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Documents Reveal Biden WH Worked With Archives on Trump Case.

Documents Reveal Biden WH Worked With Archives on Trump Case.

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigations
May 2, 2024

AP
Jack Smith, special counsel: Opposed releasing files on the handling of Trump’s documents 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.

LinkedIn
Jonathan Su, White House lawyer: In regular touch with National Archives.

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.

Southern District of Florida/Wikimedia
Aileen Cannon, presiding judge: Unseal the files, she ruled..

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.

National Archives
Gary Stern, National Archives lawyer: Some two dozen boxes of files missing.

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.”

TK

Before-and-after illustration 1: Unredactions on the National Archives’ early and aggressive focus.

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.

National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia
David Ferriero, national archivist: In touch with Justice Department.

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.

TK

.Before-and-after illustration 2: Unredactions suggest early coordination with the White House and DOJ.

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.

White House/Wikipedia
Dana Remus, White House counsel: Met with national achivist Ferriero in her office.

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.”

TK

Before-and-after illustration 3: Unredactions on cooperation between the Archives and White House counsel.

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.

Department of Justice
Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney general: “Instructed” National Archives lawyer Stern on how to proceed.

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.”

TK

Before-and-after illustration 4: Unredactions on top-level DOJ involvement before receiving criminal referral.

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.

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The “Right Man” And The Fear Of Losing Face in Politics

The “Right Man” And The Fear Of Losing Face in Politics

RE: Biden, Pelosi, Jack Smith, Engoron, Letitia James, et al.

Biden joins an elite class.

These excerpts are from Colin Wilson‘s A Criminal History Of Mankind (1984).

Here Wilson discusses the interesting psychological concept of the “Right Man”, which might in other uses also be called the “Dominant Male” or the “Alpha Male”, though we are, of course, speaking here about the negative extremes in behaviour of this human type, not just ordinary dominance or leadership.

The “Right Men” can be domestic household tyrants terrorizing their families but they can be found in all fields of life: in business, politics, art, culture. Everyone must have encountered one: a dominating boss, school headmaster or teacher, army officer, father, son, boyfriend, bully.

Essential here is that the “Right Man” must always have his way and is afraid of losing face above all (“How dare you talk to me this way?”): anything that might be an indication of his infallibility or erroneous ways, something that he can never admit.

And if things don’t exactly go his way, he may scare people into submission by breaking into outbursts of rage or downright violence. He may demand absolute faithfulness from his woman but “play around” himself, since as a God-like “Right Man” this is his divine prerogative (he thinks). Colin Wilson also points out that there are “Right Women” too, so this is not exclusively male behaviour.

“The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. (Sound familiar? — TPR) Another characteristic of both men was a conviction they they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.”

“Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A.E. Van Vogt who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length…”

[…]

“In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called The Violent Man, which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so are, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar?”

Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. […] [For example,] marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation.”

[…]

“… ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’ […] is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.”

[…]

“Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, fliers into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder.”

“Van Vogt points out that the Right Man is an ‘idealist’ — that is, he lives in his own mental world and does his best to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. Like the Communists’ rewriting of history, reality can always be ‘adjusted’ later to fit his glorified picture of himself. In his mental world, women are delightful, adoring, faithful creatures who wait patiently for the right man — in both senses of the word — before they surrender their virginity. He is living in a world of adolescent fantasy. No doubt there was something gentle and submissive about the nurse that made her seem the ideal person to bolster his self-esteem, the permanent wife and mother who is waiting in a clean apron when he get back from a weekend with mistress…”

“Perhaps Van Vogt’s most intriguing insight into the Right Man was his discovery that he can be destroyed if ‘the worm turns’ — that is, if his wife or some dependant leaves him. Under such circumstances, he may beg and plead, promising to behave better in the future. If that fails, there may be alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide. She has kicked out the foundations of his sandcastle. For when a Right Man finds a woman who seems submissive and admiring, it deepens his self-confidence, fills him with a sense of his own worth. (We can see the mechanism in operation with Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.) No matter how badly he treats her, he has to keep on believing that, in the last analysis, she recognises him as the most remarkable man she will ever meet. She is the guarantee of his ‘primacy’, his uniqueness; now it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. He may desert her and his children; that only proves how ‘strong’ he is, how indifferent to the usual sentimentality. But if she deserts him, he has been pushed back to square one: the helpless child in a hostile universe. ‘Most violent men are failures’, says Van Vogt; so to desert them is to hand them over to their own worst suspicions about themselves. It is this recognition that leads Van Vogt to write: ‘Realise that most Right Men deserve some sympathy, for they are struggling with an unbelievable inner horror; however, if they give way to the impulse to hit or choke, they are losing the battle, are on the the way to the ultimate disaster… of their subjective universe of self-justification.”

“And what happens when the Right Man is not a failure, when his ‘uniqueness’ is acknowledged by the world? Oddly enough, it makes little or no difference. His problem is lack of emotional control and a deep-seated sense of inferiority; so success cannot reach the parts of the mind that are the root of the problem.”

[…]

“The Right Man hates losing face; if he suspects that his threats are not being taken seriously, he is capable of carrying them out, purely for the sake of appearances.”

“Van Vogt makes the basic observation that the central characteristic of the Right Man is the ‘decision to be out of control, in some particular area’. We all have to learn self-control to deal with the real world and other people. But with some particular person — a mother, a wife, a child — we may decide that this effort is not necessary and allow ourselves to explode. But — and here we come to the very heart of the matter — this decision creates, so to speak, a permanent weakpoint in the boiler, the point at which it always bursts.”

[…]

“He feels he [is] justified in exploding, like an angry god. […] he feels he is inflicting just punishment.”

What is so interesting here is the way the Right Man’s violent emotion reinforces his sense of being justified, and his sense of justification increases his rage. He is locked into a kind of vicious spiral, and he cannot escape until he has spent his fury. […] The Right Man feels that his rage is a storm that has to be allowed to blow itself out, no matter what damage it causes. But this also means that he is the slave of an impulse he cannot control; his property, even the lives of those that he loves, are at the mercy of his emotions. This is part of the ‘unbelievable inner horror’ that Van Vogt talks about.”

[…]

“This is ‘magical thinking’ — allowing a desire or emotion to convince you of something your reason tells you to be untrue. […] Magical thinking provides a key to the Right Man.”

