The week began with a purge in Washington. It ends with the start of the last season of
It’s about time Assange faces justice, wrote Frida Ghitis, arguing that the law shouldn’t shield him from prosecution, since he is more of an activist than a journalist. “Assange worked diligently to advance Putin’s goals. The Russian President wanted Hillary Clinton to lose, and Assange went out of his way to help…. Assange also made extra efforts to smear the Clinton campaign, advancing conspiracy theories he knew were false.”
Tax Day
Monday’s tax deadline comes amid a battle over access to President Donald Trump’s tax returns. “House Democrats may have found a silver bullet to get their hands on them,” wrote legal analyst Elie Honig, referring to “an obscure provision of the IRS code.” But Trump administration officials are balking — one said, “this is a hill and people would be willing to die on it.”
There’s another twist: Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, one of the front-runners in the 2020 race, has promised to release the past 10 years of his tax returns by Monday, but let slip that he is a millionaire. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too,” Sanders told The New York Times.
Some found Sanders’ statement incongruous, but Sarah Jones wasn’t troubled by it: “If Sanders is a hypocrite, it’s for delaying the release of his tax returns. The size of his bank account has nothing to do with it,” she wrote in New York magazine.
For many of the 150 million-plus American taxpayers, the new tax law has slightly simplified the tax filing process. Still, it’s plain that there are really two tax systems, wrote tax expert Edward McCaffery — one for the people whose paychecks are whittled down to fund the government and the other for the super-rich, like Trump, who can in some cases get away with paying zero tax.
“We have, quite simply, nowhere to hide…. The IRS already knows everything it needs to know about us. Taxes are withheld from our paychecks before we ever even get cash to pay for food or shelter or other necessities.”
It’s all about Stephen Miller
The simmering controversy over immigration and America’s southern border boiled over twice, both times involving White House senior adviser Stephen Miller. He was reported, in a story broken by The Washington Post, to be behind an aborted plan to send immigrants stopped at the southern border to sanctuary cities, including Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, to punish Democrats for opposing Trump’s border wall. (Trump himself confirmed the report via Twitter on Friday.)
Bill Carter was floored, not only by the report, but also by the fact that it didn’t dominate coverage: “A story that merited almost cartoon-character double-takes of astonishment… grabbed, at least for the beginnings of one news cycle, a portion of media attention, before likely getting thrown into the wash of what has become the daily recitation of the gobsmacking news out of the nation’s capital.” Though the White House plan is being called out as cruel and depraved, Carter noted, the controversy won’t get the sustained attention it deserves: “Astonishment will ebb. Media heads will snap back.”
Exit Kirstjen Nielsen
The first border story of the week was the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, part of what was cast as a “near-systematic” purge of the agency carried out at the urging of Miller.
Peter Bergen thought Nielsen was particularly miscast for the high-pressure role, where she lacked the stature of her predecessors while arguably faced with what he called the “toughest job in the government.
