Amanda Carpenter has spent years inside Republican politics. She wrote speeches for Jim DeMint. She ran communications for Ted Cruz. She is not some outsider howling at the gates. She is someone who has seen the machinery up close and is now telling anyone who will listen that the machinery has been repurposed into a cash extraction operation, and that the tools to dismantle it are already sitting in federal statute.
NPS (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHer argument, laid out in The Bulwark and in her work at Protect Democracy, is straightforward in a way that should make every Democrat who has spent the last year wringing their hands feel a little embarrassed. Trump can pardon his cronies. He cannot pardon their bank accounts. Forfeiture and seizure laws, the same ones prosecutors use to strip drug traffickers of their yachts and real estate, apply equally to the contractor who landed a no-bid deal after funneling money to the right people, the crypto intermediary who washed foreign cash through a presidential-branded token, and the fixer who got paid to make a regulatory problem disappear. A pardon wipes criminal liability. It does not restore seized assets. It does not refund forfeited proceeds. Taxpayers, Carpenter notes, are going to want their money back.
They should want it back with interest. The New York Times reported that a Chinese national gave $100 million to Trump’s cryptocurrency company. Carpenter asks the obvious question that apparently no one in a position of oversight is asking: why are Chinese nationals continuing to bribe the president of the United States, and does his soft-on-China posture have anything to do with it? The Trump family, through World Liberty Financial, has built what Carpenter calls a digital direct deposit for foreign actors with shady interests. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a payment rail with the president’s name on it.
Kidfly182 (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThen there is the rest. Protect Democracy has categorized Trump’s pardon pattern as an entirely new phenomenon they call “henchmen pardons,” designed not to correct injustice but to pre-clear loyalty crimes. The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion allowing the president to claim executive privilege over communications with “private advisors,” which is a polite way of saying the cone of silence now extends to whoever is whispering in his ear from outside government. The National Guard, 4,636 troops from 23 states, has been extended through Trump’s last day in office, with a $292 million contract for apartment-style lodging. Troops stationed in the capital until 2029. Trump toyed openly with declaring a national emergency to seize control of elections, and when a far-right media host pressed him on it, his response was “stranger things have happened.” He sneaked out of Turkey on a catering cart. The White House is presiding over what CATO itself describes as government ownership stakes in private companies, which is socialist-style takeover by any honest label, executed by an administration that spent years calling everyone else socialists.
Zeal Creative Studios / PexelsEvery one of these facts is a lever. Forfeiture statutes are a lever. Oversight subpoenas are a lever. The congressional power of the purse is a lever. State attorneys general have their own forfeiture authorities and their own grand juries. The point Carpenter is making, and the point that organizers have been making since January, is that a pardon is not a wall. It is a door that closes on one room in a house full of rooms. The money is in the other rooms. Follow the money. Seize the money. Return the money. And while you are at it, audit every contract, every crypto transaction, every catering cart that left a country club at midnight.
The corruption is brazen. The response does not have to be clever. It has to be relentless.