Corruption All The Way Down

By now, you’ve all read about Trump’s brazenly corrupt “slush fund.” Three months after he filed a ridiculous $10 billion lawsuit against an Internal Revenue Service that he oversees, his lawyers agreed to withdraw the case, sidestepping a slapdown by the court. Then–mere hours later–it was announced that, In exchange for dropping his improper lawsuit, Trump’s Justice Department had created an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — a “slush fund”–from which he proposes to compensate his cronies who were investigated and/or charged for insurrection during the Biden administration.

Message: Trump will protect those who break the law on his behalf. Indeed, he will pay them off.

Secondary message: Political ethics are so passe. MAGA folks need not behave honorably or honestly, nor do they need to pretend to do so.

And so we have GOP corruption all the way down. Here in Indiana, we have several examples of officials who–after twenty-plus years of Republican rule–have no compunction about following the rules, or even pretending to. 

Indy Politics has a recent example: Diego Morales, Indiana’s Secretary of State, has engaged in persistent bluster over the prospect of “illegals” voting. He handed over Indiana’s voter file to federal immigration authorities, joined Attorney General Todd Rokita in a suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to force citizenship verification of more than half a million voters, and lectured Washington about who is and isn’t eligible to vote in Indiana elections.

But as Indy Politics reports, until April 29, Morales was

paying $160,000 a year to a Deputy Chief of Staff in the office that serves as Indiana’s chief elections authority — and who carries an Indiana driver’s license restriction the state applies to non-U.S. citizens. The same individual, nearly two decades ago, signed an Indiana voter registration form affirming that she was a U.S. citizen.

Her name is Elina Kupce, and the report noted that not only had the position not been publicly posted, Kupce had no prior public service experience.

Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles records show Kupce’s current Indiana driver’s license carries restriction code “9 — TEMPORARY.” That is the restriction the Indiana BMV applies to driver’s licenses issued to non-U.S. citizens, with the license’s expiration tied to the expiration of the holder’s underlying immigration document.

The “TEMPORARY” restriction does not indicate that the holder is in the country unlawfully. It is applied to any non-citizen license holder, including lawful permanent residents and individuals on work, student, or other visas, because the license’s validity is tied to the holder’s immigration document.

I’m sure we are all shocked–shocked!–to learn that Morales’ office has declined to answer questions about any of this.

It isn’t just IndyPolitics. Over at the Statehouse File, John Krull posted a meditation of sorts about Morales, noting that “There is no pretense to the man.”

 Indiana’s scandal magnet of a secretary of state does not hide who he is. No, the first-term Republican is clearly, undisguisedly, blatantly not a public servant in any sense of the word…

For him, the citizenry exists to be gulled and milked. The taxpayers are important to him only in that they provide the wherewithal for his office to buy him a new luxury sport utility vehicle in which to tool around, pay for the next high-end junket to a foreign country he wants to visit and provide paychecks and bonuses for him and his family members.

Krull opines that having someone like Morales– “a hustler ever on the lookout for the next mark”– in a party built by the Great Emancipator, a president who stood for the belief that all should stand equal before the law, “is proof that history has a savage sense of irony.”

After an aside noting Trump’s grifting and corruption, Krull connects the dots.

Diego Morales is a microcosm of Trump-style mythmaking and malfeasance.

He now leads an office from which he was fired twice for incompetence and dereliction. That the two secretaries of state who canned him—current Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Charlie White—were themselves both Republicans who possessed all the ethical sensitivities of swamp rats only makes the irony even more suffocating.

Since taking office, Morales has managed to live down to expectations. He has been accused, credibly, of one transgression after another. He doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that he is first a man on the make and second a partisan more rabid than a deranged dog.

That he’s the official charged with making sure that Indiana elections are fair and run efficiently is yet another sick cosmic joke.

The corruption isn’t limited to the top. In today’s GOP, it goes all the way down.