“What causes ‘right mannishness’? Van Vogt suggest that it is because the world has always been dominated by males.”

[…]

“But then, this explanation implies that there is no such thing as a Right Woman—in fact, Van Vogt says as much. This is untrue.” […] The central characteristic of the Right Woman is the same as that of the Right Man: that she is convinced that having her own way is a law of nature and that anyone who opposes this deserves the harshest possible treatment. It is the god (or goddess) syndrome.”

[…]

“… the one thing that becomes obvious in all cases of Right Men is that their attacks are not somehow inevitable’; some of their worst misdemeanours are carefully planned and calculated, and determinedly carried out. The Right Man does these things because he thinks they will help him to achieve his own way, which is what interests him.”

“And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. […] biological studies have confirmed [… that …] for some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities.”

[…]

“The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’, and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society.”

[…]

“We can also see how large numbers of these dominant individuals develop into ‘Right Men’. In every school with five hundred pupils there are about twnety-five dominant ones struggling for primacy. Some of these have natural advantages: they are good athletes, good scholars, good debaters. (And there are, of course plenty of non-dominant pupils who are gifted enough to carry away some of the prizes.) Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant pupils have no particular talent or gift; some may be downright stupid. How is such a person to satisfy his urge to primacy? He will, inevitably, choose to express his dominance in any ways that are possible. If he has good looks or charm, he may be satisfied with the admiration of female pupils. If he has some specific talent which is not regarded as important by his schoolmasters — a good ear for music, a natural gift of observation, a vivid imagination — he may become a lonely ‘outsider’, living in his own private world. (Such individuals may develop into Schuberts, Darwins, Balzacs.) But it is just as likely that he will try to take short-cuts to prominence and become a bully, a cheat or a delinquent.”

“The main problem of these ungifted ‘outsiders’ is that they are bound to feel that the world has treated them unfairly. And the normal human reaction to a sense of unfairness is an upsurge of self-pity. Self-pity and the sense of injustice make them vulnerable and unstable. And we have only to observe such people to see that they are usually their own worst enemies. Their moods alternate between aggressiveness and sulkiness, both of which alienate those who might otherwise be glad to help them. If they possess some degree of charm or intelligence, they may succeed in making themselves acceptable to other people; but sooner or later the resentment and self-pity break through, and lead to mistrust and rejection.”

“The very essence of their problem is the question of self-discipline. Dominant human beings are more impatient than others, because they have more vital energy. Impatience leads them to look for short-cuts. […] Civilisation, as Freud pointed out, demands self-discipline on the part of its members. No one can be licenced to threaten people with carving knives.”

[…]

“When the Right Man explodes into violence, all the energy is wasted. Worse still, it destroys the banks of the canal. So in permitting himself free expression of his negative emotions he is indulging in a process of slow but sure self-erosion — the emotional counterpart of physical incontinence. Without proper ‘drainage’, his inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage farm. This is why most of the violent men of history, from Alexander the Great to Stalin, have ended up as psychotics. Without the power to control their negative emotions, they become incapable of any state of sustained well-being.”

See also:
Colin Wilson interview, August 2005

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Yes Virginia, Biden and the Pentagon lied. New evidence challenges the Pentagon’s account of a horrific attack as the US withdrew from Afghanistan.

Yes Virginia, Biden and the Pentagon lied. New evidence challenges the Pentagon’s account of a horrific attack as the US withdrew from Afghanistan.

“He spoke fluently Dari,” he said. “He told me, ‘What are you doing, Doctor? You love your life. You love your family. This is not good when you are collecting that data. It would make a big dangerous situation for you. You should stop that as soon as possible.’”

The man called another time to repeat the warning, and Ahmadi advised his team to stop recording data and destroy the evidence they had collected.

The Pentagon, in response to Ahmadi’s initial anonymous statement to CNN in 2022 that he had treated gunshot wounds, said that he was mistaken. They said bullet and ball-bearing injuries are hard to distinguish – a claim disputed by multiple combat medics who spoke to CNN, and by Ahmadi himself.

Ahmadi said he was never approached by American investigators.

“I hope one day they ask me,” he said. “Now I am safe. I feel well… Sometimes just this secret that I have in my mind haunts me.”

Pentagon spokesman Lodewick said no Afghans were interviewed for the original AR 15-6 investigation “because its scope and focus on US operations did not demand it.” He said the supplemental review was “even more refined” in its scope, focusing more on events before the blast and the bomber, “and again presented no overwhelming need for the pursuit of external Afghan-centric information.”

A wounded patient is brought by taxi to the hospital in Kabul on the day of the attack.

Accounts from US servicemen of the aftermath have often been dismissed by officials as the product of blast concussion, or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). As Marine survivors leave active duty and continue to struggle with their trauma and an official narrative that jars with their personal experience, their dissent has grown.

CNN spoke with about ten Marines anonymously, many of whom described hearing gunfire and feeling under attack from it. Some have reported seeing what they thought was a militant gunman. The Pentagon has insisted no other gunmen opened fire in the area at the time of the attack, bar US and UK troops. No American or Afghan witness has specifically stated they directly saw a militant open fire.

One Marine, who decided to speak out of conscience and requested anonymity, fearing reprisals for his account, has become the first American eyewitness to describe shots fired from where US personnel were located. He said that the burst of gunfire after the explosion – heard by witnesses on the ground and audible in the new video – came from the area around the Abbey Gate sniper tower, where US Marines were grouped.

While he could not be certain the Marines had fired directly into the crowd of Afghan civilians in front of them, he said: “They would not have fired into the air.” Marines had been told to not fire warnings shots, he said, as these rounds fired in the air often landed later in civilian areas. “It wasn’t a direct order,” he added. “But it was a common understanding: no warning shots.” He said he did not think any of the shots fired in the four-minute window of gunfire audible on the new video would have been warning shots.

A Marine eyewitness told CNN's Nick Paton Walsh (left) that the burst of gunfire after the explosion – heard by witnesses on the ground and audible in the new video – came from the area around the Abbey Gate sniper tower, where US Marines were grouped.

Public orders issued in the Navy in December 2020 banned warning shots unless specifically permitted on deployment. The Pentagon’s report said Marines from the 2/1 unit that made up most of those on the scene “did not use warning shots and only used flash bang grenades infrequently.” The Marine said he did not see any US military open fire and did not fire himself.

