Washington Post: Giuliani Disregarded U.S. Intel Fears That He Was Being...

Sheriff’s deputy boasted to extremists about beating Black man, called it ‘sweet stress relief,' feds say

Katie Shepherd

Screenshot from Google Maps shows the federal courthouse in Macon, Ga., where Cody Richard Griggers faced federal charges for possessing unregistered firearms. (Google Maps)

“In texts with a group that called itself “Shadow Moses,” a Georgia sheriff’s deputy boasted about beating a Black man during an arrest, threatened to falsely charge Black people with felonies so that they could not vote and advocated for killing politicians and others he viewed as political enemies, the FBI said in court documents.

This week, Cody Richard Griggers pleaded guilty to a weapons charge after federal agents uncovered his ties to a violent extremist group and found 11 unregistered firearms at his home and in his police car, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday. Griggers, 28, who was fired by the Wilkinson County Sheriff’s Office last November, faces up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and will never work as a police officer again.

“This former law enforcement officer knew that he was breaking the law when he chose to possess a cache of unregistered weapons, silencers and a machine gun, keeping many of them in his duty vehicle,” acting U.S. attorney Peter D. Leary said in a statement. “Coupled with his violent racially motivated extreme statements, the defendant has lost the privilege permanently of wearing the blue.”

Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman told the Macon Telegraph that Griggers’s stories about targeting Black people while on the job did not hold water and he suspected Griggers had lied to impress the other people in the extremist group’s chat.

“That never happened,” Chatman told the newspaper on Wednesday of Grigger’s claim that he violently beat a Black man in an arrest.

The ex-deputy, who lived in Montrose, Ga., connected in chats with well-known extremists in California to fantasize about a “theoretical civil war” against liberals and Black, Muslim and other non-White Americans, according to charging documents filed by federal investigators. In a group chat, Griggers used racist slurs and echoed white supremacist ideas.

“On one hand it infuriates me,” Griggers said in one text rant about his desire to see violence and chaos in America. “On the other hand I wanted to go ahead and fast-forward so I can enjoy the suffering of the abortion that is the American population.”

Griggers told his associates in August 2019, more than a year before the 2020 general election that flipped two Georgia senate seats blue and helped cinch the presidency for Joe Biden, that he would target Black people with arrests in an effort to strip them of their voting rights.

“I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote,” he wrote.

In another exchange, Griggers boasted that he had “beat the s--- out of” a Black man he had arrested for allegedly stealing ammunition from a local gun store. He used slurs and described the attack as “sweet stress relief,” according to federal investigators.

“Sheriff’s dept said it look like he fell,” Griggers told his group chat.

But Chatman said sheriff’s office had no records of an arrest or call for service matching that description.

“We don’t even have a gun shop here,” he said. The sheriff added that Griggers had worked in the county jail and had never had a complaint filed against him.

In addition to the racist tirades, Griggers plotted to help an extremist group obtain weapons, including some devices that are only legal for law enforcement officials to use, the FBI said. He also shared videos that showed him shooting firearms on camera.

The group chat messages also revealed Griggers had discussed killing liberal politicians and minorities. He offered to teach another man how to build explosives and suggested he steal police supplies to sell to the group.

“I want to get [law enforcement] only stuff like flashbangs and entry charges and say I used them in training when I pocketed them,” Griggers texted.

“Yeah I’ll pay big money for bang [and] boom,” Grey Zamudio, a member of a California-based online group called Defend East County wrote back, according to an FBI affidavit. “I’m ready to terrorize.”

Federal investigators found the incriminating messages after obtaining a warrant for Zamudio’s phone last August, according to court records. Zamudio was a member of Defend East County, which had openly advocated in Facebook posts for attacking Black Lives Matter protesters and shared videos of people beating demonstrators and running people over with vehicles on Facebook, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last year. Facebook eventually removed the groupin October, the newspaper reported.

Federal officials also charged Zamudio last August for possessing unregistered firearms and silencers. According to court records, Zamudio pleaded guilty in December.

