#ag merrick garland

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[macwantspeace]

Everybody was kung fu fighting! "your fake eyelashes are in the way of you reading" "your bad built butch body" "girl. baby girl. don't even go there." Jamie Raskin laughing but then putting his serious face back on. The purpose of the meeting [I pause to collect my thoughts] was to impeach the Attorney General for bad behaviour.

[saywhat-politics]

Donald Trump's former co-defendants are asking the judge who tossed his classified documents case to issue an emergency order blocking the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report about his investigation of the president-elect.

Lawyers for Trump's former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, asked Judge Aileen Cannon -- who dismissed the case in July after deeming Smith's appointment unconstitutional -- to issue an order barring Attorney General Merrick Garland from publicly releasing the report by Jan. 10.

The unorthodox legal maneuver came the same day Trump's personal lawyers sent a letter to Garland demanding he remove Smith from his post and defer the decision about the report's release to Trump's incoming attorney general, Pam Bondi.

[darkmaga-returns]

The UN Can't Take My Land. Can They? by The Truth Monster John Anthony - great article - I will add an additional caveat to the land grab agenda…..The Biden SUSTAINS Act and the Biden 30X30 (seal off 30% of land and water by 2030) ARTICLE

4 MAJOR cover-ups Kash Patel would EXPOSE as FBI Director - Here is a dynamite snippet from the longer interview with Glenn Beck and Kash Patel I shared a couple of days ago - again, NOW you know why the left will do whatever it takes to make sure Kash is not the Director of the FBI…..again, Trump needs to call a recess and make his recess appointments or the most powerful of his nominations will not get approved - if you missed the full interview you can find it on my Thursday Substack - 4 min. VIDEO

Senator Josh Hawley tells Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray to preserve all their documents. "Justice is coming."from Dr. Meryl Nass - well we shall see. I surely won’t be holding my breath. I Like Hawley but he is all mouth and no real action - ARTICLE

Doc Drops COVID Truth Bombs: "Everything Was A Lie From The Beginning..." - ARTICLE/VIDEO (2 min.)

Texas AG and 10 others sue Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street - Gee I wonder why TN was not one of the 10 states…..could it be because our state is all bought in to the EV market????? 1 min. VIDEO

Biden falls asleep at the meeting in Africa - VIDEO

Biden pledges $1B in aid to Africa as North Carolina residents continue to struggle after Helene - as I drove to St. Augustine, FL 2 weeks ago I saw people in NC living in tent encampments. I could not believe my eyes. But we have $1B to give to other countries while these people after 2 months are living in tents?? ARTICLE

[justinspoliticalcorner]

ProPublica:

In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.

So much has been made of this limited access that the impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.” House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release. ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.

Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.

ProPublica recently released the full, unedited interview by John Harwood with Joe Biden that was conducted on September 29th, 2023.

Unedited interview with ProPublica, 09.29.2023:

[simply-ivanka]

DEMOCRATS WILL LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING AND ALTER ANY STATEMENT OR DOCUMENT TO SUIT THEIR NEED. NO MATTER THE COST.

Department of Justice released its investigation into Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents, delivering a damning assessment of his limited memory.

But the president, 81, has informed his aides and advisers that Garland didn't do enough to rein in the report written by Special Counsel Robert Hur.

Democrat insiders have also claimed more time working on Biden's makeup could help ease concerns about his age.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[realtalkingpoints]

John Solomon broke this story last night on Hannity and left us all with our jaws on the floor...

From the piece:

In a letter Wednesday to Republicans and Democrats overseeing multiple oversight committees in Congress, Lytle wrote: "The protected disclosures: (l) contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee, (2) involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case, and (3) detail examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected."

Also from the piece:

Specifically, the agent has provided evidence that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys' offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators' recommendations to do so and the blessing of career prosecutors in the DOJ tax division.

He also alleges that Weiss told agents on the case that the Delaware U.S. Attorney asked to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down, according to interviews.

[centrally-unplanned]

Who are the judges that the next Dem president should appoint to the Supreme Court, now that Merrick Garland and Sri Srinavasan are aging out?

I do not know! I am not a big legal researcher, I only approach it as a policy person - I would be very interested in other people's answers around this actually, if the followers have some.

Maybe related but I do think its silly that this is a mystery at all - right now we "feign meritocracy" and, when a justice croaks, do this like ~survey of the land~ to see who is accomplished at that moment, worthy. Its silly and prevents the democrats from committing to a coherent strategy. They should instead have a solidified docket, like a minister list in parliamentary systems, where we know who is up next and they have been vetted for understanding the political strategy and are committed to fighting the battles necessary. This is something people are loathe to do because it would "politicize the court" but that's silly, the court is a completely political organ - you can't oversweeten sugar. So hopefully in the future we won't have to ask this question ^^

[slipping-into-madness]

[bighermie]

"This is the Definition of Corruption" — AG Merrick Garland is Now Calling GOP Lawmakers, Coercing Them Not to Vote for 'Inherent Contempt' | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hᴏft

[mariacallous]

A Trump-appointed prosecutor dropped an unfalsifiable partisan bomb on President Joe Biden Thursday, playing into a years-long right-wing media campaign — and U.S. political journalists decided to treat it as a valid and impartial charge.

Biden, who has a 40-year record of public service in the U.S. Senate, as vice president, and in the Oval Office, is a self-described “gaffe machine” with a well-documented stutter. He is also, at 81, the oldest president in U.S. history.

