It makes the so-called "Trumpization" look skin deep. None of these pro-Trump candidates and elected officials actually support Trump or his agenda, they're just using him.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.The Nation: The Pentagon has been committing massive accounting fraud.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the Do D should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the Do D was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.
As Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a frequent critic of the Do D’s financial practices, said on the Senate floor in September 2017, the Pentagon’s long-standing failure to conduct a proper audit reflects “twenty-six years of hard-core foot-dragging” on the part of the Do D, where “internal resistance to auditing the books runs deep.” In 1990, Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required all departments and agencies of the federal government to develop auditable accounting systems and submit to annual audits. Since then, every department and agency has come into compliance—except the Pentagon.
Now, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the Do D’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the Do D’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. Do D has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the Do D the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former Do D officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.
“If the DOD were being honest, they would go to Congress and say, ‘All these proposed budgets we’ve been presenting to you are a bunch of garbage,’ ” said Jack Armstrong, who spent more than five years in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General as a supervisory director of audits before retiring in 2011.
The fraud works like this. When the Do D submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year’s financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the Do D does not always spend all of the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such moneys to other parts of the Do D’s budget.
Veteran Pentagon staffers say that this practice violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution, which stipulates that
- No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.
The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon.
The plugs can be staggering in size. In fiscal year 2015, for example, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army. Yet Do D financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs. Most of these plugs “lack[ed] supporting documentation,” in the bland phrasing of the department’s internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General. In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.
In this way, the Do D propels US military spending higher year after year, even when the country is not fighting any major wars, says Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a former Pentagon whistle-blower. Spinney’s revelations to Congress and the news media about wildly inflated Pentagon spending helped spark public outrage in the 1980s. “They’re making up the numbers and then just asking for more money each year,” Spinney told The Nation. The funds the Pentagon has been amassing over the years through its bogus bookkeeping maneuvers “could easily be as much as $100 billion,” Spinney estimated.
Indeed, Congress appropriated a record amount—$716 billion—for the Do D in the current fiscal year of 2019. That was up $24 billion from fiscal year 2018’s $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from fiscal year 2017’s $686 billion. Such largesse is what drives US military spending higher than the next ten highest-spending countries combined, added Spinney. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a full-scale war the United States is currently fighting is in Afghanistan, where approximately 15,000 US troops are deployed—only 2.8 percent as many as were in Vietnam at the height of that war.
The Do D’s accounting practices appear to be an intentional effort to avoid accountability, says Armstrong. “A lot of the plugs—not all, but a substantial portion—are used to force general-ledger receipts to agree with the general budget reports, so what’s in the budget reports is basically left up to people’s imagination,” Armstrong says, adding, “Did the Do D improperly spend funds from one appropriated purpose on another? Who can tell?”
“The United States government collects trillions of dollars each year for the purpose of funding essential functions, including national-security efforts at the Defense Department,” Senator Grassley told The Nation. “When unelected bureaucrats misuse, mismanage and misallocate taxpayer funds, it not only takes resources away from vital government functions, it weakens citizens’ faith and trust in their government.”
This Pentagon accounting fraud is déjà vu all over again for Spinney. Back in the 1980s, he and a handful of other reform-minded colleagues exposed how the Do D used a similar accounting trick to inflate Pentagon spending—and to accumulate money for “off-the-books” programs. “Do D routinely over-estimated inflation rates for weapons systems,” Spinney recalled. “When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury, as required by law, but slipped them into something called a ‘Merged Surplus Account,'” he said.
“In that way, the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion” (about $120 billion in today’s money), Spinney added. He believes that similar tricks are being used today to fund secret programs, possibly including US Special Forces activity in Niger. That program appears to have been undertaken without Congress’s knowledge of its true nature, which only came to light when a Special Forces unit was ambushed there last year, resulting in the deaths of four US soldiers.
“Because of the plugs, there is no auditable way to track Pentagon funding and spending,” explains Asif Khan of the Government Accountability Office, the Congress’s watchdog on the federal bureaucracy. “It’s crucial in auditing to have a reliable financial record for prior years in order to audit the books for a current year,” notes Khan, the head of the National Security Asset Management unit at GAO. Plugs and other irregularities help explain why the Pentagon has long been at or near the top of the GAO’s list of “high risk” agencies prone to significant fraud, waste, and abuse, he adds.
