The increasingly suspicious pattern behind Trump's nominees-keen interest in confirming one official

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The Fix Analysis


The increasingly suspicious pattern behind Trump’s nominees


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/05/increasingly-suspicious-pattern-behind-trumps-nominees/?utm_term=.394b433d281d
House committee seeks Trump tax returns from IRS

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) on April 3 asked the IRS for six years of President Trump's tax returns. (Reuters)


By Aaron Blake
April 5 at 9:55 AM

President Trump is not a man in a hurry to fill top-level vacancies in his administration. He hasn’t nominated someone for 1 in every 5 top jobs. He has left “acting” officials in charge of the huge bureaucracies for months at a time without selecting replacements. He has yet to name ambassadors in some of the most important diplomatic outposts in the world.

But he has reportedly taken a keen interest in confirming one official: his pick for . . . IRS chief counsel?

It’s not difficult to surmise a very self-serving reason for that. And other recent Trump appointments only reinforce the possibility that his motives aren’t entirely pure here.

[White House maneuvers to block release of Trump’s tax returns]

The New York Times reported Thursday night that Trump pushed to put the IRS nomination of Michael J. Desmond on the fast track. Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos write that Trump asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in early February to take it up even before taking up Trump’s attorney general nomination of William P. Barr. That’s remarkable, given the gravity of the office Barr was being nominated to and his now-much-discussed role in overseeing the end of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.


The effort is problematic for a number of reasons. One is that Democrats at the time had been telegraphing a push to use an obscure federal law to force the IRS to share Trump’s long-hidden tax returns. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) previewed that battle shortly after Democrats won back the House in November. And given the law’s obscurity, there will almost definitely be a protracted legal battle that would involve the IRS chief counsel.

Another reason, as the Times notes, is that Desmond has personal ties to Trump:......................

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[Mc Mike]

1. Tax returns, twitler, tax returns.