Griggers is scheduled to be sentenced on July 6.“

Giuliani’s claims about Hunter Biden and the FBI get more confusing

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What Giuliani has said about Hunter Biden’s purported laptop

“Giuliani’s claims about Hunter Biden and the FBI get more confusing

JM Rieger

Since the New York Post published an article in October based on emails purportedly from a laptop owned by President Biden’s son Hunter, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has maintained three things:

3) The FBI had the laptop for months before he gave it to Delaware investigators.

But when he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Thursday night to attack the legitimacy of the federal raid on his home and office, Giuliani seemed to inadvertently cast doubt on claim No. 3.

“They weren’t taking the three hard drives, which of course are electronic devices,” Giuliani said, referring to the seizure of his electronic devices during the raid. “ … I said, ‘Well, don’t you want these?’ And they said, ‘What are they?’ I said, ‘Those are Hunter Biden’s hard drives.’ And they said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ … They also were completely content to rely on my word that these were Hunter Biden’s hard drives.”

It is unclear whether these hard drives are from the same laptop that Giuliani previously acknowledged was already in the FBI’s possession in October, or if these are new hard drives purportedly belonging to Biden. The Washington Post has been unable to verify the authenticity of the emails published last year by the New York Post.

FBI warned Giuliani, key Trump ally in Senate of Russian disinformation campaign targeting Biden

For months, Giuliani said that he had given the purported Biden materials to Delaware state investigators; the materials were also reportedly shared with the FBI. Giuliani repeatedly acknowledged the FBI’s possession of the materials during interviews in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, examples of which you can watch in the video above.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the FBI warned Giuliani in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at damaging then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Giuliani had previously met with a Ukrainian lawmaker, whom the Treasury Department later imposed sanctions on and described as an “active Russian agent for over a decade.” And in October, Time magazine reported that emails and photos purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden had been circulating in Ukraine for months “at the same time that Rudy Giuliani was searching for dirt there” on Joe Biden.

The current federal investigation of Giuliani centers on his interactions with Ukrainian figures. Whether Hunter Biden’s purported hard drive or hard drives are part of that investigation is unclear.

In December, Hunter Biden confirmed that he was under federal investigation, and in April he told CBS News that he did not know whether the laptop was his.

“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me,” Biden said. “It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence.”

New details emerge about investigation into Giuliani

FBI warned Giuliani, key Trump ally in Senate of Russian disinformation campaign targeting Biden

Tom Hamburger

Rudolph Giuliani speaks in Washington in 2018. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

“The FBI warned Rudolph W. Giuliani in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage President Biden politically ahead of last year’s election, according to people familiar with the matter.

The warning was part of an extensive effort by the bureau to alert members of Congress and at least one conservative media outlet, One America News, that they faced a risk of being used to further Russia’s attempt to influence the election’s outcome, said several current and former U.S. officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive.

Giuliani received the FBI’s warning while deeply involved with former president Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and related activities in Ukraine to surface unflattering or incriminating information about the Biden family. The revelation comes as the FBI this week seized Giuliani’s cellphone and other electronic devices as part of a long-running criminal investigation into whether the onetime New York mayor and personal attorney for Trump acted as an unregistered foreign agent.

The FBI executes a search warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s home

The warning, made by counterintelligence agents, was separate from the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal probe, but it reflects a broader concern by U.S. intelligence and federal investigators that Giuliani — among other influential Americans and U.S. institutions — was being manipulated by the Russian government to promote its interests and that he appears to have brazenly disregarded such fears.

Despite the alert, Giuliani went forward in December 2019 with a planned trip to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where he met with a Ukrainian lawmaker whom the U.S. government later labeled “an active Russian agent” and sanctioned on grounds he was running an “influence campaign” against Biden. That operation, officials said, involved Ukrainian officials and political consultants who the U.S. intelligence community has since concluded were acting as Russian proxies not only to smear Biden and derail his candidacy but also to curtail U.S. support for Ukraine.

Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, did not respond to requests for comment. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

The FBI last summer also gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who ahead of the election used his perch as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to investigate Biden’s dealings with Ukraine while he was vice president and his son Hunter Biden held a lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, recalled receiving a vague warning from FBI briefers in August, but he said Thursday that there was no substance to their cautionary message and that he did not view the meeting as a “defensive briefing” on his oversight of the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.

