No Virginia there is no comparison to Trumps Philly crowd. Trump got thousands. Joe got 100.
So, Biden speaks at a high school gym and gets about 100 folks. Including the students and the media. Trump has between 8-10,000. So what do the Biden folks do? Put out a phony comparison. They use an Obama rally photo for Fetterman.
Below is the Biden rally.
Here’s the real comparison photo along with the fake one.
No Virginia, Trump isn’t the feeble one. CNN reporter calls out liar at MSNBC.
As everyone knows, Biden is the one who’s been caught on video hundreds of times where he either lies, falls, freezes,etc. But now one MSNBC put out a fake photo trying to show that Trump is as feeble as Biden. Here’s the twitter photo.
Here’s a CNN reporter calling out the jerk from MSNBC. HE SHOWS THE ACTUAL VIDEO.
The media and the Biden regime have responded by proclaiming such footage as “fake videos” doctored by conservative outlets. In the words of George Orwell, they are asking you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
Articles that MSM doesn’t do justice to.
Below are links to articles that MSM usually ignores and hopes that the common man and woman won’t read? Why? They aren’t written from a progressive spin.
#10 – Top law professor labels mRNA COVID-19 injections “weapons of mass destruction.”
#9 – Joe Biden’s daily pharmaceuticals have reportedly been revealed.
#8 – Joe Rogan now questions if elections are even “real.”
#7 – Candace Owens destroys Piers Morgan in a one-on-one debate about the COVID shots.
#5 – The US-Saudi petrodollar deal ends after fifty years, and nobody’s talking about it.
#4 – Senator Lindsay Graham gives away the neocon playbook to the war in Ukraine.
#1 – European elections see a dramatic shift to the right across the entire continent.
Short and sweet. Why are White Progressive Supremacists afraid of having children? Maybe they fear the children will turn out like them? I’m seeing it all the time. Older white progressive supremacists bragging about how they talk their children into abortions or not having babies at all.
My thinking is that they look at their pathetic life and figure the grand kids will grow up like them or turn out like their own children.
Biden Loves to Tell Tall Tales. NY Times Cuts Them Down to Size.
Below is a NY Times Fact Check.
In President Biden’s telling, he was a teenage civil rights activist, a former trucker, the first in his family to go to college and the nephew of a cannibalism victim.
All of these claims stretch the truth or are downright false. But Mr. Biden persists in telling personal tales with rhetorical flourishes and factual liberty when he works a room or regales an audience. They are a way to connect with voters, emphasize his “middle-class Joe” persona and charm his audience.
Despite Mr. Biden’s penchant for exaggerating details when recounting episodes from his life, these autobiographical embellishments differ in scale and significance from the stream of lies about a stolen election peddled by his opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.
A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, said that Mr. Biden had “brought honesty and integrity back to the White House” and that he shared life experiences that had shaped his outlook.
Here are some of the president’s most repeated yarns.
WHAT WAS SAID
“In our last debate, when I was 29 years old, the first question he was asked at the debate was, ‘Do you have any regrets, Senator Boggs?’ And he said, ‘No.’ Then we came to the very end of the debate, where I spoke and then he was to conclude. He stood up, and he said, ‘You know, I was asked if I had any regrets. I said no, but I have one: Had Joe Biden gone to the Naval Academy when I appointed him, he’d still have seven months left on and wouldn’t be able to run.’”
— in a May commencement speech at the United States Military Academy
Mr. Biden has repeatedly recounted this tale to graduating cadets at various military academies and to families of service members: In high school in the 1960s, he had been nominated to attend the United States Naval Academy by Senator J. Caleb Boggs of Delaware, his Republican opponent in his first Senate race. Mr. Boggs, Mr. Biden sometimes adds, later lamented that Mr. Biden had declined to accept the nomination in a 1972 debate. It is an anecdote that dates as far back as 2010, when Mr. Biden said in a speech that Mr. Boggs had “considered” him for the academy.
It is possible that this nomination occurred, but The New York Times could not verify Mr. Biden’s claim.
The academy does not have any records of Mr. Biden receiving a nomination or an appointment, said a spokeswoman, Ashley Hockycko, but it does not possess preliminary applications or requests made to congressional offices.
Mr. Boggs started his first term as senator in January 1961. If the current deadline is any indication, members of Congress have until Jan. 31 to submit nominations to the Naval Academy. Mr. Biden graduated from high school that June and began his first semester at the University of Delaware that fall. The Delaware Historical Society, which houses Mr. Boggs’s Senate records, could find only his nominations to the Naval Academy from 1962. Mr. Biden’s name was not on that list.
