Silence says it all

There are moments in American public life when the corruption on display is so brazen, so self-serving, and so plainly contemptuous of American citizens that silence becomes its own form of complicity. This past week delivered one of those moments — and our own congressman, Eighth District Rep. Pete Stauber, has chosen silence.
Let’s be clear about what has happened in Washington.
President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service — the very agency he controls as president — purporting damages over the leak of his tax returns years ago. A contractor who committed that leak has already been convicted and sentenced to federal prison, which is the appropriate legal remedy. That should have ended it. Instead, Trump used his own lawsuit against his own government as leverage to engineer one of the most nakedly corrupt arrangements in American history.
The result: a $1.776 billion fund established by the Department of Justice that will give payouts and issue “formal apologies” to those who pursue settlements because they believe they were targeted by the government for their political views. In plain language: it is a slush fund to compensate Trump’s political allies — including convicted Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol, causing millions of dollars in damage and badly injuring more than 100 police officers. And Trump will use taxpayer dollars to reward them.
The constitutional problems here are not subtle. Never in the history of the United States has a sitting president sought a monetary settlement from the government he leads. Trump was simultaneously the plaintiff demanding billions and, as president, also the defendant. This is not a legal gray area. This was self-dealing plain and simple, and legal experts across the political spectrum agree.
And that isn’t the worst of it.
The day after the fund was announced, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who previously served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before being appointed to Trump’s Justice Department — quietly posted a one-page document on the DOJ website, that forever bars the federal government from pursuing any legal action against Donald Trump, his children, or his companies, for any crimes committed up to the date of the agreement. While that agreement effectively ends ongoing tax audits of the president and his companies, the settlement language makes clear that it applies to any and all violations of the law.
Read that again. The president of the United States used the machinery of the Justice Department he controls to permanently exempt himself, his sons, and his business empire from federal scrutiny over any crimes they have committed, then quietly slipped this abomination onto a government website without any formal announcement.
This is not what equal justice under law looks like. It’s what Third World corruption looks like.
Two new lawsuits have already been filed in federal courts challenging the fund’s creation. Democrats in Congress have rightly called it unconstitutional. Even many Senate Republicans have pushed back. The fund’s secrecy provisions, critics note, are specifically designed to hide from public view how taxpayer money is being distributed and to whom.
Which brings us to Pete Stauber.
Our congressman has not said one word about any of this. Not about the slush fund. Not about a president suing the government he runs. Not about a sitting president using the Justice Department to permanently shield his family from legal scrutiny. Search his press releases and you’ll find obsequious statements supporting Trump at nearly every turn.
But when the president uses $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to reward political loyalists and then hands himself a get-out-of-jail-free card? Nothing but crickets.
Stauber has said he has “fiercely supported” Trump — and his record bears that out. He has been a reliable instrument of the president’s will through every controversy or constitutional stress test that called for a congressmember to put country above party.
There is a word for the posture Stauber has adopted toward this president. It is not loyalty. It is not even partisanship. It is abdication — the willful surrender of the oversight function that the Constitution assigns to Congress, the one institution designed to check exactly this kind of blatant self-enrichment.
Stauber represents a district full of people who work hard, pay their taxes, and would face serious consequences if they tried half of what Trump does in a typical week. And yet their tax dollars just funded a slush fund for the president’s political pals.
Their president just gave himself permanent immunity from federal laws that apply to all of us who live in the Eighth District.
We deserve a representative who will say this is wrong.
Silence, in circumstances like these, is not neutrality. It is a choice. And the people of northern Minnesota should recognize that their congressman has made it. Pete Stauber, a former cop, supports taxpayer funding of convicted criminals, even those who physically assaulted police. Remember that come November.