The Marine calmly described key details of blast and its aftermath, but became emotional when discussing the Pentagon’s investigations, including what he described as a lack of transparency about what happened, and the possible role Marine gunfire played in raising the Afghan civilian death toll.

But he defended the immediate response of his colleagues under attack. “The reaction that the Marines had was a reaction that I believe anybody trained to do in that scenario would have had,” he said, suggesting they were in the first phase of the three-stage practice of RTR – Returning fire, Taking cover and then Returning accurate fire.

“You’ve got to think, these are kids,” he said. “They’re young. And they’ve only been taught what they’ve been taught. Some of these kids had been with the unit for quite literally two, three months prior to deployment. They didn’t have the training to be able to recognize some of the things that, you know, might have occurred – nor could you have the training for what had happened on August 26. Or really what happened in Kabul.”

He said the significant gunfire response from Marines after the blast was common knowledge among Marine survivors, even though it was not spoken of publicly. “It’s incredibly weird,” he said. “It’s frustrating, you know? Why hide from what happened?”

Reacting to the Pentagon’s dismissal of accounts from US personnel who recalled gunfire as the product of TBI, the Marine said: “It’s a pathetic excuse. To say that every Marine, every soldier, every Navy corpsman on the deck has a traumatic brain injury and cannot remember gunfire is, is lunacy. It’s outright disrespectful. And especially for it to come from somebody that wasn’t there.”

“To the Afghani [sic] families – I’m sorry that after 20 years of war, that that is the way that this (was) conducted. And that we weren’t able to uphold a promise that we gave your people after removing the Taliban in 2001. And it should not have ended like that.”

Evacuees aboard a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft during the Afghanistan evacuation from Kabul on August 21, 2021.

Many of the 10 other Marines with whom CNN spoke anonymously also describe gunfire. One told CNN that he ran through a hole in the fence outside the Abbey Gate in the minute after the blast to assist with the wounded. As he emerged, he said, he heard suppressed rifle fire nearby from another Marine. Many US Marines’ rifles were fitted with suppressors, reducing the noise of their fire, according to footage from the incident.

“I would probably say five, 10 meters away from me, was where it was,” he said. He said the Marine firing was not from his own unit, and after he had opened fire, “whoever was shooting at us wasn’t shooting at us anymore.”

Another Marine told CNN he was about 20 meters (65 feet) from the blast. “There was definitely, shooting,” he said. “Snapping over our heads after the blast and it wasn’t the Taliban.” He said he used his rifle optic to look at the Taliban, who were some distance away on nearby shipping containers used to control access to the Abbey Gate area. “When I looked over at them, none of them were holding their guns. They looked just as shocked as us.” Other US servicemen who said they witnessed gunfire in the aftermath of the bombing have spoken out on social media.

Sgt. Romel Finley, who received a Purple Heart, said that another sergeant ordered US troops into position to open fire after the bomb blast. Finley told The Brrks YouTube channel, a social media account run by a former Marine and Master Barber which interviews active or former Marines, that he recalled, while being dragged from the scene, “My platoon sergeant running past us, saying ‘get back on that wall and shoot back at those motherf**kers.’ So I was like, we are in a gunfight too.”

Finley, who sustained significant leg injuries in the attack, added that he did not witness Marines firing, or responding to the order. He declined to comment to CNN, as did his platoon sergeant. CNN is withholding the names of Marines who did not specifically consent to being identified in interviews.

Christian Sanchez, another Marine survivor, who was injured in his left arm, told the same Brrks Barber channel that he opened fire after the blast. “All I see is flashes. And all I could hear was ringing. Like all hear is ringing and f**king flashes going on. And I start hearing snaps. And I start realizing that that’s a f**king dude shooting at me,” he said. “And I just started shooting at the dude,” he added, breaking down. Sanchez also declined to speak to CNN about his recollections and it is unclear if he specifically saw the purported militant gunman open fire. Another American military survivor who spoke to CNN said he had endured two years of “leadership saying what you saw was basically not the truth.” He summarized the two investigations as: “Shut your mouth. We’ll talk for you.”

Significant gaps remain in the evidence presented by the Pentagon. Investigators have only released five edited minutes of drone footage from the aftermath, which they said supported their findings that no gunfire hit anyone.

A recent congressional hearing for the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and then-Central Command Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie ended with Congressman Darrell Issa presenting the two generals with a list of unpublished video that, under a Freedom of Information Act request, the Pentagon had admitted they held. The generals told the session they had seen the videos, and that it should be released to congressional investigators.

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Stories we sometimes miss. Exposed: Moderna’s Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent.

Stories we sometimes miss. Exposed: Moderna’s Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent.

Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations & LeeFang.com

Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss last year of $3.6 billion.

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Arpa Garay, Moderna: “It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.

In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s thenchief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna’s numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. “Despite some misinformation,” Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations. “It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.

To get past the “misinformation” and convince the public to take continual booster shots, Garay briefly noted that Moderna was “delving down” on ways to partner “across the ecosystem to make sure consumers are educated on the need for the vaccine.”

What Garay hinted at during the call, but didn’t disclose, was that Moderna already had a sprawling media operation in place aimed at identifying and responding to critics of vaccine policy and the drug industry. A series of internal company reports and communications reviewed by RealClearInvestigations show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded non-governmental organization called The Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.”

Part of this effort includes providing talking points to some 45,000 healthcare professionals “on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream.” PGP and Moderna have created a new partnership, called the “Infodemic Training Program,” to prepare health care workers to respond to alleged vaccine-related misinformation.

The company has also used artificial intelligence to monitor millions of global online conversations to shape the contours of vaccine-related discussion. The internal files — shorthanded here as the Moderna Reports — show high-profile vaccine critics were closely monitored, particularly skeptics in independent media, including Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand, and Alex Berenson. PGP, which was funded by a $1,275,000 donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, a lobby group representing Pfizer and Moderna, has identified alleged vaccine misinformation and helped facilitate the removal of content from Twitter, among other social media platforms, throughout 2021 and 2022.

rocketreach.com
Kaitlyn Kkrizanic of PGP: Beware of “reports that Sweden is no longer recommending the vaccine for children.”

Emails from that period show that PGP routinely sent Excel lists of accounts to amplify on Twitter and others to de-platform, including populist voices such as ZeroHedge.