Similarly, The Times was unable to verify Mr. Biden’s retelling of that 1972 debate. Newspaper articles detailing debates and events attended by Mr. Biden and Mr. Boggs in September and October of that year did not mention any questions about regrets or the nomination. In his 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” Mr. Biden wrote of only one debate, and did not include any reference to the nomination.
It is also unclear what Mr. Boggs, in Mr. Biden’s telling, could have meant by suggesting Mr. Biden would have still been committed to the academy or the armed services for another seven months. Midshipmen at the Naval Academy attend for four years and serve for at least five years in the Navy or Marines after graduation. Had Mr. Biden attended the academy instead of the University of Delaware in 1961, he would have still been able to run against Mr. Boggs in 1972.
WHAT WAS SAID
“I used to drive an 18-wheeler.”
— at an April campaign event in Florida
Mr. Biden often repeats this claim when attending events with union members. The White House cited Mr. Biden’s job driving a school bus during law school. In the 1970s, he also took a 500-mile trip as a senator on a cargo truck.
WHAT WAS SAID
“As a matter of fact, the first organization I ever joined was the N.A.A.C.P. Didn’t get to vote until you were 21 in those days, but I got involved in civil rights when I was 15.”
— at an N.A.A.C.P. event in Michigan in May
“She said, ‘Remember when they were desegregating Lynnfield, the neighborhood? It was 70 homes, built, suburbia. And I told you there was a Black family moving in, and people were down there protesting. I told you not to go down there. And you went down, remember that? And you got arrested, standing on the porch with a Black family.’”
— in an interview with Howard Stern in April
Our politics reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
For decades, Mr. Biden has occasionally suggested that he played a greater role in the civil rights movement than he actually did. While there is corroboration of Mr. Biden’s participation in a few desegregation events, he has also said he would not consider himself an activist in the movement. There is no evidence that he was ever arrested.
The White House said that there are countless moments in any person’s life that local newspapers opt not to cover and that Mr. Biden was proud to have stood up against segregation in his youth.
The Washington Post detailed several other instances of the anecdote Mr. Biden is relaying, through his mother, of his arrest as a teenager while protesting for civil rights. In some cases, Mr. Biden has said he was 13 or that the police brought him home.
Local newspapers reported that in spring 1959, when Mr. Biden was 16, a Black family moved into an all-white neighborhood in Wilmington, prompting residents to protest against integration. Police officers described the demonstrators as a mob, some armed with fire bombs, and arrested seven people, including four teenagers for possessing fireworks. (The house was bombed and destroyed later that year.)
Mr. Biden joined the N.A.A.C.P. during his first political race for New Castle County Council in 1970, when he was in his late 20s, according to a 2019 Washington Post article that included an interview with the former president of the Delaware N.A.A.C.P.
WHAT WAS SAID
“I’m the first in my family ever to go to college.”
— at a May campaign event in Detroit
Mr. Biden described his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan Sr., as the “only person in the house with a college degree” in his 2007 autobiography. According to Mr. Finnegan’s 1957 obituary, he attended and played football for Santa Clara College in California. Mr. Biden has previously said that he was the first on the Biden side of the family to go to college.
WHAT WAS SAID
“Under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 will pay an additional penny. I hope you’re all able to make $400,000. I never did.”
— at an April campaign event in Pennsylvania
“She said, ‘Did you read today’s paper?’ I said, ‘They don’t have today’s paper — Wilmington paper, Delaware — where I’m with Leahy up in Vermont. And she said, ‘Well, let me read it. Top of the fold, headline, Biden, poorest man in Congress.’”
— at a March campaign event in Nevada
For much of his political career, Mr. Biden was among the least wealthy members of Congress. With a net worth of negative $166,500, Mr. Biden was listed by the newspaper Roll Call as the poorest member in 1990, the first year it began compiling net worth rankings. (The News Journal, based in Wilmington, reported the ranking on page 33, not the front page.)
He continued to rank near the bottom for net worth throughout his decades-long career in the Senate. According to Mr. Biden’s tax returns, he and his wife, Jill, earned less than $400,000 almost every year from 1998 to 2016. But they earned more than $400,000 in 2013 and in every year since 2017, ranging from $408,733 in 2013 to more than $11 million in 2017. (The president’s yearly salary, under federal law, is $400,000.)