“Regarding reports that I received an FBI briefing warning me that I was a target of Russian disinformation, I can confirm I received such a briefing in August of 2020,” Johnson said in a statement to The Washington Post. “I asked the briefers what specific evidence they had regarding this warning, and they could not provide me anything other than the generalized warning. Without specific information, I felt the briefing was completely useless and unnecessary (since I was fully aware of the dangers of Russian disinformation).

“Because there was no substance to the briefing, and because it followed the production and leaking of a false intelligence product by Democrat leaders, I suspected that the briefing was being given to be used at some future date for the purpose that it is now being used: to offer the biased media an opportunity to falsely accuse me of being a tool of Russia despite warnings.”

Johnson and staffers to Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), another Trump ally in the Senate who aided Johnson with his probe, said that in separate briefings earlier in 2020, FBI officials assured them there was no reason to discontinue their inquiry into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. It is not the bureau’s place to tell lawmakers what to investigate or not, or whether to stop or start an investigation, former FBI officials said.

The senators suspected that the younger Biden’s position with the Ukrainian firm posed a conflict of interest to his father’s role shaping U.S. policy toward Ukraine and created impediments for U.S.-backed anti-corruption efforts in that country. Their investigation ended last fall with a report concluding that Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma was “problematic” but did not influence his father’s work or Obama administration policy toward Ukraine.

GOP senators’ report calls Hunter Biden’s board position with Ukraine firm ‘problematic’ but doesn’t show it changed U.S. policy

Defensive briefings are given to people to alert them that they are being targeted by foreign governments for malign purposes, former officials said. But they’re also used “to see how they respond to that,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former senior FBI counterintelligence official. “They’re now on notice.”

Giuliani’s electronic devices were seized by authorities Wednesday in searches of his Manhattan home and office as part of the federal investigation into whether he acted as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine.

The probe centers on Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian figures ahead of November’s election, as he sought information that might undermine Joe Biden and lobbied for the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine while also pressing Ukrainian officials to announce an inquiry into Biden. Trump abruptly removed the ambassador in May 2019, but Ukraine did not launch an investigation into the Bidens.

Giuliani, a former Manhattan U.S. attorney, has emphatically denied any wrongdoing, and his attorney on Wednesday accused federal investigators of ignoring “clear evidence” of what he alleged was Hunter Biden’s “failure to register as a foreign agent” and the Biden family taking “millions in bribes to sell [Biden’s] public offices.”

Costello also has said Giuliani never peddled disinformation on the Bidens.

During his December 2019 trip to Kyiv, Giuliani was accompanied by a team from One America News, which has described itself as one of Trump’s “greatest supporters.” The network later produced a documentary series based on the trip.

The network did not address questions about the FBI’s briefing. But it did provide a statement, attributed to an unidentified network spokesman, expressing pride in its investigation of the Bidens in Ukraine.

“We stand by our reporting highlighting Hunter Biden’s financial windfall relationship with Burisma and VP Joe Biden’s efforts to have a Prosecutor General fired to protect alleged wrongdoing by his son, Hunter,” the statement said, referring to unproven allegations made by some Ukrainian officials.

The statement acknowledged that the Treasury Department sanctioned a Ukrainian lawmaker interviewed by the network last year. But, the statement said, “OAN’s interviews were prior to the sanctions and the reasons for sanctions were unknown to OAN at the time of the interviews.”

U.S. sanctions Ukrainian lawmaker tied to Giuliani as ‘active Russian agent’

On his trip to Kyiv, Giuliani met with Andriy Derkach, a politician sanctioned by the United States in September and accused by the Treasury Department of having been an active Russian agent “for over a decade” and maintaining “close connections with Russian intelligence services.” Derkach, who attended a KGB academy in Moscow, has denied involvement with any foreign intelligence agency and any illegal activities.

In late 2019, before Giuliani’s trip to Kyiv, U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Trump White House that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation, as The Post reported last year. Officials became concerned after obtaining evidence, including communications intercepts, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence. The warnings led then-national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien to caution Trump that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia.