The messages also suggested emerging narratives to remove from the platform. “People opposed to vaccines are capitalizing on the NYT [New York Times] article about the CDC withholding vaccine information. The articles do not contain misinformation themselves but are using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy,” wrote Savannah Knell, PGP’s senior director of partnerships, in an email to a Twitter lobbyist in September 2022. In another email the following month, Kaitlyn Krizanic, PGP’s senior program manager, told Twitter to be on the lookout for “reports that Sweden is no longer recommending the vaccine for children.” In some cases, conservative accounts expressing outrage at restrictive pandemic policies, such as vaccination passports, were deemed by PGP as “misinformation” that warranted removal.

The Moderna Reports consistently show the company raising red flags about those reporting documented side effects of the vaccine the biotech company was selling. Such concerns, which may be typical of corporate public relations efforts that want their product shown in the best light, take on a darker cast when it involves medicine injected into people’s bodies.

Like the Twitter Files, the Moderna Reports highlight the push by powerful entities – especially government, Big Tech, and Big Pharma – to identify and brand dissenting opinions about establishment narratives as risky forms of speech. The growing network these efforts rely on shows the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex. Moderna’s faltering financials also suggest, at least for now, the limits of that project.

Public Good Projects and Moderna did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Related: Moderna Is Spying on You by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson

In an internal email sent last July, Moderna notified its team of its latest efforts to shape the vaccine debate. “We have partnered with PGP (The Public Good Projects) and Moderna’s Global Intelligence, Corporate Security, Medical Affairs, Corporate Communications, Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance teams to provide media monitoring for misinformation at scale,” Marcy Rudowitz, the company’s customer program lead, wrote. “If and when a response is needed, our team will notify the appropriate stakeholders with recommendations,” she added.

The extent to which the company may intervene to shape content decisions is not clear. PGP continues to boast close relations with establishment institutions, including major medical associations.

The rise of censorship is inextricably connected to the pandemic, which emerged in the U.S. in early 2020. As federal, state, and local governments imposed unprecedented regulations on Americans in the name of public health, efforts arose to discredit counter-narratives that could be spread easily on social media. Early in the pandemic, criticism of policies such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates came almost entirely from independent media, which faced shadowbans and outright censorship on various platforms.

Moderna 2022 ESG Report
Stéphane Bancel, Moderna CEO: “As you can see, we’re losing economies of scale,” he said, explaining price hikes.

When they introduced their vaccines in 2021, manufacturers such as Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson also had a powerful financial interest in bolstering such censorship.

Moderna, perhaps more than other drug firms, is overwhelmingly reliant on the continued success of its vaccine. The company announced a price hike of up to $130 a dose this month, far higher than the $15-26 for American federal contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We’re expecting a 90% reduction in demand,” Modena CEO Stéphane Bancel said, when he was asked to defend the decision. “As you can see, we’re losing economies of scale.”

Far from acting as a neutral arbiter, the Moderna Reports show that the company blurred the lines between public relations and public health. In many cases, Moderna’s intelligence and communications team targeted accurate information that had “the potential to fuel vaccine hesitancy” as menacing forms of misinformation in its reports. Given the size and scope and the censorship industrial complex, it can be difficult to draw a clear straight line between Moderna’s surveillance and actions taken against specific articles, posts, and writers. Instead, as Garay suggested, the company is one stream in an evolving ecosystem aimed at undermining dissent.

Alex Berenson

FNC
Berenson: “It’s nice to know Moderna is watching me. I’m watching them too.”

Independent journalist Alex Berenson is a repeated subject of the company’s surveillance efforts. A former reporter for the New York Times, Berenson quickly emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of vaccine-related policies. He was among the earliest to cast doubt on the Biden administration’s false claim that the vaccinated people could not transmit the COVID-19 virus to others. After government pressure on Twitter, Berenson was banned from the platform in 2021, only to return after successfully litigating against the company.

He appears to still be in the crosshairs. In September 2023, Moderna flagged a tweet from Berenson that highlighted the CDC’s data showing that among 1 million mRNA-vaccinated teenagers, there were from zero to a single COVID death and up to 200,000 side effects.

The company cited Berenson’s tweet under a report headline “Attacks on pediatric COVID-19 vaccines escalate” and claimed he had “cherry-picked data.” However, the company did not directly rebut any of Berenson’s claims in its report. Rather, Moderna noted the “high-risk” danger of Berenson’s viral tweet related to the potential for low child COVID-19 vaccination rates. “Fears about side effects and long-term dangers are major reasons parents report not vaccinating their children,” the report stated. It further concluded that “resistance to COVID-19 vaccines for children can be a gateway to broader anti-vaccine beliefs.”

Other Moderna reports flag Berenson’s tweets for “misinformation about mRNA safety” and claim that he is a “conspiracy theorist” for suggesting that health authorities have not properly taken into account the documented risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) for young men receiving the vaccine. Such questions have been posed by an increasing number of health professionals, but the misinformation reports dismiss any Berenson criticism as inherently false.

“It’s nice to know Moderna is watching me,” said Berenson, when asked about his response to the revelations. “I’m watching them too. mRNA shots carry unacceptably high heart risks for teenagers and young adults. Nearly the entire rest of the world accepts this reality and now discourages or bans people under 50 from taking mRNA Covid boosters. It is unconscionable that Moderna and Pfizer continue to market them to non-elderly adults.”

“They can call me whatever they like,” he noted, “but they can’t stop my reporting.”

Russell Brand

Invision
Brand: Moderna warned of his videos “in anti-vaccine spaces where he is viewed as a truth-teller.”

Russell Brand, the British commentator and comedian, is also a repeated name in the Moderna misinformation files. The left-leaning populist routinely pillories the pharmaceutical industry for exploiting the pandemic to generate unprecedented profits.

Moderna has closely monitored Brand’s criticism of the drug industry.

In various “low-risk” reports produced in August 2023, Moderna flagged videos produced by Brand twice. In one, Moderna noted that Brand had broadcast a monologue about Jonathan Van-Tam, a former senior health official who helped formulate COVID-19 policies in Britain. Van-Tam had just taken a position with Moderna, a move that raised eyebrows with many in the press. In the video, Brand noted that the company had just “made a fortune during the pandemic selling vaccines to the government,” and that the “government worker that bought all those vaccines” was now moving through the revolving door.

