Published February 10, 2024
Republicans on up to former President Donald Trump have for three years now been making credible cases alleging the Biden administration at the highest levels has been using the FBI and the Dept. of Justice as political weapons to use against a potential general election opponent.
A new story that dropped Friday night detailing Biden’s growing frustrations with Attorney General Merrick Garland after the release of the Hur report lent more credence to those allegations, with sources stating Biden had privately been “grumbling” to those close to him about the fact that Garland didn’t “move sooner” on the Trump election interference investigation – because maybe by this point he might have already been tried and convicted (and presumably out of the way):
Joe Biden has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties, according to two people close to the president, as White House frustration with the head of the Justice Department grows.
[…]
In recent weeks, President Biden has grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss private matters. That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.
And in what in my opinion was clear evidence this was a story planted by a senior-level Biden official who wanted to send a warning message to Garland, it was also predicted that if Biden were to win a second term, he wouldn’t retain Garland as AG:
While Biden himself has not weighed in on Garland’s future, most of the president’s senior advisers do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term, according to the two people.
In other words, Merrick Garland, do Joe Biden’s bidding and Protect the Precious or you’re outta here.
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SOURCE: www.redstate.com
RELATED: ‘Confidential’ in name only: Merrick Garland’s delicate decision to release the Hur report
In theory, the attorney general could have kept the report secret. In practice, he had only one option.
Published February 9, 2024
The White House is livid over the Justice Department’s release of a special counsel report that painted a devastating portrait of Joe Biden. But Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to release it was a foregone conclusion — and anything short of publicizing the full report would have been worse.
Technically, the report from special counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is considered confidential under DOJ rules. Hur even labeled it as such.
In practice, though, burying or censoring the report would have been untenable, former Justice Department leaders say.
They described a high-stakes calculus for both Garland and Hur informed by previous politically sensitive investigations: Special counsel reports have always been made public in recent years, and Garland would have been slammed by Republicans and the press if he tried to keep this one under wraps. Hur, meanwhile, clearly understood that political reality, so the harsh language he included was exactly what he expected the public to see.
The result on Thursday was a public 345-page document, bearing the Justice Department’s imprimatur, that described the president as embarrassingly, and perhaps dangerously, forgetful. Hur’s allies say he needed to include the details about Biden’s mental state because such judgments are critical to decisions about whether to prosecute for these sorts of crimes.
“I just think it’s a question of the compelling public interest at the time, and Garland having to bow to that,” said former Attorney General Bill Barr, referring to the decision to release Hur’s report. “Can you really draw the line and say, ‘I’m not going to put this out,’ without having people even more suspicious? That’s almost as bad as letting it out. At that point, your options are very limited.”
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SOURCE: www.politico.com
RELATED: Biden angrily pushes back at special counsel’s report that questioned his memory, handling of docs
Published February 9, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — A special counsel report released Thursday found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden’s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh questions about his competency and age that cut at voters’ most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.
In remarks at the White House Thursday evening, Biden denied that he improperly shared classified information and angrily lashed out at Hur for questioning his mental acuity, particularly his recollection of the timing of his late son Beau’s death from cancer.
The searing findings will almost certainly blunt his efforts to draw contrast with Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and refusing to return them to the government. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”
Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.
