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David Cay Johnston

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, now retired from The New York Times. He is co-founder of DCReport.org, which covers what Trump does, not what he tweets.

Recent Articles

Tax Evasion Exposed

Senator Carl Levin was the Senate's exemplary investigator of corporate tax scams. 

David Cay JohnstonNov 21, 2018
AP Photo/Evan Vucci A lot of what we know about tax avoidance and evasion is courtesy of Senator Carl Levin's work as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Financial Exposure: Carl Levin's Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse By Elise J. Bean Palgrave Macmillan This article appears in the Fall 2018 issue of The American Prospect. Subscribe here . S enator Carl Levin of Michigan, who retired in 2015, was one of the Senate’s legendary workhorse progressives. He used his chairmanship of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to probe the corruption of American capitalism as enabled by feeble or complicit government policies. One of his prime subjects was tax evasion. Indeed, a lot of what we know about techniques of tax avoidance and evasion is courtesy of Levin’s work and that of his staff. For 15 years, Elise Bean, a lawyer educated at the University of Michigan, worked as an investigator and then staff director and chief counsel for Levin’s...

Demonizing the IRS to Protect Tax Evaders

Weakening tax enforcement combined with new complexity invites evasion and massive illicit tax savings for the rich.

David Cay Johnston | June 26, 2018

The Legacy of Carl Levin

Corporate America will cheer the Michigan senator’s retirement. His investigations have flagged hundreds of billions in offshore tax evasion.

David Cay Johnston | December 30, 2014

Too Big to Fail. Not Too Strong.

Nomi Prins’s new book traces America’s propping up of banks since the robber barons.

David Cay JohnstonApr 22, 2014
F rom Andrew Mellon’s nearly 11 years as Treasury secretary under Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover to our time, when Timothy Geithner went from financial regulator at the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury secretary to investment executive, journalists have often employed the image of a revolving door to describe the flow of bankers between Wall Street and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. But few know that the White House and the Treasury are, arguably, a single building. A tunnel connects 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue with 1600. Presidents use this passageway to slip visitors in and out of the Oval Office. prinstall.jpg Nomi Prins, in her new history All the Presidents’ Bankers , does not say it in so many words. But she shows that the tunnel from the White House to the Treasury extends, metaphorically, for 226 miles to Lower Manhattan. Prins digs into presidential libraries and national archives and mines a shelf of books. She also knows Wall Street...

We Shall Overwhelm

David Cay JohnstonSep 18, 2013
AP Images/J. Scott Applewhite
AP Images/J. Scott Applewhite F our years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle-class people seeking lower tax rates. A search for the phrase “tea party” in connection with “politics” in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008—and when the words did appear linked together, they suggested studied formality and decorum. The next year, they appeared more than 1,500 times, often connected to “protest demonstration.” But little was spontaneous about the new party. “Social movements that explicitly defend the interests of the rich and the almost-rich have been a recurring feature of American politics,” Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, reminds us in his new book, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent . “Such movements shook the American polity before the...

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