Author: David Cay Johnston

Long Prison Terms for Crooks Who Preyed on Gullible MAGA Nearly four years ago DCReport broke the story that the WeBuildTheWall charity was a scam, one that extracted $25 million from gullible MAGA. On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced the man who led the scam to more than four years in prison. Donald Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, heartily endorsed the sham project. They went to the site on the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, where a contractor hired by Kolfage had built a short, flimsy, and utterly ineffective bit of fencing. This was…

A Deception Many Journalists Uncritically Promote Today, April 18, 2023, is NOT the mythical Tax Freedom Day. This annual stunt is one of the most misleading and downright intellectually dishonest pieces of propaganda in America. It’s based on abusing facts and simple math to deceive Americans about our burden in supporting our government. For decades the Tax Foundation, did its best to rile up people against taxes more than to inform them about the wide variations in tax burdens – even among people with the same income and family structure and size. Incidentally, compared to Canada, the European Union, and…

Politics Reporters Neglect A Basic, Easy, Fact Check UPDATE: An individual responding to my invitation below has provided video images showing attendees not visible in the many Trump Waco rally stills and videos that I scrutinized along with two others last week. The reader, who did not provide a name, suggests the crowd was between 5,000 and 10,000, while my team, working separately, estimated it at under 1,500 from the images we gathered. From the limited perspective of the video it’s clear that there more people than I wrote about. I remind readers that Trump security routinely ousts those, as…

The Reagan Hostage Plot That Defeated Jimmy Carter  Millions of Americans watched on split screen televisions in 1981 as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. As Reagan recited a jetliner in Iran holding 56 American hostages rolled down a Tehran runway, its wheels lifting just as Reagan finished. That precise timing fueled widespread—and reasonable— speculation in major newspapers and elsewhere that Team Reagan had cut some secret deal with the Iranian mullahs to further his chances of becoming president by making Jimmy Carter appear impotent. The suspicions became known as the October Surprise conspiracy theory, generating lots of smoke…

It’s The Big Bank Failure Story No One is Talking About The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week raises serious issues far more significant than the obvious ones cited by the financial press and a broad range of Washington politicians. Chief among these are bank loans against dubious assets. That’s not getting much if any attention in the news or from Washington and is likely to soon be swept under the rug, allowing needlessly risky banking practices to continue. Before its collapse last week, SVB made loans against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The question: why is any bank…

A rule we exposed six years ago is back When Republicans regained control of the House, they immediately renewed their rule allowing giving away our government’s land without ensuring that we taxpayers get fair value for our property. This is exactly what Republicans did when they last gained control of the House in 2017, the subject of one of DCReport’s first articles after its launch six years ago. DCReport and the excellent environmental news outlet High Country News were pretty much alone in reporting this important 2017 news affecting taxpayers. This week a few more news organizations covered the revived rule,…

Be Cautious About Recession Predictions After consulting their models of the American economy, many political naysayers and Wall Street economists are shouting “A recession is coming! A recession is coming!” Should we trust these projections, which dominate major news reports on the economy? Count me a skeptic, given what the economic performance data show and the conflicted interests of commercial economists. More jobs and more pay are the opposite of what the word ‘recession’ implies: “a significant, widespread and prolonged downturn in economic activity.” In a piece typical of news articles last week, CNN reported: “Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan believes a…

More Writers. Expanded Coverage. Same Quality Nonprofit Journalism. It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since I collaborated with David Crook to start DCReport. We did so as a public service, to provide a voice for fact-based journalism and opinion about our government. Since then, our nonprofit newsroom has carved out a strong niche and readership by uncovering the stories that the mainstream media ignores or completely misses altogether. Along the way, we’ve certainly broken some big ones, and brought to light important facts, all in the name of protecting your rights as citizens, consumers, workers, investors, and voters. To…

Trump Took Tax Losses He Knew Were Fraudulent Donald Trump knowingly committed dozens of brazen tax frauds during the six years when he ran for office and was President, my analysis of the Congressional report on his tax returns and other documents shows. This explains why he fought all the way to the Supreme Court in a failed effort to keep his tax information secret. One technique he used at least 26 times between 2015 and 2020 was as simple as it was flagrant. Trump filed sole proprietor reports, known as Schedule C, that showed huge business expenses despite having…

Part-time Pay, Adjusted for Inflation, Fell in 2021 The number of Americans earning less than $15,000 a year fell significantly in 2021 as a growing number of states and localities increased minimum pay standards for millions of part-time workers, new federal wage data shows. One in four Americans with paid work made less than $15,000 in 2021. DCReport refers to these people as part-timers because working full-time for all 52 weeks at the federal minimum wage earns gross pay of $15,080. After considering inflation, their average pay fell by $275 for the year. That’s the equivalent of working one week…