JUST the Stolen Documents/Mar-A-Lago/"Judge" Cannon Trial

[Kismet]

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/havana-syndrome

Very good piece on Havana Syndrome and what we should do about it

CIA Director Burns went on the record about it recently warning the Rooskies outright.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... e-rcna6684


Also Brett McGurk update on Mideast policy
https://www.thenationalnews.com/gulf-ne ... st-policy/

[youthathletics]

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/havana-syndrome

Very good piece on Havana Syndrome and what we should do about it

CIA Director Burns went on the record about it recently warning the Rooskies outright.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... e-rcna6684


Also Brett McGurk update on Mideast policy
https://www.thenationalnews.com/gulf-ne ... st-policy/

Thanks. Posted on this in the GWAT >> GPC thread.

Worth following...Havana Syndrome

https://wtop.com/government/2021/07/us- ... in-vienna/

State Dept. names new coordinator.....

https://wtop.com/world/2021/11/state-de ... ome-cases/

The cases are known as “Havana Syndrome” dating to a series of reported brain injuries in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba.

[old salt]

Also Brett McGurk update on Mideast policy
https://www.thenationalnews.com/gulf-ne ... st-policy/

Key takeaways, imho :

Mr McGurk stressed that “we intend to stay” inside Syria, with a troop presence in the northern part of the country to combat ISIS remnants

...while the “combat role” of US troops has ended, Mr McGurk said that the “advise and assist role” will continue in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/k ... y-n1285415

So the US apparently has been using this technology very "quietly" for years to kill people we want dead. IMO there is a need for a debate about the "ethics" of the targeted killing of people. If some folks on this forum that chit their pants over water boarding you all may have a stroke on this little bit of information. Who is our government killing and why? Does anybody really care as long as they died quickly and quietly and they didn't get wet in the process?

[old salt]

From behind the NR paywall :

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/ ... n-thing-2/

The difficulty of rallying Europe against China

In the late 1970s, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was asked about his “vision” for Germany. Schmidt scoffed at the question: “People who have visions should go see a doctor.”

Germany has just elected a new chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Like Schmidt, he is a member of the Social Democratic Party but is not the kind of social democrat given to the utopian reveries that afflict Americans of that persuasion. “Sell the world a BMW” — that’s the German ideology in our time. Germany has had worse ideas.

Modern German coalitional politics — and the rest of modern German politics — can seem damned peculiar to an American. Scholz is nominally a socialist, but he served as finance minister — the second-most-powerful position in German government — under the conservative Angela Merkel. His new coalition government comprises three parties: the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, who are Germany’s libertarian party. The new finance minister, Christian Lindner, comes from those libertarian Free Democrats, but he is expected to follow much the same policy as Scholz did before him. Put another way: The libertarian serving under the socialist is expected to conduct business in much the same way as the socialist did when he served under the conservative.

The thing about German socialists and German libertarians is that they are German, and as finance minister Scholz was much more a fiscal conservative than any Republican actually holding high office in the United States. You want fiscal conservatism? Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio is just over half that of the United States, and, in spite of its more-expansive welfare state, Germany’s government spending as a share of GDP isn’t much more than ours: 51 percent for Germany vs. 46 percent for the United States. Germany’s new socialist leader ran on a platform of no tax increases and no new debt. These will be difficult promises to keep, but the fact that he made them and was elected on them should tell us something about how he sees the world and what to expect of him. Don’t think that he is going to get carried away by any “visions” — not his own, and certainly not Joe Biden’s.

The United States needs to figure out its relationship with Germany, because Germany is the key to American relations with the European Union and the European Union is critical to dealing — as we eventually must — with China.

Things are not off to a great start there. President Biden had been hoping that some other democratic powers would join in our not-quite-a-boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Biden found no taker in Olaf Scholz. When asked whether he was signing on, the new German chancellor took about 600 words to say Nein. That shouldn’t surprise us: Biden’s policy is a stupid and cowardly one, and there wasn’t anything in it for the Germans. A “diplomatic boycott” is a protest that nobody would have noticed if there hadn’t been a press release: “Where in the World Is Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Melissa A. Brown” is not a game that anybody really plays. Of course, we’re still sending the athletes — the only people anybody cares about when it comes to the Olympics — because this is America, where sports is the most weirdly sensitive nexus of capitalism and nationalism. That’s American diplomacy in our time: China may be a genocidal police state and our No. 1 global adversary, but, by God, our figures skaters stay off the ice for nothing and no one!

The problem with bringing the Germans around to the U.S. position vis-à-vis China is that the Germany–China relationship already is too much like the U.S.–China relationship: Germany’s leaders, like ours, will occasionally make some ceremonial gestures toward democracy or human rights, and there are a few German and American policy thinkers who still take a long-term geopolitical view, but the governments of both countries still approach their respective relationships with China as an almost exclusively economic matter.