Despite the FBI warning, Giuliani met with Derkach again in New York in February 2020 when he hosted Derkach on a podcast. In the podcast, Derkach aired false allegations that billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine were misused or went missing while Joe Biden was handling the Obama administration’s Ukraine portfolio.

Costello has said Giuliani did not rely on Derkach for material.

Since Biden’s victory, the National Intelligence Council, an analytic arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials in Moscow sought to influence the 2020 election. They did so by spreading misleading information about Biden through prominent individuals, “including some” who were “close to former President Trump,” according to an ODNI report issued in March.

Putin targeted people close to Trump in bid to influence 2020 election, U.S. intelligence says

The report did not identify the individuals by name, but several current and former officials confirmed at the time that Giuliani was among them. The primary narrative that the Kremlin sought to promote — alleging corrupt ties between the Bidens and Ukraine — dated back to at least 2014, the intelligence report said.

To distance themselves from the disinformation, the Russian spy services relied on Ukrainian individuals including Derkach, the report said. Derkach and others “sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S. officials and audiences,” the report stated. “These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked U.S. persons to advocate for formal investigation . . . and attempted to make contact with several senior U.S. officials.”

Johnson has said he never met or spoke with Derkach. But he and his staff met with another Ukrainian national, former diplomat Andriy Telizhenko, who pushed the unfounded allegation that it was Ukraine rather than Russia that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. Johnson has not discussed the meeting publicly.

Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) alleged that Johnson was seeking to “give credibility” to disinformation advanced by Derkach and Telizhenko “for the sole purpose” of aiding Trump’s reelection. Johnson has said his staff vetted the reliability of Telizhenko’s information and rejected Wyden’s assertion.

As part of his committee’s investigation, Johnson and two Republican colleagues considered subpoenaing Telizhenko to testify. At Senate Democrats’ request, the FBI in March 2020 briefed Johnson’s panel and two other committees on Telizhenko’s background and motives. As a result, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers urged Johnson to refrain from issuing the subpoena.

Telizhenko also has met several times with Giuliani, appearing on his podcast and facilitating his December 2019 trip to Ukraine.

This past January, in the waning days of the Trump administration, the Treasury Department sanctioned Telizhenko as well for his role in trying to influence the 2020 election. He has denied any involvement in Russian interference or disinformation operations and denied working with Derkach.

This month, the Biden administration imposed economic sanctions on 32 entities and individuals for Russian government attempts to influence November’s election“

Florida Republicans Pass Voting Limits in Broad Elections Bill The bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign, is the latest Republican effort to restrict voting after the 2020 election. It will make Florida the first major swing state won by Donald Trump to pass such a law

Florida Republicans Pass Voting Limits in Broad Elections Bill

The bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign, is the latest Republican effort to restrict voting after the 2020 election. It will make Florida the first major swing state won by Donald Trump to pass such a law.

April 29, 2021

Florida’s new voting bill would sharply limit the use of drop boxes, which many voters used to return absentee ballots in last year’s elections.Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

MIAMI — Republicans in the Florida Legislature passed an election overhaul bill on Thursday that is set to usher in a host of voting restrictions in one of the most critical battleground states in the country, adding to the national push by G.O.P. state lawmakers to reduce voting access.

The bill makes Florida the first major swing state won by former President Donald J. Trump to pass significant voting limits and reflects Republicans’ determination to reshape electoral systems even in states where they have been ascendant. Mr. Trump carried the state last year by more than three percentage points, other Republicans also performed strongly, and the party raised new hopes of its ability to appeal to Latino voters.

But Republicans in Florida argued that its elections needed to be more secure, despite the fact that voting unfolded smoothly in 2020 and arguments by Democrats and voting rights experts that some of the new measures would disproportionately affect voters of color. Now the state is on the verge of weakening key parts of an extensive voting infrastructure that was slowly constructed after the state’s chaotic 2000 election and was rapidly enlarged last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The new bill would limit the use of drop boxes; add more identification requirements for those requesting absentee ballots; require voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, rather than receive them automatically through an absentee voting list; limit who could collect and drop off ballots; and further empower partisan observers during the ballot-counting process. The legislation would also expand a current rule that prohibits outside groups from providing items “with the intent to influence” voters within a 150-foot radius of a polling location.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has indicated his support for the voting overhaul and is expected to sign it. The bill passed largely along a party-line vote in both chambers, 77 to 40 in the House and 23 to 17 in the Senate, though one Republican state senator, Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg, voted against it.