In another report, Moderna alleged that Brand “claimed that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were based on a lie in a recent podcast episode.” The video was broadly accurate. The monologue highlights CDC documents that had come to light showing that officials were aware that the virus would “break through” and still infect vaccinated patients. In an ironic twist, Brand finished the segment with a discussion of efforts to censor debate around the vaccine.

Moderna noted they were not yet taking action on this broadcast, but “we are monitoring with our partner, the Public Good Projects.”

The following month, several media outlets reported that several women who insisted on anonymity were claiming that Brand had abused them nearly twenty years ago. The ensuing media firestorm, which led to YouTube demonetizing his account, became fodder for other Moderna misinformation reports. The company warned that the cancellation of Brand was sparking a backlash among social media users, who believed that he may be targeted by government and corporate censors for his outspoken opposition to pandemic narratives.

In a Moderna high-risk report, the company noted that speculation was swirling that “allegations are part of a conspiracy to silence the comedian, who has been a vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccines.” The report linked an X video of Brand sharply criticizing Moderna and Pfizer for generating “$1,000 of profit every second” in 2021. The specific claim of profiteering was a mainstream claim, a statistic that was produced by Oxfam.

Nowhere in its reports on Brand did Moderna highlight any incorrect information. But the reports noted that they monitored Brand because he “has a large platform with over 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and over 21 million followers across multiple social media platforms.” Moreover, his “videos are widely circulated in anti-vaccine spaces where he is viewed as a truth-teller and threat to authority,” and that Brand maintained support from Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.

Michael Shellenberger

AP
Shellenberger: Dismissed by Moderna in internal reports as a known “misinformation author.”

The Moderna misinformation reporting system reveals that the pharmaceutical firm maintained an interest in pandemic-related issues that go beyond vaccine policy, overlapping with general issues surrounding the unexplained questions that still swirl around the source of the pandemic.

The company, for instance, flagged discussions around news last year of a congressional whistleblower who came forward with allegations that the CIA suppressed an assessment from analysts that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The story has garnered widespread coverage in NBC, Science, and ABC News, among other outlets.

But Moderna’s misinformation alerts flagged Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and journalist Michael Shellenberger for distributing information about the CIA allegation. Shellenberger – with whom this reporter has worked on the Twitter Files – had exclusively reported earlier last year that U.S. government sources believed that the “patient zeros” of COVID-19 were a group of Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab – a major revelation later confirmed by the Wall Street Journal.

Despite his work on the issue, Moderna dismisses Shellenberger in its reports as among its known “misinformation authors.”

“Moderna has spent years spreading disinformation about their vaccines and so it makes sense that they would smear the scientists and journalists who expose them as conspiracy theorists and sources of misinformation,” Shellenberger told RCI.

“The question is why is Moderna spreading disinformation on the high probability that Covid escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab?” he added. “A company that makes its money selling a coronavirus vaccine shouldn’t care where Covid came from.”

Others

Moderna closely monitored other independent voices. The company flagged left-wing comedian Jimmy Dore for simply tweeting at a New York Times call for triple-vaccination with the two-word response, “Hard pass,” as an example of misinformation. The company also warned about the appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Joe Rogan podcast as well as Lex Fridman, a popular independent podcaster.

AP
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Moderna warned of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Other reports flag skeptics of vaccine efficiency and potential side effects. In September, Moderna’s system cited Megyn Kelly, the podcaster and former Fox News host, for a viral clip in which she said she regrets the COVID-19 booster after she developed an autoimmune condition that she believes was caused by the shot.

Moderna warned that such comments could “discourage people who are on the fence about getting vaccinated.”  In its alert about Kelly, the company noted that her comments added to growing concern around autoimmune disorders and COVID-19 vaccinations. The Moderna misinformation email proceeded to offer data that appeared to reaffirm, rather than debunk, Kelly’s assertions. The alert concluded with a message about an NIH report that highlights a link between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and inflammatory and autoimmune skin diseases. Moderna did not dispute the findings of the NIH study, but noted that it “is in rotation in anti-vaccine spaces online.”

Invision
Megyn Kelly: Moderna warned that her apparently valid comments could “discourage people who are on the fence about getting vaccinated.”

The merging of public health and corporate influence peddling has concerned many academics. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who says the government violated his free-speech rights by trying to silence his questioning of federal policies regarding COVID, told RCI: “We have a problem that social media companies and the government have allied with pharma to treat information flows around the COVID vaccine as a propaganda problem, rather than a medical issue that is best resolved by patients talking with their doctor about what’s best for them.”

FNC
Jay Bhattacharya: Moderna flagged a tweet of his simply linking to an unwelcome FDA finding on child vaccination.

Bhattacharya was one of the most prominent academics who was shadowbanned under the previous owners of Twitter because of his criticism of the lockdowns and masking policy. He is now one of the plaintiffs litigating against the U.S. government’s role in shaping content decisions on social media platforms in the Missouri v. Biden case, which is now before the Supreme Court.

Bhattacharya’s outspoken advocacy has attracted attention from Moderna as well. In October 2023, shortly after I spoke to him for an interview, Moderna flagged one of the Stanford professor’s tweets that shared a link to a new Food and Drug Administration preprint study that documented “elevated risk of seizures in toddlers and myocarditis in teenagers associated with covid mRNA vaccination.” Moderna did not directly dispute the study findings other than to note that its authors wrote that it “should be interpreted cautiously.”

In the attached report, Moderna added that it had highlighted the tweet and others like it because “concerns about safety and side effects are among the main reasons parents are hesitant about or oppose COVID-19 vaccines for their children.”

In other words, anything that might discourage children from vaccinations, despite any risks or lack of benefits, is dangerous information. That suggests a motive far from bringing truth to the vaccine debate, and far more about dominating it for financial gain.

Near the end of the Moderna call last September, as the biotech firm worked to highlight its stepped-up outreach to consumers, James Mock, the chief financial officer, spoke briefly to assure investors of the company’s ability to continue to make money.

“COVID is a very valuable product line of business and will continue to be,” said Mock, “and we’ll make it more profitable.”

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Biden Biden Cartel Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. Terrorism

‘An outrage, if true,’ says Friedman of reports Biden negotiated scale of Iran attack.

An outrage if true says Friedman of reports Biden negotiated scale of Iran attack. Below is a reprint from the Jewish News Syndicate.

During the Tuesday edition of the New York City-based radio show, “Sid & Friends in the Morning,” host Sid Rosenberg said he believed that Biden was “behind the whole thing” referring to the missile barrage on Israel.