And the economic footprint there is a big one. Trade between the United States, the European Union, and China accounts for almost half of the world’s total trade in goods, and Germany is both Europe’s largest economy and its largest exporter. While the prominence of Chinese imports in the United States is wildly exaggerated in our political discourse (Chinese goods account for only about 18 percent of U.S. imports), China does send more goods to the United States than any other country, well ahead of No. 2 Mexico (11.8 percent of U.S. imports) and No. 3 Canada (11.4 percent). China is the third-largest buyer of U.S. exports, behind Canada and Mexico. The biggest buyer of German exports is the United States and the biggest source of German imports is China. Germany is the sixth-biggest buyer of U.S. exports.

That’s a lot of trade, a lot of money, and a lot of jobs.

Nobody wants to put all that at risk — yet. And, furthermore, nobody wants to be the first to admit that the turn-of-the-century confidence that economic liberalization would bring other kinds of liberalization to China has not been borne out by subsequent events, partly because Chinese nationalism is a real and organic phenomenon rather than a mere instrument of the Communist Party, partly because the credibility and prestige of Western liberalism have been damaged in recent years, and partly because the assumption was unrealistic to begin with. And so the fruitful and dynamic commercial relationship with China remains the dominant consideration in both the United States and in Germany, while other aspects of the Chinese challenge to the liberal-democratic order produce neither consensus nor urgency — only a vague sense of dread.

Joe Biden may not take precisely Donald Trump’s elbows-and-knees posture toward Xi Jinping, but, like Trump, he sees the U.S.–China relationship basically in terms of steel-mill jobs and “Made in China” stamps on flip-flops at Walmart. Biden sees China that way, he sees the European Union that way, and he even sees the United Kingdom, our closest ally, mainly as a trade challenge. And, in spite of a slight stiffening in the European attitude toward China in the past two years, it is safe to expect the new German chancellor to take roughly the same nickel-and-dime view of China for the immediate future — but with a twist: The Europeans increasingly see the United States as a potential long-term threat, too, an unpredictable, unreliable, mercantilist power willing to deploy economic coercion (among other means) in the service of a foreign-policy agenda entirely dominated by domestic political calculation. From the European point of view, the transition from Trump to Biden has only confirmed that the United States is a country with two nationalist-populist parties and no party with anything more than a superficial commitment to trans-Atlantic cooperation.

Olaf Scholz couldn’t really overturn the status quo if he wanted to, because Germany is not the kind of power the United States and China are. Germany cannot lead the world, but it can lead Europe, and that makes it worth having as an ally — preferably, an active and invigorated ally, not one whose alliance is a matter of inertia. Unfortunately, the reality is that when Olaf Scholz asks, “What’s in it for us?” Joe Biden is not going to have much of an answer. It is peculiar: In spite of the fact that the United States and China maintain more or less ordinary diplomatic relations and vigorous, mutually beneficially commercial relations, that there is a coming existential conflict with Beijing is practically the only matter of broad bipartisan consensus in Washington. And nobody seems to have even four or five practical ideas for what to do about that, even as the Washington Post takes note of “the president’s oft-stated vision that democracies are locked in a must-win historic battle with autocracies.”

President Biden may have a vision. He may have several of them. There are doctors for that.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON is a fellow at National Review Institute

[DocBarrister]

As many of you know, even the Israelis now believe that it was a catastrophic mistake for Trump to dump the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... story.html

How bad are things? Now the U.S. is seriously considering its military options.

(CNN)The Biden administration has reviewed military options that could be part of an effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, if a multilateral deal between the United States, Iran and other nations on Tehran's nuclear program is not salvaged, according to administration officials.

In October, at the direction of President Joe Biden, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan received a briefing by Pentagon leaders on a full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, administration officials said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/11/politics ... index.html

People who supported Donald Trump have now been proven to be idiots on a massively dangerous and tragic scale.

DocBarrister

[PizzaSnake]

As many of you know, even the Israelis now believe that it was a catastrophic mistake for Trump to dump the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... story.html

How bad are things? Now the U.S. is seriously considering its military options.

(CNN)The Biden administration has reviewed military options that could be part of an effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, if a multilateral deal between the United States, Iran and other nations on Tehran's nuclear program is not salvaged, according to administration officials.

In October, at the direction of President Joe Biden, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan received a briefing by Pentagon leaders on a full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, administration officials said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/11/politics ... index.html

People who supported Donald Trump have now been proven to be idiots on a massively dangerous and tragic scale.

DocBarrister

Just now so proven?

[DocBarrister]

As many of you know, even the Israelis now believe that it was a catastrophic mistake for Trump to dump the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... story.html

How bad are things? Now the U.S. is seriously considering its military options.

(CNN)The Biden administration has reviewed military options that could be part of an effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, if a multilateral deal between the United States, Iran and other nations on Tehran's nuclear program is not salvaged, according to administration officials.

