READ: GOP senators secretly slip themselves a payday

Legislation to reopen the gov't could award millions of dollars to key Republicans

This is the biggest story of the day. I spoke about it on this morning’s broadcast of DEFIANCE Radio.

By the way, if you’re not tuning in LIVE to our 7a.m. broadcast for today’s top stories, you should. Otherwise, here’s the replay, below. Full story beneath that.

So let’s start with what happened.

Buried deep inside the Senate’s bill to end the government shutdown was a quiet little clause — just a few lines of legalese — that could make a handful of senators rich.

As first reported by The New York Times, the provision allows lawmakers to sue the federal government for up to half a million dollars per violation if their “phone data” was accessed by federal investigators without notification. On its face, that might sound like a privacy safeguard. In reality, it’s a self-pay provision, which could funnel millions of dollars of taxpayer money directly to lawmakers who voted for it.

Who could benefit? The list is telling: eight Republican senators whose phone records were lawfully obtained as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the effort to overturn the 2020 election, including Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Marsha Blackburn, Dan Sullivan, Bill Hagerty, and Cynthia Lummis.

The facts aren’t in dispute. Prosecutors subpoenaed phone metadata (not the contents of calls or texts) during a legitimate criminal investigation into the events surrounding January 6th and Donald Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. The senators weren’t charged with crimes, but their communications were relevant to an inquiry into whether senior officials helped coordinate efforts to obstruct certification of the election.

Now, GOP senators have slipped language into the government funding bill that allows them to sue the very Justice Department that investigated them, retroactively, for actions taken as far back as January 2022. And because the Justice Department is now under President Trump’s control, it’s safe to assume those cases won’t be fought hard in court. They’ll surely be settled quietly, conveniently, and lucratively.

This screams conflict of interest. It’s self-dealing on a constitutional scale. Lawmakers were apparently writing laws that could directly line their own pockets and, in bad faith, snuck them into a bill to reopen the federal government, when folks would be least likely to be paying attention to minor legalese. In effect, they are taking advantage of the government shutdown debacle in order to authorize a personal reimbursement plan — reparations for the inconvenience of being investigated.

If you can believe it, the rot goes deeper than that. The same president who the other week claimed he deserves $230 million in “damages” from the Justice Department for being investigated is now presiding over a party that wants in on the payday. Trump has made grievance profitable. Every ally who was ever scrutinized, subpoenaed, or held to account will now likely see an opportunity to cash out and to turn public corruption into private compensation.

Let me be very clear about all of this. These senators were not “spied on.” They were lawfully investigated by federal agents following the evidence in a probe into one of the most serious assaults on American democracy in history. The rule of law demands that no one — not a president or any of these senators — be immune from such scrutiny. Yet the Senate’s latest maneuver is designed to ensure precisely the opposite by punishing investigators and rewarding the investigated.

And most U.S. Senators until this morning probably didn’t even know they’d voted on such a thing.

The provision also sets a dangerous precedent. It makes oversight of elected officials financially perilous. It tells future Justice Department lawyers that if they follow the facts all the way to the doors of power, the politicians behind those doors will write themselves a check from the Treasury as payback.

I have a hard time describing this as anything other than official plunder. What’s more, it’s being done under the cover of bipartisanship, hidden in the fine print of a shutdown deal that most senators likely didn’t even read. Indeed, the bill was moved within hours of a deal being struck.

In a functioning democracy, lawmakers accused of self-enrichment like this would be shamed, investigated, or even expelled. Shockingly, in ours, they may soon be rewarded for it with a taxpayer-funded windfall. The bill has been sent to the House, where I would hope Democratic representatives will make a huge fuss about the language. More than that, I hope they do what they can to stop the bill and get it rewritten before this gets signed by the president.

The founders were less worried about the republic collapsing from foreign invasion. This type of corruption — internal corruption — is what gave them pause about the nation’s future. They imagined demagogues would try to bend laws for personal gain. They tried to guard against it. But I don’t think they imagined senators openly billing the public for the cost of their own misconduct.

Don’t let this one be forgotten without a fight.

Your friend, in defiance,

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