“I was kind of skeptical, but as the stories are coming out… Look, if this ends up being true, this will be an absolute outrage and a scandal the likes of which I haven’t seen before,” Friedman agreed.

The former ambassador accused Biden of being unprincipled enough to do such a thing, and that he would presumably be motivated by the fear of losing the presidential election over high gas prices, an inevitable result of a regional Mideast conflagration.

The White House has categorically denied the rumors with National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby telling the press on Monday, “I’ve also seen this speculation about messages passed back and forth and warnings.

“We did receive messages from Iran. And they received messages from us, too. But there was never any message to us or to anyone else on the timeframe, the targets, or the type of response,” he said.

“In fact, before yesterday it was presumed that 100 ballistic missiles might overwhelm even the best defensive systems. That was Iran’s intent. And as you all saw for yourself, it didn’t work,” Kirby added, crediting “Israel’s remarkable defensive systems.”

On Monday, Reuters cited an unnamed Turkish diplomatic source, who said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had acted as a kind of go-between between his U.S. and Iranian counterparts over the past week to discuss the upcoming Iranian attack.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Fidan to relay to the Iranians that a regional escalation was not in anyone’s interest, the report said.

“Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with Blinken, and they (the U.S.) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits,” the source said.

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Biden Cartel Censorship Commentary Corruption COVID Daily Hits. Government Overreach Leftist Virtue(!) Links from other news sources. Media Woke MSM Reprints from others.

Media Blackout: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You.

Media Blackout: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You. Below are stories taken from the Vigilant fox’s website.

 

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Back Door Power Grab Biden Biden Cartel Commentary Corruption Government Overreach Journalism. Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics Reprints from others. The Courts The Law Uncategorized Weaponization of Government.

Winning. Biden-appointed judge torches DOJ for blowing off Hunter Biden-related subpoenas from House GOP.

Winning. Biden-appointed judge torches DOJ for blowing off Hunter Biden-related subpoenas from House GOP.

A federal judge tore into the Justice Department on Friday for blowing off Hunter Biden-related subpoenas issued in the impeachment probe of his father, President Joe Biden, pointing out that a former aide to Donald Trump is sitting in prison for similar defiance of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee on the federal District Court in Washington, spent nearly an hour accusing Justice Department attorneys of rank hypocrisy for instructing two other lawyers in the DOJ Tax Division not to comply with the House subpoenas.

“There’s a person in jail right now because you all brought a criminal lawsuit against him because he did not appear for a House subpoena,” Reyes said, referring to the recent imprisonment of Peter Navarro, a former Trump trade adviser, for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee. “And now you guys are flouting those subpoenas. … And you don’t have to show up?”

“I think it’s quite rich you guys pursue criminal investigations and put people in jail for not showing up,” but then direct current executive branch employees to take the same approach, the judge added. “You all are making a bunch of arguments that you would never accept from any other litigant.”

It was a remarkable, frenetic thrashing in what was expected to be a relatively routine, introductory status conference after the House Judiciary Committee sued last month to enforce its subpoena of DOJ attorneys Mark Daly and Jack Morgan over their involvement in the investigation of Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes.

Republicans are demanding the two attorneys testify and say it’s crucial for their ongoing impeachment probe of the elder Biden. But the Justice Department argues that subpoenaing two rank-and-file, or “line,” attorneys to seek details about an ongoing investigation would be a violation of the separation of powers.

Reyes has been on the bench for just over a year. Rarely seeming to stop to catch her breath, she repeatedly dressed down DOJ attorney James Gilligan as he sought to explain the department’s position, scolding him at times for interrupting her before continuing a torrid tongue-lashing that DOJ rarely receives from the bench.

She delved into great detail about the nuances of House procedure — like the chamber’s rule against allowing executive branch lawyers to attend depositions — and even asked whether the Judiciary Committee had followed internal rules requiring that the ranking Democrat on the panel be notified of the subpoena to the DOJ attorneys before it was issued.

Yet, perhaps even more remarkably, Reyes seemed inclined to support DOJ’s central argument that the line attorneys cannot be compelled to answer substantive questions from Congress.

They just need to show up and assert privileges on a question-by-question basis, she said — the type of thing, she said, that DOJ demands from others “seven days a week … and twice on Sunday.”

Indeed, while Reyes was withering in her attacks on the DOJ’s position, she was similarly unflinching in her criticism of the House for its stance in the dispute — particularly its claim that line lawyers working on the Hunter Biden tax probe are not entitled to attorney-client privilege.

She also said she thought it absurd for the House to argue that privilege was waived because it was obscuring some crime or fraud within the executive branch.

“I don’t think you’re going to win that fight,” the judge told House Counsel Matthew Berry, saying at one point that she “can’t imagine” ruling for the House on that issue.

At bottom, Reyes said she viewed it as unlikely that the two DOJ attorneys would ultimately be required to answer anything of substance from Congress, but that the department’s effort to prevent them from showing up at all was a brazen affront.

“I imagine that there are hundreds, if not thousands of defense attorneys … who would be happy to hear that DOJ’s position is, if you don’t agree with a subpoena, if you believe it’s unconstitutional or unlawful, you can unilaterally not show up,” the judge said.

Gilligan suggested that the employees subpoenaed in the dispute at issue are current employees, while Navarro and another Trump adviser who was convicted of similar charges, Steve Bannon, were no longer on the government’s payroll when their testimony was demanded.

The judge didn’t seem impressed with that distinction and downplayed the significance of a Trump-era Office of Legal Counsel opinion contending that executive branch employees could defy such subpoenas if Justice Department lawyers were not allowed to be present. “Last time I checked, the Office of Legal Counsel was not the court,” she said.

Reyes also sounded stunned when Gilligan refused to commit to instructing the two subpoenaed lawyers to show up if the House dropped its objection to allowing government counsel to sit in the room. “It would be a different situation,” Gilligan said. “I cannot answer that now. ”Are you kidding me?” the judge responded.

Reyes ultimately ordered the Justice Department to send lawyers to the Capitol next week to confer with Berry and attempt to hammer out a workable agreement. And she said that if the two sides did not work out a deal, she planned to require them to estimate the total cost to the taxpayers of continuing the legal fight, which past precedent suggests could drag out for years.