The Nation submitted detailed written questions and requested interviews with senior officials in the Defense Department before publishing this article. Only public-affairs staff would speak on the record. In an e-mailed response, Christopher Sherwood of the Do D’s Public Affairs office denied any accounting impropriety. Any transfer of funds between one budgetary account and another “requires a reprogramming action” by Congress, Sherwood wrote, adding that any such transfers amounting to more than 1 percent of the official Do D budget would require approval by “all four defense congressional committees.”
The scale and workings of the Pentagon’s accounting fraud began to be ferreted out last year by a dogged research team led by Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics specializing in state and local government finance at Michigan State University. Skidmore and two graduate students spent months poring over Do D financial statement reviews done by the department’s Office of Inspector General. Digging deep into the OIG’s report on the Army’s 2015 financial statement, the researchers found some peculiar information. Appendix C, page 27, reported that Congress had appropriated $122 billion for the US Army that year. But the appendix also seems to report that the Army had received a cash deposit from the US Treasury of $794.8 billion. That sum was more than six times larger than Congress had appropriated—indeed, it was larger than the entire Pentagon budget for the year. The same appendix showed that the Army had accounts payable (accounting lingo for bills due) totaling $929.3 billion.
“I wondered how you could possibly get those kinds of adjustments out of a $122 billion budget,” Skidmore recalled. “I thought, initially, ‘This is absurd!’ And yet all the [Office of Inspector General] seemed to do was say, ‘Here are these plugs.’ Then, nothing. Even though this kind of thing should be a red flag, it just died. So we decided to look further into it.”
To make sure that fiscal year 2015 was not an anomaly, Skidmore and his graduate students expanded their inquiry, examining OIG reports on Pentagon financial records stretching back to 1998. Time and again, they found that the amounts of money reported as having flowed into and out of the Defense Department were gargantuan, often dwarfing the amounts Congress had appropriated: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012, plus amounts in the hundreds of billions in other years.
In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion. And that $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.
To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion. The disappearance of thousands of records adds further uncertainty. The upshot is that no one can know for sure how much of that $21 trillion was, or was not, being spent legitimately.
That may even apply to the Pentagon’s senior leadership. A good example of this was Donald Rumsfeld, the notorious micromanaging secretary of defense during the Bush/Cheney administration. On September 10, 2001 Rumsfeld called a dramatic press conference at the Pentagon to make a startling announcement. Referring to the huge military budget that was his official responsibility, he said, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” This shocking news that an amount more than five times as large as the Pentagon’s FY 2001 budget of an estimated $313 billion was lost or even just “untrackable” was—at least for one 24-hour news cycle—a big national story, as was Secretary Rumsfeld’s comment that America’s adversary was not China or Russia, but rather was “closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” Equally stunning was Rumsfeld’s warning that the tracking down of those missing transactions “could be…a matter of life and death.” No Pentagon leader had ever before said such a thing, nor has anyone done so since then. But Rumsfeld’s exposé died quickly as, the following morning on September 11, four hijacked commercial jet planes plowed full speed into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Since that time, there has been no follow-up and no effort made to find the missing money, either.
Recalling his decades inside the Pentagon, Spinney emphasized that the slippery bookkeeping and resulting fraudulent financial statements are not a result of lazy Do D accountants. “You can’t look at this as an aberration,” he said. “It’s business as usual. The goal is to paralyze Congress.”
That has certainly been the effect. As one congressional staffer with long experience investigating Pentagon budgets, speaking on background because of the need to continue working with Do D officials, told The Nation, “We don’t know how the Pentagon’s money is being spent. We know what the total appropriated funding is for each year, but we don’t know how much of that funding gets spent on the intended programs, what things actually cost, whether payments are going to the proper accounts. If this kind of stuff were happening in the private sector, people would be fired and prosecuted.”
Do D officials have long insisted that their accounting and financial practices are proper. For example, the Office of Inspector General has attempted to explain away the absurdly huge plugs in Do D’s financial statements as being a common, widely accepted accounting practice in the private sector.
When this reporter asked Bridget Serchak, at the time a press spokesperson for the inspector general’s office, about the Army’s $6.5 billion in plugs for fiscal year 2015, she replied, “Adjustments are made to the Army General Fund financial statement data…for various reasons such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts and reconciling balances between systems…. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion made to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable.”