WHAT WAS SAID
“Ambrose Finnegan — we called him Uncle Bosie — he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.”
— in remarks to reporters in April
In his 2007 autobiography, Mr. Biden wrote that he often heard family lore about his hero uncle, Ambrose Finnegan Jr., who was a pilot during World War II. But his suggestion that Mr. Finnegan was shot down and cannibalized in New Guinea is not supported by military records or anthropologists.
Image
According to the agency of the Pentagon that accounts for the missing or those taken prisoner during war, Mr. Finnegan, a second lieutenant, was a passenger on an aircraft that crashed into the ocean on the north coast of New Guinea in May 1944 after its engines failed. Three men, including Mr. Biden’s uncle, were lost in the crash while a fourth was rescued by a passing barge. There are no indications that the plane was shot down or that Mr. Finnegan was flying the plane.
Mr. Finnegan would have been an unlikely victim of cannibalism in New Guinea, anthropologists and locals told PolitiFact and The Guardian. Studies of cannibalism in the country have noted that victims tended to be enemies from warring tribes as an act of revenge or deceased relatives as part of a mourning ritual.
Mr. Biden shared his account of Mr. Finnegan’s death after visiting a war memorial in Scranton, Pa., that bore his uncle’s name. The story was meant to highlight Mr. Biden’s commitment to equipping troops and honoring veterans, the White House said.
WHAT WAS SAID
“I was getting on the train, and one of the senior guys at Amtrak — I became friends with all of them after all the years, and I’ve ridden 36 years as a senator — and he comes up to me — his name is Angelo — and he comes over and says, ‘Joey, baby!’ He grabs my cheek, and I thought they were going to shoot him. And I said, ‘Ang, what’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I just read in the newspaper’ — because they keep meticulous mileage about how many times you — how many miles you use an aircraft for the United States Air Force as vice president. ‘I just read in the paper, Joey, you traveled 1,200,000 miles on Air Force Two.’”
— in a speech in Nevada in December
This story, as told, stretches credulity. Mr. Biden logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two in early 2016, according to himself. Angelo Negri, the conductor, retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in 2014. It is possible that Mr. Biden mistook another conductor for Mr. Negri: He recounted in 2009 speaking with an unnamed Amtrak employee, who also called out to him, “Joey, baby.”
Linda Qiu is a reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
Yes Virginia, If Trumps court cases are allowed in the debates, so are Biden’s China contacts and his sons charges. Below is what some say is a partial list of what Trump and Biden want covered in the debate.Biden’s campaign made public their wish list last week:
That’s a far different wish list than Trump’s campaign:
I would like to see the corruption in the DOJ covered. Also if Trumps court cases are brought up, then so should the Hunter laptop and Hunter and Joe’s family cases and Chinese business dealings.
Protecting Yourself from a Bully with a Badge Part 3 Some GOOD COPS
Not all Bullies with a Badge are evil or have underlying mental problems. There is no doubt that some most definitely do have severe problems, and civilians get injured or die because of them.
Then, some think they are doing things correctly but are either ignorant of the laws they are supposed to enforce or harbor unconscious biases.
There is also the “the end justifies the means” group.
Note the good cop was penalized for speaking up, and the bad cop was rewarded — until a news station filed a FOIA request for the body cam footage.
Finally, there are the cops who are so thin-skinned that they harass and/or arrest people because their feelings get hurt.
The end justifies the means. Here, the “end” is getting credited with an arrest. I would likely fail the walking a straight line (heel and toe) test because my toes rarely point straight ahead unless I’m running. This test also forces you to place your feet in an unnatural, unbalanced position. Even professional wire walkers have trouble maintaining their balance when forced to walk like that without a balance pole or something similar, and any swaying as you walk will cause the cops to claim that “proves” you’re intoxicated.
ON TO THE GOOD COPS!
Here, we start with the typical bad attitude, this time by a court bailiff. As usual, when a bad cop gets frustrated, they escalate, but this time, officers who KNOW the law stand up for the civilians.
I don’t think I’d be brave enough to do what this guy does. Too much chance of suffering an “accident.” But again, Good cops straighten out the bad cops and the civilian Karens/Kevins.
And cops doing good deeds:
Support good cops and report the bad ones.
Protecting Yourself from a Bully with a Badge (When You’ve Done Nothing Wrong.) Part One
First off, not every Law enforcement officer is a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or just a power-mad entitled dick – male OR female, and I’ll give examples later in this series. The ones who aren’t hate these other jerks as much as we do.
