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Donald Trump on Monday dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his personal and business tax records, a bizarre case of a sitting president suing his own government and essentially acting as both plaintiff and defendant. This comes amid reports that Trump's Department of Justice was considering settling the case in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate victims of so-called weaponization of the DOJ under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump allies who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol could file claims and be compensated.
"They want a $1.7 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways," says Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who spoke with Democracy Now! shortly before news broke of Trump dropping the IRS lawsuit.
Raskin last week introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which is geared toward curbing the president's profiteering from public office. "Corruption is the whole purpose of the Trump administration," says Raskin. "It's not like some eccentric peripheral thing; it's a vast money-making operation."
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(First column, 4th story, link)
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Police fired tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at hundreds of animal rights activists in Wisconsin on Saturday as they attempted to rescue about 2,000 dogs from a facility that breeds beagles for medical experimentation. The crackdown by Dane County sheriff's deputies left scores of activists injured; 25 people were arrested. Protesters were attempting to enter a property owned by Ridglan Farms, which agreed last fall to surrender its state breeding license and stop selling dogs to other laboratories by July 1 as part of a deal to avoid prosecution on animal mistreatment charges. A state judge found Ridglan Farms likely broke Wisconsin animal cruelty laws by housing beagles in brutal conditions, performing surgeries without anesthesia, and leaving wounds untreated, along with other violations.
The protesters who participated in Saturday's action were "teachers, veterinarians, students, software engineers," says Rebekah Robinson, a Wisconsin resident and longtime animal rights activist who was arrested during the action. "These were ordinary citizens who were trying to help these Ridglan dogs, to go in and take them to safety, get them the veterinary care that they needed. And what we were met with was overwhelming police brutality."
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