There is a grain of truth in Serchak’s explanation, but only a grain.
As an expert in government budgeting, Skidmore confirmed that it is accepted practice to insert adjustments into budget reports to make both sides of a ledger agree. Such adjustments can be deployed in cases where receipts have been lost—in a fire, for example—or where funds were incorrectly classified as belonging to one division within a company rather than another. “But those kinds of adjustments should be the exception, not the rule, and should amount to only a small percentage of the overall budget,” Skidmore said.
For its part, the inspector general’s office has blamed the fake numbers found in many Do D financial statements on the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), a huge Do D accounting operation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In review after review, the inspector general’s office has charged that DFAS has been making up “unsupported” figures to plug into Do D’s financial statements, inventing ledger entries to back up those invented numbers, and sometimes even “removing” transaction records that could document such entries. Nevertheless, the inspector general has never advocated punitive steps against DFAS officials—a failure that suggests Do D higher-ups tacitly approve of the deceptions.
Skidmore repeatedly requested explanations for these bookkeeping practices, he says, but the Pentagon response was stonewalling and concealment. Even the inspector general’s office, whose publicly available reports had been criticizing these practices for years, refused to answer the professor’s questions. Instead, that office began removing archived reports from its website. (Skidmore and his grad students, anticipating that possibility, had already downloaded the documents, which were eventually were restored to public access under different UR Ls.)
Nation inquiries have met with similar resistance. Case in point: A recent Do D OIG report on a US Navy financial statement for FY 2017. Although OIG audit reports in previous years were always made available online without restriction or censorship, this particular report suddenly appeared in heavily redacted form—not just the numbers it contained, but even its title! Only bureaucratic sloppiness enabled one to see that the report concerned Navy finances: Censors missed some of the references to the Navy in the body of the report, as shown in the passages reproduced here.
A request to the Office of Inspector General to have the document uncensored was met with the response: “It was the Navy’s decision to censor it, and we can’t do anything about that.” At The Nation’s request, Senator Grassley’s office also asked the OIG to uncensor the report. Again, the OIG refused. A Freedom Of Information Act request by The Nation to obtain the uncensored document awaits a response.
The GAO’s Khan was not surprised by the failure of this year’s independent audit of the Pentagon. Success, he points out, would have required “a good-faith effort from Do D officials, but to date that has not been forthcoming.” He added, “As a result of partial audits that were done in 2016, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have over 1,000 findings from auditors about things requiring remediation. The partial audits of the 2017 budget were pretty much a repeat. So far, hardly anything has been fixed.”
Let that sink in for a moment: As things stand, no one knows for sure how the biggest single-line item in the US federal budget is actually being spent. What’s more, Congress as a whole has shown little interest in investigating this epic scandal. The absurdly huge plugs never even get asked about at Armed Services and Budget Committee hearings.
One interested party has taken action—but it is action that’s likely to perpetuate the fraud. The normally obscure Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board sets the accounting standards for all federal agencies. Earlier this year, the board proposed a new guideline saying that agencies that operate classified programs should be permitted to falsify figures in financial statements and shift the accounting of funds to conceal the agency’s classified operations. (No government agency operates more classified programs than the Department of Defense, which includes the National Security Agency.) The new guideline became effective on October 4, just in time for this year’s end-of-year financial statements.
So here’s the situation: We have a Pentagon budget that a former DOD internal-audit supervisor, Jack Armstrong, bluntly labels “garbage.” We have a Congress unable to evaluate each new fiscal year’s proposed Pentagon budget because it cannot know how much money was actually spent during prior years. And we have a Department of Defense that gives only lip service to fixing any of this. Why should it? The status quo has been generating ever-higher Do D budgets for decades, not to mention bigger profits for Boeing, Lockheed, and other military contractors.
The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future.
As President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who retired from the military as a five-star general after leading Allied forces to victory in World War II, said in a 1953 speech, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What would Eisenhower say today about a Pentagon that deliberately misleads the people’s representatives in Congress in order to grab more money for itself while hunger, want, climate breakdown, and other ills increasingly afflict the nation?

Details to come soon.
Edit: A few small details.
I didn’t think it was possible, but he actually managed to somehow dig himself even deeper than the massive hole to China that he’s already in. That’s actually rather impressive.
Edited by megaeliz on Nov 26th 2018 at 7:45:31 AM