It is possible that the missing Salomon documents could be what Secretary Mellon left for you to find. I am told that those could be not only financially damaging, but overtly embarrassing. As you related, Mellon noted that the page with numbers deals with “two” national secrets. What the other might be, I do not know. My suggestion would be to follow the trail and see where it leads.
She silently filled in the blanks with what she already knew. Obviously, FDR had discussed the Mellon situation with someone other than his Secret Service agent Mark Tipton. But that was no surprise. She knew Roosevelt had made a habit of delegating the same task to multiple people, telling each not to speak of it with anyone else. It served as a way for him to obtain varying viewpoints. Ed Tipton had told her and Danny that FDR had focused on George Mason. Indeed, the wooden crate was full of books on Mason. Now she knew how that focus had been obtained.
“Henry Morgenthau hated Mellon,” Levy said. “He wholeheartedly supported Roosevelt’s tax vendetta against Mellon. Of course, that backfired in both of their faces.”
“Which is a lesson for not doing it.”
“I get it, Stephanie. I’m playing games, too. But this isn’t 1944. The world is a different place. This country is different. Roosevelt had a war to worry about, but he was dead six months after that memo from Morgenthau. And all of this was forgotten.”
She could see that there was more. “What is it, Joe?”
He handed her a tattered sheet of brownish paper. An original memorandum from the solicitor general to the secretary of state, dated February 24, 1913.
“Larks found this and copied it. I withheld it from what the president viewed yesterday and from what I showed you earlier. The stuff about Salomon is one thing, but this is altogether different. This is the second secret Mellon was referring to.”
She read it, then said, “This talks about concerns with the 16th amendment. It specifically mentions Kentucky.”
“Which Larks visited. He discovered that the state may have never ratified the amendment, yet Knox certified that it did.”
She motioned with the copy. “And the other memo? The one sent eleven days earlier that seems to have even more concerns?”
He shook his head. “It’s not here. And that’s the truth.”
She gestured again with the page. “Is there any evidence that Morgenthau saw this memo from the solicitor general?”
“If he did, he never mentioned it in any surviving documents. But in those days, finding anything in our archives would have taken weeks of hand searching. It was easy for things to get lost.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to know.”
“That’s possible. But there’s no evidence anywhere that he even looked. He was definitely focused on the Salomon angle, and realized that there may be something else, but there’s nothing to suggest he ever went looking. Again, they were all preoccupied with the war, then FDR died. I also did some other checking. The solicitor general who wrote that memo you’re holding, from 1913, left office and died three months after sending it.”
“So tell me what’s so awful that you’re willing to risk your job and career?”
“Larks read that 1913 memo and got some kind of wild hair up his butt. He went to Kentucky and found problems, which didn’t help. I told him to forget about it and leave it alone, but he wouldn’t stop. Finally, I sent Isabella Schaefer, the agent now in Croatia, not only to Kentucky, but three other states, and she found similar problems. Questionable procedures, lax rule following, missing originals. More than enough to call into question whether those states properly ratified the 16th Amendment. By then Larks had gone nuts, demanding a formal investigation. There’s no way we could do that. So I eased him out and sealed his lips behind a classified stamp and threat of jail.”
“And without any proof, he’d just be another wild conspiratorialist.”
“That was my thinking. But the old man got a step ahead of us and made copies. Then we found out he stole that original, keeping the best evidence for himself. A single page with random numbers—”
“Crumpled up.”
He looked surprised. “That’s right. How did you know?”
“Kim Yong Jin has it now.”
Shock filled Levy’s face. “Stephanie, I don’t think that amendment was properly ratified. It could be void, and may have been even from the start. I think Mellon knew that, and used it to his political advantage.”
And she knew the rest. “But this was never meant to get out. It was something between Mellon and FDR.”
The lawyer inside her calculated the fallout. Danny had been right in the car on the drive back from Virginia. If the person certifying the 16th Amendment had been placed on notice that the ratification process may have been flawed, yet he certified the amendment passed anyway, that was fraud. Which meant that every single cent collected through a wrongfully adopted 16th Amendment was subject to suit and restitution. Those millions of lawsuits would destroy the American economy. Not only that, current revenue collections would cease until a substitute revenue source could be legally enacted. Maybe a direct tax, subject to apportionment? Or some sort of national sales tax or flat tax? Or a new amendment to allow a legal income tax without apportionment? All options. But those would take time to enact, all while the U.S. government would be without over 90 percent of its revenues.
“Kim wants to use this offensively against us,” Levy said. “And he can. He’ll be able to destroy us, without ever firing a shot. He’ll actually turn our own legal system against us. He could do what North Korea has been threatening for decades. We laugh at them. What are they? Just a tiny, insignificant country on the other side of the world. But look at the damage he could do.”
Which also explained why the Chinese were so interested. Over a trillion dollars in defaulted debt would seriously injure them as well. She had to admit, the scheme was clever. Smart, too. And they would have never seen it coming but for a few fortuitous flukes that had pointed them in the right direction.