The right has dedicated substantial time and resources since Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign to attributing his verbal miscues to his age. Republican political operatives surface out-of-context snippets of Biden’s misstatements and try to blow them up into national stories, and it is rarely-disputed canon in the right-wing media that the president is a mentally failing dementia patient. 

This argument blew up in their faces when Biden performed so well in a debate against then-President Donald Trump that the GOP resorted to accusing him of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and again in 2023, when his canny dealings with then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy led McCarthy to describe him as “very smart” and Republicans to question how they’d been outmaneuvered by someone purportedly in mental decline. But undeterred by reality, the right has maintained the drumbeat over Biden’s mental status, driving up public concern over the president’s age.

Enter Robert Hur. Attorney General Merrick Garland presumably selected him as a special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records because he thought he could quell potential complaints of political bias by putting in charge a former clerk to right-wing judges whom Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney with every incentive to do maximum political damage to the Democratic president. This is a regular pattern — Republican and Democratic administrations each appoint Republicans to investigate both Republicans and Democrats, though that never seems to halt the complaints from the right about the handling of those cases.

On Thursday, after a year-long investigation, Hur issued a 345-page report in which he concluded that “​​no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” and that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But rather than stop there, he also levied an incendiary and gratuitous attack on Biden’s mental status, claiming that, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur cited specific mental lapses he’d observed during their five hours of interviews — conducted at a time when Biden was responding to the international crisis caused by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel — including that his “memory appeared hazy” when discussing the intricacies of 15-year-old White House policy debates.

Hur’s argument that lawyers for the sitting president of the United States would argue in court that he shouldn’t be convicted of a crime because he is a senile old man is facially absurd. Indeed, Biden forcefully pushed back on the critique during a White House appearance Thursday night.

The special counsel’s actions drew sharp criticism from the legal community. Biden’s lawyers blasted claims about Biden’s memory in a draft report, saying, “We do not believe that the report's treatment of President Biden's memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.” On MSNBC, former FBI counsel Andrew Weissmann called the claims “wholly inappropriate,” “gratuitous,” and “exactly what you’re not supposed to do, which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions.” Neal Katyal, the former acting U.S. solicitor general, likewise said that based on his tours in the Justice Department, Hur’s statements were “totally gratuitous” and a “too-clever-move-by-half by the special counsel to try and take some swipes at a sitting president.” And Ty Cobb, a former Trump lawyer, said on CNN that he had served on an independent counsel probe that declined to prosecute someone due to “health issues, but we didn’t tell the world that,” suggesting that such statements by Hur were inappropriate.

But by including those inappropriate and gratuitous statements, Hur put an official seal on a partisan attack. 

The right jumped on Hur’s claims, with Republican politicians and right-wing commentators falsely claiming that the special counsel had found that Biden “is not competent to stand trial” and “has dementia.” Some called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

The mainstream political press, meanwhile, turned Hur’s insinuations about Biden’s mental health — and not his declination to prosecute — into the report’s big takeaway. Here’s a sampling of top headlines from major newspapers, political tipsheets, and digital outlets on Thursday and Friday.

New York Times: “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024” Axios: “1 big thing: Report questions Biden’s memory” Semafor Flagship: “DoJ report questions Biden’s memory” Washington Post: “Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory” Wall Street Journal: “Biden’s Age Back in Spotlight After Special Counsel Report, Verbal Flubs” CNN: “Biden tries to lay to rest age concerns, but may have exacerbated them” ABC News: “Special counsel blows open debate over Biden age and memory” CBS News: “Biden disputes special counsel findings, insists his memory is fine” Politico: “Age isn’t just a number. It’s a profound and growing problem for Biden.

Stories about Biden’s mental state are clearly catnip for political journalists. They can demonstrate how “fair” they are by providing negative coverage of Biden to balance their treatment of his likely opponent Donald Trump, who is an unhinged authoritarian facing scores of federal and state criminal charges, including for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And they don’t need to bone up on policy nuances separating the candidates — “is the president addled” is an easy venue for hot takes.

The storyline is particularly toxic because no matter how many times it is repudiated by Biden’s public actions or the statements of people who have spoken to him privately, it cannot be falsified. The White House physician can release health summaries calling him “fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.” Democrats who have recently spoken to the president, like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), and reporters who have recently interviewed him, like John Harwood, can attest to his mental acuity at the time of his special counsel interview. But Biden is still Biden, so he’s going to keep making gaffes, as he did Thursday night when he referred to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico,” leading journalists to downplay his newsmaking statements about the Israel-Hamas war and fixate instead on what the statement says about his mental health. 

The choice for reporters is how they respond to such misstatements. On NPR, Mara Liasson said that the White House is pushing back by pointing out that Biden’s foes, like Fox’s Sean Hannity and Trump, have had similar mix-ups.

“But the difference is that one of these missteps, one of these guys who forgets things, Biden, has become a viral meme, and it's become a big problem for him,” she said. “Trump's misstatements, for some reason, have not risen to that level.”

It’s true that Trump’s own verbal missteps have not coalesced into an overarching narrative about his mental fitness for office. But the reason why is obvious: Political journalists decided to treat Biden’s missteps as a big problem, and Trump’s as a small one. They’re setting the agenda, following the lead of the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and now, Hur.