There’s this thing called “qualified immunity,” which the ones who are dicks, think permits them to break the law and screw civilians over — up to and including killing them — often without consequence.
If you want to see for yourself what I’m talking about, go to YouTube or TikTok and search for “bad cops.” You’ll see hundreds of items there, illustrating police/civilian encounters gone bad: from cops just being stupid to going on out-and-out vendettas. Content creators include Audit the Audit, Justice for All, DeleteLawz, KY Reacts, LackLuster/L L Media, We The People University(a former cop/sheriff deputy), The Civil Rights Lawyer, and @Detectivemattthornton (still an active duty officer) on both Tiktik and YouTube. 
First of all, according to the courts Cops are ALLOWED to lie to you. They are also allowed to intimidate you through their lies and ask “fishing” questions to try to get you to incriminate yourself (Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.) Keep your hands visible at all times!
As soon as you see flashing lights, check your speedometer. If you have a dash cam, make sure it’s turned on. If you also have a smartphone, START RECORDING on it. Lock all your doors. Don’t roll your window down so far that the cop can reach through and try to open the door if he/she gets frustrated.
A.)”Do you know how fast you were going?” Do NOT say ‘No.’ If you do, he can pick a number and say that’s how fast you were going — true or not.
Note: I once shut down a cop who came up and asked me that leading question by saying, “Yes, I know EXACTLY how fast I was going — the speed limit.” Of course, you can’t use that if you are speeding.
B.)”ID/DL, registration, and Proof of Insurance.” Answer,”Am I accused of a crime, Officer?” If he’s just fishing, he/she will hem and haw and say something alongs the lines of “that’s what I’m trying to find out” or “that’s what I’m investigating.” They have nothing on you, they’re fishing. You can refuse to ID yourself under the 4th and 5th Amendments if he can’t quote a specific crime. Mere suspicion is not a crime.”Disorderly conduct,” “obstruction” and similar “crimes” are mere deflections and lies. They cannot ask for your SSN in any case, despite what they may tell you. It is only a crime to give a FALSE name to a cop. It’s NOT a crime to refuse to provide ID.
If he/she keeps repeating this mantra, immediately ask for his/ her name and badge number and keep repeating that each time he refuses to tell you WHY he/she needs your ID, If they start getting frustrated and belligerent, change your response’ to “I want to see your Supervior/ Call your supervisor.”
C.) “Turn your phone off.” MAJOR RED FLAG!!!! They know they don’t have a good case and don’t want evidence showing their mistakes. In fact, some bad cops have been caught DELETING footage from someone else’s phone.
D.) “Do you mind if I search for your car/search you/pat you down?” before he has given a justifiable ( and actual) crime. If you answer anything other than “I do not consent/give consent/ give permision to/for any search of myself or my property.” or “I refuse to surrender my constitutional rights under the 4th and fifth amendments.” Be careful because if your reply is IN ANY WAY ambiguous, said cop will interpret it as you consenting to what would otherwise be an unlawful search. ex “Yes ( I DO mind)” = Go ahead ; “No (you don’t have my permission)” = Go ahead.
E.) “Have any drugs or weapons in the car?” Another RED FLAG that they are fishing, trying to get you to (supposedly) incriminate yourself and/or give themselves an excuse to escalate the situation.
F.) “Step out of the car” with or without threats of arrest or physical violence if you don’t obey and without giving a valid law that he has a justifiable reason to suspect you of breaking. Immediately demand a supervisor. This is also why you should keep your doors locked, to prevent the cop from opening the door and yanking you out of your vehicle. They may break out your window despite you not threatening them in any way.
If you aren’t alone and they have a phone, call the county or state police and tell them that the LEOs at your site will not identify themselves. You are unsure if they are real officers since they cannot give a valid reason for the stop, and you are fearful for your safety. (If the cops or 911 don’t seem impressed, I suggest you contact a local TV or radio station.) Stay on the line. Give a running commentary of what’s happening. KEEP AS CALM AS POSSIBLE. If you snap back at them, corrupt (or stupid) cops will claim you’re resisting and/or being aggressive and escalate things even further.
See part TWO, upcoming…
Loser. Former Capitol Police officer who lied to lawmakers about Jan. 6, 2021, defeated in primary. Let this be a lesson to others who try to capitalize off their lies about January 6.
Dunn resigned as a Capitol Police officer in December after serving for more than 15 years. He told the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, that he was the target of racial slurs and joined support groups after the attack to deal with the trauma of what had unfolded. His claims were not verified by the government investigation.