The legislation follows a similar law passed recently by Georgia, and comes as Texas, Arizona and other states led by Republicans pursue limits on access to the ballot. G.O.P. lawmakers have been fueled by a party base that has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election. In Florida, Republican legislators promoted the voting bill while providing little evidence of any problems with fraud, and despite their continued claims that the state’s 2020 election was the “gold standard” for the country.

“There was no problem in Florida,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”

Once the bill is signed into law, Florida will become the first state to create new barriers to voting after businesses across the country embarked on a public pressure campaign to oppose such measures. Major corporations, after speaking out against voting bills in states like Georgia and Texas, remained largely muted on the Republican push in Florida.

Hovering over Florida’s debate about the bill was the state’s strong and exceptionally popular tradition of voting by mail — and a recent sea change in which party benefited most from it.

In the 2016 and 2018 elections, roughly a third of the state’s voters cast ballots through the mail. And in both years, more Republicans than Democrats voted by mail.

But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans, largely because of a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false attacks on the practice. (The former president and his family, however, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 primary.)

Florida has a popular tradition of voting by mail, a method that favored Republicans until 2020, when Democrats encouraged the practice during the pandemic.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Given that history in Florida, its bill will act as a unique test of the national Republican push to curtail voting access, especially absentee and mail voting. And the G.O.P. effort carries risks: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting a sign of a new normal for the previously Republican-dominated voting method, or a blip caused by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?

The legislation has already become something of a political balancing act, as state Republicans try to appease a Trump-friendly base hungry for new voting limits while not harming the party’s turnout. In 2022, the state is poised to yet again become a marquee political battleground as Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, and Mr. DeSantis seek re-election.

Democrats in the Legislature seized on Republicans’ justification for the bill.

“So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic representative from Orlando, asked rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”

But Republicans defended the bill, saying that it was popular with “our constituents” and noting that voting options in Florida were still far more extensive than in other states. Florida will still have no-excuse absentee voting and will mandate at least eight days of early voting.

“If the opposition says that we are creating barriers to voting, those barriers already exist in other states,” said Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative from Hernando County who helped lead the push for the bill. “But we never hear a peep from the opposition about those laws.”

Other Republican legislators echoed language used by Mr. Trump and his allies during their challenges to the 2020 election.

“I believe that every legal vote should count,” said Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”

Data requested by lawmakers themselves suggested there was little need for the legislation. The Republican-led House Public Integrity and Elections Committee surveyed the state’s 67 election supervisors in February, asking them about past elections. Almost all of the supervisors responded and said that, over the past four years, they had reported very few instances of possible fraud — one of lawmakers’ stated reasons for pushing the legislation — and that most of their drop boxes were already monitored, through either physical or video surveillance, public records show.

“It seems like the Legislature is ignoring — I would say deliberately ignoring — the facts that they have in their possession,” said Stephen F. Rosenthal of Miami, who is part of a group of Democratic lawyers that requested the records. The group also queried elected state prosecutors about voter fraud, finding a minuscule number of prosecuted cases.

The supervisors’ answers to the House committee also revealed that election supervisors had received millions of dollars in grant funding from outside organizations in 2019 and 2020. That money will now be prohibited, with no obvious substitute for it in the future.

Republicans, when pressed for details on any reported fraud that would prompt the need for the bill, often demurred.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it was going on,” Mr. Ingoglia responded to a question on the House floor about any reported instances of illegal ballot collection. “Just the fact that they weren’t caught doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not happening.”

The bill was not without criticism from notable Republicans inside and outside the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign the bill into law, will face re-election in 2022.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The new bill is likely to face legal challenges from Democrats; hours after Gov. Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s voting bill into law, a coalition of Democrats and civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging its legality.

Democrats in the Florida Legislature focused heavily on the bill’s potential impact on communities of color.