“I don’t think the taxpayers want to fund a grudge match between the executive and the legislative,” she said. “Bad cases make bad law. … This is a bad, bad case for both of you.”

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Affirmative Action Back Door Power Grab Biden Cartel Censorship Commentary Education Links from other news sources. Reprints from others.

Stories we sometimes miss. Constitutional Scholars, Black Conservatives, Asian Americans praise ruling banning affirmative action.

Stories we sometimes miss. Constitutional Scholars, Black Bonservatives, Asian Americans praise ruling banning affirmative action.

A collective cheer rang out Thursday from a variety of constitutional scholars, black conservatives and Asian American students and supporters after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision banning race-based admissions practices as unconstitutional.The nation’s highest court on Thursday released a 237-page opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College in which a 6-3 majority determined that Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Today’s victory … belongs to thousands of sleepless high schoolers applying to colleges,” Calvin Yang, a member of Students for Fair Admissions and a rising junior at the University of California Berkeley, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

Yang said he was rejected from Harvard University because of its affirmative action policies and he chose to join SFFA to stand up for those who have suffered.

The victory “belongs to those with the last name of Smith or Lee, Chen or Gonzales; it belongs to all of us who deserve a chance. … We can rejoice in the fact that our children will be judged based on their achievements and merits alone,” Yang said at the news conference.

Several black conservatives also chimed in Thursday on social media and in news releases, arguing the decision is a win for the black community.

“Years from now, black students admitted to top schools will say Thank you Supreme Court for a decision that removes the perception the only reason I got in is due to my race. You re-established merit as the core criteria to be considered against a standard bar of excellence,” stated Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on Twitter.

 

The Project 21 Black Leadership Network also published a news release Thursday that cited a parade of scholars praising the decision.

“Using discriminatory practices to supposedly remedy past discrimination was always going to be a recipe for disaster,” said Project 21 Ambassador Christopher Arps. “…Today’s Supreme Court decision is a decisive victory towards Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society.”

Project 21 Ambassador Melanie Collette added: “For years, blacks have been told their achievements are not solely their own, and that their skin color somehow played a role in their successes. It’s insulting and demeaning to suggest that blacks couldn’t have done this without affirmative action’s handout.”

The justices ruled in Students for Fair Admissions that the affirmative action policies instituted by these major universities are unconstitutional.

Constitutional scholar GianCarlo Canaparo with the Heritage Foundation also joined the chorus of praise for the decision.

“For too long the court has allowed universities to use stereotypes to racially balance their student bodies. Today that ends,” he told The College Fix via email on Thursday.

Constitutional scholar Adam Feldman, creator of Empirical Scotus, said the ruling has far-reaching implications for both public and private colleges and universities.

“This ruling not only encompasses public universities but through the Harvard decision also includes universities accepting federal funds as a violation of Title VI. Once the Supreme Court granted these cases the most obvious hypothesis was that the Court would overturn affirmative action with the new conservative supermajority,” Feldman told The Fix via email.

Both Feldman and Canaparo said they expect lower courts will experience more litigation as a result of the decision and admissions officials will now use loopholes to continue to administer race-based enrollment decisions.

Universities “may not use race explicitly, but they’ll give advantages and disadvantages to zip codes and high schools where they know they will find high proportions of the races they like and the races they don’t like,” Canaparo said.

Courts will be forced to “draw a line in the sand delineating how race can no longer play a role in university admissions,” Feldman added. “The magnitude of this decision and its expansiveness should not be understated.”

“It is tricky to predict repercussions beyond the decision’s clarity of race based admissions violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and that this will be applied in all future and pending litigation.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the liberal side of the bench, dissented.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch quoted Bostock, which determined that employers must exercise sex-blindness when making employment decisions. Even though Title IX – which provides clear protections for sex-specific spaces, including athletics – was not mentioned in the opinion, it is unclear how Justice Gorsuch’s inclusion of Bostock will impact future court decisions involving the Civil Rights Act, some scholars say.

Despite what litigation may follow, students say they are hopeful that the court’s majority opinion will provide a brighter future for students, properly awarding merit rather than judging students based on the color of their skin.

“Today’s decision has started a new chapter in history and the saga of Asian Americans in this country. It marks the promise of a new beginning,” Yang said at Thursday’s news conference.

Another student of color who weighed in Thursday was Grove City College’s Isaac Willour, who wrote a piece for the Lone Conservative headlined “Why I welcome the death of affirmative action.”

“The things that allow non-white Americans to rise in today’s society are the things that allow everyone to rise: ingenuity, dynamism, personal drive, and good choices. To claim that such virtues can be encapsulated or accurately measured by skin color is inherently racist,” wrote Willour, who is also an alumnus of The College Fix.

MORE: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in landmark decision

IMAGE: Lazy Llama / Shutterstock

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Biden Cartel California. Commentary Government Overreach Leftist Virtue(!) Life Links from other news sources. Reprints from others.

Living in Florida vs California.

Living in Florida vs California.

For those who think it’s so great, think about what it would cost you to live in California..

 
If you lived in California instead of Florida, you would:

PAY 8.2% MORE FOR RESTAURANTS

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Basic meal with drink at inexpensive restaurant$19.03
 
$19.70
 
Fast food combo meal
McDonalds, or similar
$9.60
 
$10.02
 
Bottle of Coca-Cola (11 fl. oz)$2.25
 
$2.59
 
Bottle of water (11 fl. oz)$1.84
 
$2.01
 

 

PAY 3.6% MORE FOR GROCERIES

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Bread
1 loaf
$3.21
 
$3.79
 
Local cheese (8 oz)$6.22
 
$6.34
 
Milk (1 gallon)$4.26
 
$4.47
 
Eggs
1 dozen
$4.01
 
$4.63
 
Boneless chicken breast (1 lb)$5.09
 
$6.05
 
Apples (1 lb)$2.33
 
$2.14
 
Bananas (1 lb)$0.76
 
$0.86
 
Oranges (1 lb)$1.97
 
$1.77
 
Tomatoes (1 lb)$2.20
 
$2.23
 
Potatoes (1 lb)$1.43
 
$1.42
 
Onions (1 lb)$1.46
 
$1.24
 

 

PAY 22.6% MORE FOR TRANSPORTATION

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Gasoline (1 gallon)$3.44
 
$4.89
 
Monthly public transit pass$52.60
 
$68.08
 
New Volkswagen Golf 1.4 (standard edition)$24,899.31
 
$25,571.45
 
Taxi trip in downtown area (5 miles)$15.08
 
$17.49
 
 
 