Dunn said on X, formerly Twitter, that he ran for Congress to “protect our democracy from MAGA Republicans & greedy corporations while also fighting for abortion rights & economic opportunity for every Marylander.”
Documents Reveal Biden WH Worked With Archives on Trump Case.
Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida.
More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt for presidential papers, challenge public statements by Joe Biden about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival.
The new disclosures indicate the Department of Justice was in touch with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) during much of 2021, undermining the DOJ’s claims that it became involved in the matter only after the Archives sent it a criminal referral on February 9, 2022, based on the findings of records with “classified markings” in 15 boxes of materials Trump gave to the Archives a month prior.
The court exhibits, which were compiled by Trump’s defense lawyers and kept under seal until last week, also show that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su regularly communicated with Archive officials.
Although Biden himself is not mentioned in the exhibits, the active participation of Su and other high-ranking White House officials raises questions about whether Biden was forthright when he told “60 Minutes” he wasn’t involved in the investigation.
“I have not asked for the specifics of those documents,” Biden told Scott Pelley in the Sept. 17 broadcast, “because I don’t want to get myself in the middle of whether or not the Justice Department should move or not move on certain actions they could take. I agreed I would not tell them what to do and not, in fact, engage in telling them how to prosecute or not.”
Trump’s lawyers first filed the heavily redacted material in a January motion, under a standing protective order issued by the court to initially conceal potentially sensitive information. His team then asked U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the matter in southern Florida, to remove many of those redactions based on her review.
A protracted battle ensued as Smith fought to keep large portions of the motion and accompanying exhibits from the public. Smith told Cannon that disclosing the material would jeopardize the investigation and expose potential witnesses and government employees to “significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment.”
But Cannon, arguing the need for public transparency, authorized the unsealing of the files, which were posted in mostly unredacted form on April 22. A comparison of the redacted and unredacted material shows the Archives acted in concert with several Biden administration agencies to build the case — coordination that included the DOJ, the Biden White House, and the intelligence community.
The Trump case prompted revelations that both Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence had also retained classified documents – in Biden’s case for decades, stretching back to his time in the Senate. But while the Archives’ outreach to Biden and Pence consisted of requests, the agency took a more assertive stance with Trump.
Within weeks of Trump’s leaving office in 2021, employees with Biden’s Office of Records Management and the Archives began coordinated demands to Trump’s transition team, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Gary Stern, the Archives general counsel, noting “several conversations” with records office employees to discuss “concerns” about material in Trump’s possession, emailed Trump’s team in May 2021 and asked them to account for “roughly two dozen boxes of original Presidential records [that] have not been transferred to NARA.”
Stern did not specify the files the Archives wanted beyond “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office.” An unsealed FBI report indicated the Archives also sought the so-called “Sharpiegate” map of Hurricane Dorian that the former president used during a 2018 televised briefing on the track of the storm.
Despite Trump’s cooperation, David Ferriero, the national archivist appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, warned the transition team a month later in June 2021 that he was running “out of patience.”
By August 2021, Ferriero and Stern were in contact with DOJ officials and at least one White House attorney to develop what initially appeared to be a records destruction case against Trump. According to White House visitor logs, Stern met with Su on August 12 at the White House.
From that point on, the collaboration between the White House and Archives accelerated. On Aug. 30, 2021, Ferriero, making unfounded accusations that 24 boxes of materials were missing, warned Trump’s team, “At this point, I am assuming [the boxes] have been destroyed. In which case, I am obligated to report it to the Hill, the DOJ, and the White House.”
A Trump staffer whose name remains redacted responded, “To my knowledge, nothing has been destroyed.”
The archives, with apparent guidance from top White House lawyers, pressed forward. On Sept. 1, Stern sent an email to Ferriero and deputy archivist Debra Wall with the subject line, “Draft Letter to AG re Missing Trump Records.” In the Sept. 1, 2021 email, Stern disclosed that he already had “reached out to DOJ counsel about this issue,” and that “WH Counsel is now aware of the issue.”
An attachment to the email included a draft letter from Ferriero to Attorney General Merrick Garland to notify him that presidential records “may have been unlawfully removed from U.S. government custody or possibly destroyed.”
On Sept. 2, presumably with the draft letter in hand, Ferriero met with White House Counsel Dana Remus in her office, according to visitor logs. The draft letter was not sent as the Archives and White House continued to advance the case behind the scenes.
