Hmmm

Re: Trump’s supposed demand for $230M from DOJ, I’m reminded…In 1996, lawyers sued the government in a class action over the management of Indian trust accounts.

They got a friendly judge who put bureaucrats through hell over the course of over a decade of litigation.

Records from a century ago were a mess, to be sure, but there wasn’t any evidence that the departments were siphoning wealth.

DOJ kept taking various rulings up on appeal and would win every time.

Finally, there was a trial, and plaintiffs…failed to show damages. The best they could do was a statistical study with an estimated range of damages from negative to positive within two standard deviations, i.e., perhaps the government mess had overpaid the Indians.

The judge picks a number from the 95th percentile from the right hand tail, and awards a few hundred million. That’s a tiny single digit percentage of the alleged claims—and even that gets reversed by the DC Circuit.

So the government has all but won, and just needs to mop up the rest. The lawsuit is a failure.

Then the Democrats elected Barack Hussein Obama. And suddenly the DOJ wants to settle. And, by settle, I mean give away billions of taxpayer dollars, $3.4B to be precise (over $5B today), with over $90M to the Obama fundraisers who were the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Elouise Cobell, the lead named plaintiff, whose story of childhood land being swiped by an oil company turned out to be fictional family lore, got the Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumously given to her son) and lionized in the Smithsonian and on Wikipedia.

People whose trust accounts were worth pennies because an ancestor’s worthless acre got fractionally subdivided among his dozens of great grandchildren received hundreds of dollars each in the settlement.

Try to find *any* press coverage of what a corrupt collusive taxpayer ripoff this was, or even suggesting this was another side to the story than what you find in Wikipedia.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top