Are you better off than you were four years ago? The people at Caterpillar sure are. From The New York Times:
In December 2018, a team of federal law enforcement agents flew to Amsterdam to interview a witness in a yearslong criminal investigation into Caterpillar, which had avoided billions of dollars of income taxes by shifting profits to a Swiss subsidiary. A few hours before the interview was set to begin, the agents were startled to hear that the Justice Department was telling them to cancel the long-planned meeting.
The interview was never rescheduled, and the investigation would limp along for another few years before culminating, in late 2022, with a victory for Caterpillar. The Internal Revenue Service told the giant industrial company to pay less than a quarter of the back taxes the government once claimed that Caterpillar owed and did not impose any penalties. The criminal investigation was closed without charges being filed — and even without agents having the chance to review records seized from the company.
It was like...magic!
No, really, it was. Someone made the IRS disappear. David Copperfield only pretended to make the Statue of Liberty vanish. This was no illusion. It was the genuine article, and as Steve Martin's tent-show evangelist from the movie Leap of Faith tells a teenager he seemed to have cured,
"I've been pulling one kind of scam or another since I was your age, and if there's one thing I know it's how to spot the genuine article because that's what you've got to watch out for. Not the cops, you can always get around the cops. But the one thing you can never, ever get around is the genuine article, and you, kid, are the genuine article."
And the magician in this case, although he had help, was someone with whom we all became familiar.
In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Kind of an outdated CV there, NYT. Barr's entire career in the legal end of Republican politics indeed has consisted of making inconvenient things disappear. He did make Iran-Contra disappear on behalf of Poppy Bush. But the last administration* turned Barr into a assembly-line magician. Hell, he auditioned for the Attorney General's job by citing his record as a master political necromancer. From justsecurity.org:
Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction. Apart from whether Mueller a strong enough factual basis for doing so, Mueller's obstruction theory is fatally misconceived. As I understand it, his theory is premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law. Moreover, in my view, if credited by the Department, it would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch.
So, it's no surprise that, in the interregnum, Barr brought his mystical powers to bear on behalf of a major corporation.
A week before the agents were to interview the witness in the Netherlands, President Donald J. Trump nominated Mr. Barr to return to the Justice Department as the next attorney general. Mr. Zuckerman then ordered the interview to be canceled and the inquiry halted, without getting input from the prosecutor overseeing the Caterpillar investigation, according to the emails. The sequence of events alarmed some federal officials and set off calls for an internal investigation. “It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain,” Jason LeBeau, one of the agents who worked on the investigation, wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general late last year.
You think?
In early 2017, federal agents searched and seized records from several Caterpillar buildings in and around Peoria as part of the investigation. Two weeks later, the company announced that it was hiring some Washington heavy hitters for help. Mr. Barr was one. He was joined by James Cole, who had been the No. 2 official By early 2018, the I.R.S. had informed Caterpillar that the agency was seeking taxes and penalties totaling $2.3 billion. The U.S. attorney’s criminal investigation was also moving ahead. Mr. Barr and his colleagues met with Mr. Miller’s boss, the U.S. attorney for the central district of Illinois, and asked him to end the investigation.
During his confirmation hearings, Barr promised, pinky-swear, that he would not take part in any DOJ investigations into his former clients. But, by then, he'd already laid the rails for a settlement that saved Caterpillar a 327-ton mining truck full of money. And the IRS was never seen at the job site again.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
