Peter Cary's guest appearances

Peter Cary

TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent

Donald Trump

David Smith

Sarah McBride

Kurt Andersen

Jay Michaelson

John Kelly

Jeff Sessions

Mike Pompeo

Mark Walsh

Mike Pence

Lenny Bruce

David Cay Johnston

Harry Edwards

James Comey

David Corn

OwlTail

(2/13/19) “The rich will not be gaining at all with this plan,” President Trump said in September of 2017 as Republicans began to draft their sweeping overhaul of the tax code. It was a claim echoed the following month by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC. “As I’ve said all along, the objective of the president is that rich people don’t get tax cuts,” Mnuchin said. Yet, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis entitled "Did billionaires pay off Republicans for passing the Trump tax bill?" from the time the Republican tax plan was unveiled on Nov. 2, 2017 until the end of the year, dozens of billionaires and millionaires gave a total of $31.1 million to Republican members of Congress, a departure from when they gave in previous years. On this week’s “TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent” on WBAI, reporter Peter Cary (one of the authors of the Center for Public Integrity study) examines whether Republican donors bought the passage of the tax bill by withholding their contributions until it was passed.

Did billionaire Republican donors buy support for the 2017 tax overhaul? (Peter Cary)