On Sept. 9, 2021, both Ferriero and Stern met again with Remus and possibly White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. (A Sept. 8, 2021, email from Stern referred to a meeting beforehand with “Ron and Dana,” possibly referencing Klain.) The same email indicated plans to also meet with Su.
An Oct. 2021 letter to Ferriero from Remus referred to a “notification on September 8” related to the January 6 Select Committee’s request for Trump’s records. In the letter, Remus denied Trump’s claims of privilege in preventing the committee from early access to his papers.
But the email chains do not reflect any mention of the January 6 Committee’s demands; to the contrary, emails between the White House and Archives repeatedly reference the “Trump boxes.”
In fact, a Sept. 15 email disclosed that Stern spoke to Su to “get him up to speed on the issue and the dispute whether there are 12 or 24 missing boxes.” A few weeks later, Stern told his colleagues that “WHCO [White House counsel] is ready to set up a call to discuss the Trump boxes.”
On Jan. 18, 2022, following roughly seven months of negotiations, Trump’s team delivered 15 boxes to the Archives. In a matter of hours, the Archives’ White House liaison director said he conducted what he described in an email to Ferriero, Wall, and three undisclosed recipients as a “high level overview” of the contents.
While admitting that most of the material consisted of “newspapers, magazines, and printed news articles,” the official claimed the boxes contained “lots of classified records.”
That assessment triggered deeper involvement by the DOJ. An unsealed FBI interview with an Archives official indicated that on Jan. 22 Su directed Stern to contact the office of Lisa Monaco, the current deputy attorney general and a longtime former adviser to Obama, to lay the groundwork for a criminal referral. It would represent the first time the Archives had ever sent a referral to the DOJ asking for an investigation into the retention of classified records.
Two days later, Monaco’s office “instructed” Stern on how to proceed. For guidance as to how a criminal investigation would proceed, two Monaco associates told Stern to notify the inspectors general for both the Archives and the intelligence community as well as DOJ National Security Division Chief Jay Bratt, now the lead prosecutor for Jack Smith in the classified documents case, and the chief of the DOJ’s public integrity unit.
According to the unredacted defense motion, Stern followed the DOJ’s guidance and sent information about the 15 boxes to the Archives’ inspector general, who then notified the intelligence community’s inspector general about a “very high level potential spillage and records management issue.”
The email chain then made its way to Thomas Windom, a prosecutor now tasked to Smith’s team on the Jan. 6 case against Trump, on Feb. 1. A criminal referral was officially sent to the DOJ on Feb. 9.
Two months after the archives received Trump’s boxes, which he produced voluntarily, the FBI opened on March 30, 2022, what it named the “Plasmic Echo” investigation, according to an unsealed FBI document. The probe centered on the “mishandling of classified or national defense information.”
A grand jury and the FBI summoned Mar-a-Lago employees to testify. In May 2022, at the same time Biden officials were scouring Biden-related locations including the Penn-Biden Center in Washington for classified documents in advance of a potential GOP investigation into the same matter if Republicans won the House, the DOJ issued a subpoena for more classified records.
Not satisfied with the result – that Trump’s lawyers produced 38 more files to investigators in June 2022 – Garland authorized and the FBI executed a nine-hour raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. After seizing more than 13,000 pieces of evidence, prosecutors claimed agents found another 102 records with classified markings.
In June 2023, Smith, appointed in November 2022 to take over the existing investigation, charged Trump with 32 counts of “willfully” retaining national defense information, representing a shift from the premise of the original investigation into more serious Espionage Act crimes. (Visitor logs show that Stern met with Biden’s special counsel Richard Sauber at the White House the day before Smith announced the indictment.)
Smith has also indicted Waltine Nauta, Trump’s personal aide, with obstruction, for moving boxes within Mar-a-Lago in an alleged attempt to conceal materials from investigators, and another Mar-a-Lago employee, Carlos DeOlivera, for allegedly attempting to erase security video at the property. All have pleaded not guilty.
Another Special Counsel, Robert Hur, was subsequently named to investigate Biden’s retention of classified material, dating as far back as 1977. Although Hur reported that Biden had willfully retained state secrets in unsecured locations and illegally shared them with a ghostwriter, he concluded that Biden should not be prosecuted for these violations.
Trump and his co-defendants have filed motions to dismiss based on selective and vindictive prosecution; Cannon has not yet ruled on those motions.
A May 2024 trial date in Florida has been postponed in light of Trump’s other legal entanglements, which the former president has described as a partisan witch hunt to interfere in the 2024 election.