PAY 17.8% MORE FOR HOUSING

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Internet connection
50 mbps or faster, cable/dsl
$69.94
 
$70.94
 
1-Bedroom apartment in downtown area$1,757.68
 
$2,161.66
 
1-Bedroom apartment outside city center$1,518.55
 
$1,891.75
 
Utilities for two (700 sq ft apartment)
including electric, gas, water, heating
$124.44
 
$151.84
 

PAY 37.9% MORE FOR CHILDCARE

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Private preschool for 1 child, monthly$960.80
 
$1,413.75
 
Middle school for 1 child, two semesters$14,658.88
 
$18,865.17
 
 

PAY 23.8% MORE FOR ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS

 
 FLORIDA
 CALIFORNIA
Domestic/local beer (1 pint)$4.81
 
$6.51
 
Cappuccino in mid-range area$4.36
 
$4.78
 
Pack of cigarettes
Marlboro or similar
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Joe Biden’s Political Origin Story Is Almost Certainly Bogus. It May Land Him In Legal Trouble.

Joe Biden’s Political Origin Story Is Almost Certainly Bogus. It May Land Him In Legal Trouble.

March 25, 2024

For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. He repeated the tale, at the risk of facing criminal charges for lying to a federal agent, while speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.

Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case.

“I wrote this memo. And son of a b—, it prevailed,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. “And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b—, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.’”

Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm’s named partners and walked into the public defender’s office to ask for a job that very day. It’s “the only time I ever lied,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. Thus began, according to a New York Times report on the special counsel interview, “a career that would one day take him to the White House.”

But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction. Although Biden did work at a law firm tapped to defend a construction company in a negligence suit like the one he described to Hur, the case concluded in 1968, while Biden was still in law school. And the welder won, walking away with $315,000, more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars.

Biden, whose 1988 presidential campaign collapsed amid allegations that he had plagiarized speeches and a law school paper, has a long record of embellishments and yarn spinning. Over the years, he has told several stories about himself that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Those fibs range from the small and peculiar—he claimed in November 2023 that he was offered a spot on the Naval Academy’s football team—to the mendacious, such as his insistence that he never spoke with his son, Hunter Biden, about the latter’s foreign business dealings.

This report is based on a review of court records obtained from the National Archives as well as contemporaneous news reports and interviews with Biden’s former law firm colleagues and federal court clerks.

Over the years, Biden has told different versions of the welder story. He told Hur that he received several offers from “prestigious law firms,” one of which he landed because of his good looks. Biden says he accepted a job at Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders but could not begin work until he passed the bar exam and started as a law clerk at the firm.

In his 2007 memoir, however, Biden says he had very few job prospects after his 1968 graduation from Syracuse University Law School and that Prickett took a chance on him, offering him a role despite his poor grades—including the F he received in a torts class after he was caught plagiarizing.

Regardless, Biden began work at Prickett in 1968 and spent about a year at the firm. It was there, Biden says, that senior partner William Prickett tapped him to draft a motion to dismiss a case against the firm’s client, Catalytic Construction Company, which had been sued by a welder who had been engulfed in flames while working inside a chimney at a Delaware plant.

If there was any “slightly contributory negligence,” Biden said to Hur, “you were out.” So, Biden told Hur that, in his brief, he leveraged the welder’s failure to wear protective gear and argued the worker bore legal responsibility for his misfortune.

The Washington Free Beacon was unable to find any record of Biden working on a case that fits this description or any record of Prickett handling such a case while Biden was in the firm’s employ.

Biden’s story bears a striking resemblance to a case Prickett took on while Biden was still an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. Some of the language Biden used in recounting the incident to Hur matches that found in an article published by the Wilmington News-Journal, which Biden reportedly reads daily.

In May 1962, Joseph Januszewski, a welder for the Catalytic Construction Company, was working inside a chimney at the Stauffer Chemical plant in Delaware. At one point, the News-Journal reported, “sparks from his torch apparently ignited a chemical substance used to clean water” and engulfed his body in flames.

The accident left Januszewski disfigured. Surgeons amputated his leg at the thigh and he was wheelchair bound until his death in 1972.

A Pennsylvanian who was 56 years old at the time of the accident, Januszewski was working inside a “vessel” at the plant when the accident occurred, a detail Biden emphasized during his interview with Hur. Both Januszewski and his wife sued the Catalytic Construction Company in 1964. William Prickett represented Catalytic.

 

Whether Januszewski was left without a penis, as Biden claimed, is unclear. In April 1968, a federal jury sided with Januszewski and awarded him $315,000, a massive sum worth more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars.

It is extremely unlikely that Biden had any involvement in the case. He was 21 years old when Januszewski filed suit in May 1964. At the time, Biden was completing his junior year at the University of Delaware in Newark. He was finishing his law degree at Syracuse University when a federal jury ruled in Januszewski’s favor four years later, and didn’t start working for Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders until at least June 1968, according to his memoir. By then, records show, the case had concluded. No appeal was filed.

There is a possibility that Biden is referring to another civil case tried in the late 1960s in the District Court of Delaware or its Pennsylvania counterpart that saw William Prickett defending the Catalytic Construction Company against a welder and his wife suing over burns sustained while working inside a “vessel” at a company plant.

But if there was such a case, no one can locate it. The District Court of Delaware only keeps records for cases dating back to 1974, a clerk told the Free Beacon. Nor does Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders have any records on it. A spokesman for the firm, which is now named Prickett, Jones & Elliot, told the Free Beacon that its records from the Januszewski case and any others in the late 1960s have long been destroyed. William Prickett died in 2014.

“We are familiar with the passage in Mr. Biden’s autobiography discussing our firm and a civil action William Prickett and Mr. Biden worked on,” the spokesman said. “Unfortunately we cannot confirm that the Januszewski matter is the one to which the autobiography refers. Any records from the case, and other matters the firm handled in the late 1960s, are well outside the time period of our records retention policy and have likely been destroyed.”

The Free Beacon obtained a copy of the case records from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A staff member there could not locate any cases with similar fact patterns.

Spokesmen for the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

This piece has been updated to reflect that Biden was not under oath while speaking to Hur, but could still face criminal charges for lying to a federal agent.

This article was originally from The Free Beacon.