“Typically, in communities of color, households are very diverse,” said State Representative Bobby DuBose, the minority leader, taking issue with the restriction that says a person could collect only two absentee ballots from other voters to bring and drop off at a polling location. “And so, if the intent was to add two — and in many households, there are more than two — why the number two and why not expand beyond two if your intent was to open up the accessibility to voting?”

Mr. Ingoglia said he believed allowing two ballots per person was sufficient, but Democrats disagreed, likening the rule to racially discriminatory laws of the past. Over and over, they framed the bill as a solution in search of a problem.

One Democratic representative, Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, framed the debate as similar to the hunt for the chupacabra, the mythical, nightmarish mammal-gobbling and goat-blood-sucking beast.

“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”

Biden's First 100 Days

Why I Got Arrested in Ethiopia!

Biden’s plans are ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to end global tax abuse, says OECD boss Ángel Gurría says international deal is within striking distance and could be signed this summer

Biden’s plans are ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to end global tax abuse, says OECD boss

“Ángel Gurría says international deal is within striking distance and could be signed this summer

Richard Partington

Ángel Gurría is secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.Photograph: Reuters

President Joe Biden’s proposals to stop multinationals from shifting profits to tax havens are a “once in a lifetime” chance to end tax abuse, and could be signed within months, the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has said.

Ángel Gurría, who has been coordinating international negotiations on Biden’s plan as secretary-general of the OECD, said a deal was within striking distance and could be signed this summer after decades of limited progress. It follows a shift by the White House to call time on a “race to the bottom” between nations undercutting each other on tax rates to attract businesses to locate within their borders.

Writing in the Guardian before stepping down from the Paris-based institution next month, Gurría said: “It is a once in a lifetime opportunity to achieve a complete overhaul of the international tax system, to both provide more tax certainty for businesses, as well as ensure everyone pays their fair share of taxes.

“The new US impetus is just what was needed to get this negotiation over the line by mid-2021.”

Sounding the alarm over the risks to a fragile global economy as several nations relax Covid-19 restrictions after the worst recession in 2020 since the Great Depression, the head of the OECD, the 37-member club of wealthy nations, said the Biden plan offered an escape route from years of deadlock on international tax reform.

Failure to conclude the agreement, which is being debated at talks between 135 countries, would risk the world slipping into a renewed era of economic conflict over trade, he said.

“Today, we are at a crossroads: push forward with greater effort on tax cooperation, or face the risk of countries taking unilateral measures. This would not only result in increased tax uncertainty but could provoke a tax-driven trade war – the last thing a world economy ravaged by the Covid pandemic need.”

Biden’s administration announced plans earlier this month for sweeping reforms to the global tax system, with proposals to limit the ability of multinational firms to locate profits in low-tax jurisdictions and to agree a worldwide minimum tax rate.

Washington had long resisted calls for the global treaties that reformers argued were needed to ensure that powerful multinational companies pay their fair share of taxes.

Biden announced further details of his reform agenda in his first major speech to both houses of Congress on Wednesday. The White House has confirmed plans to inject $1.8tn into the world’s largest economy to support ordinary Americans, as part of a national pandemic recovery programme, which will be funded by a number of tax increases for large companies and wealthy individuals.

Under the Biden proposals, big technology companies and large corporations would be forced to pay taxes to national governments based on the sales they generate in each country, irrespective of where they are based. A global tax floor would also be agreed. The US has suggested a rate of 21%, although this is higher than in several jurisdictions – including Ireland, Hungary and the Caribbean – and could be a stumbling block.

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G20 finance ministers have agreed to make progress towards a global deal, working through the OECD, with hopes of an agreement in time for a July summit.

Gurría’s comments come at the end of 15 years in charge of the OECD. He will stand down at the end of May, replaced by Australia’s former finance minister Mathias Cormann despite grave concerns voiced by environmental groups over his record on climate change.

“As I approach the end of my term as secretary-general, it is my lasting hope that we learn from the previous crisis to build forward better. Concluding a global tax deal in 2021 would be the culmination of many years of hard work and would mark a new era for a better regulation of globalisation,” Gurría said.“