In October, at the direction of President Joe Biden, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan received a briefing by Pentagon leaders on a full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, administration officials said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/11/politics ... index.html

People who supported Donald Trump have now been proven to be idiots on a massively dangerous and tragic scale.

DocBarrister

Just now so proven?

That’s a legitimate point.

DocBarrister

[DocBarrister]

President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal might have been the most disastrous foreign policy miscalculation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The only competitor for that dubious honor is the one-sided agreement that Trump concluded with the Taliban and that President Biden implemented.)

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran got rid of 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and limited its uranium enrichment to just 3.67 percent purity. Its “breakout” time to produce enough material to make a nuclear bomb was estimated to be more than a year.

Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to rev up its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that Iran had 12 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the deal. It is also enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, just short of the 90 percent needed to make nuclear weapons. Its breakout time has shrunk to as little as three weeks. It will take longer to manufacture the warheads needed to create nuclear weapons, but Iran is far closer to that dreaded milestone than it was in 2018.

… Even former Israeli security officials, most of whom opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, now admit that pulling out of it has backfired. Benjamin Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said last month: “Looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal of the U.S. administration from the agreement.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo described the pullout as a “tragedy.” Retired general Isaac Ben Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency, called “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement … the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... lear-iran/

Let’s face facts … anyone who supported Trump is an idiot, and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is an idiot.

DocBarrister

[dislaxxic]

Another re-purposed thread for JUST issues in and around the Mar-A-Lardo Stolen Documents court case...where there was recently a LARGE dump of documents into the public record by "judge" Cannon...

Mark Meadows Proffer in the Stolen Documents case...

I continue to dig through the document dump Judge Aileen Cannon finally released the other day.

The dump included 70 exhibits (some FOIAed documents) submitted in conjunction with Trump’s motion to compel discovery and a few exhibits submitted with the government’s response.

The most titillating of the latter set is a November 2022 interview with Person 16 (whom I suspect to be Eric Herschmann, in part because Herschmann relishes giving titillating interviews in which he calls other lawyers morons).

But for the moment, I want to look at Person 27’s December 2022 proffer.

While the government is coy about the identity of Person 16, they’re not hiding Person 27’s identity: It is Mark Meadows.

The passages below, matched to the corresponding exhibits, makes it clear that Person 27 is Trump’s former Chief of Staff. Said Chief of Staff briefly got involved in the document recovery effort after NARA first threatened to make a referral to DOJ, then threatened to deem the boxes Trump had taken destroyed. Said Chief of Staff traveled to Mar-a-Lago in October 2021 (at a time when discussing the January 6 investigation would have been fruitful) and while there asked if Trump wanted help searching boxes, only to be told that Trump didn’t need help returning documents he wanted to keep.

Mark Meadows has some 'SPLAININ' to do...

..

[PizzaSnake]

President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal might have been the most disastrous foreign policy miscalculation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The only competitor for that dubious honor is the one-sided agreement that Trump concluded with the Taliban and that President Biden implemented.)

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran got rid of 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and limited its uranium enrichment to just 3.67 percent purity. Its “breakout” time to produce enough material to make a nuclear bomb was estimated to be more than a year.

Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to rev up its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that Iran had 12 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the deal. It is also enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, just short of the 90 percent needed to make nuclear weapons. Its breakout time has shrunk to as little as three weeks. It will take longer to manufacture the warheads needed to create nuclear weapons, but Iran is far closer to that dreaded milestone than it was in 2018.

… Even former Israeli security officials, most of whom opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, now admit that pulling out of it has backfired. Benjamin Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said last month: “Looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal of the U.S. administration from the agreement.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo described the pullout as a “tragedy.” Retired general Isaac Ben Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency, called “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement … the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... lear-iran/

Let’s face facts … anyone who supported Trump is an idiot, and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is an idiot.

DocBarrister

Yeah, I think there are a few contender's for worst strategic mistake in Israel's history that Bibi has overseen or authored,

[cradleandshoot]

President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal might have been the most disastrous foreign policy miscalculation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The only competitor for that dubious honor is the one-sided agreement that Trump concluded with the Taliban and that President Biden implemented.)

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran got rid of 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and limited its uranium enrichment to just 3.67 percent purity. Its “breakout” time to produce enough material to make a nuclear bomb was estimated to be more than a year.

Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to rev up its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that Iran had 12 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the deal. It is also enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, just short of the 90 percent needed to make nuclear weapons. Its breakout time has shrunk to as little as three weeks. It will take longer to manufacture the warheads needed to create nuclear weapons, but Iran is far closer to that dreaded milestone than it was in 2018.

… Even former Israeli security officials, most of whom opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, now admit that pulling out of it has backfired. Benjamin Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said last month: “Looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal of the U.S. administration from the agreement.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo described the pullout as a “tragedy.” Retired general Isaac Ben Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency, called “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement … the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... lear-iran/

Let’s face facts … anyone who supported Trump is an idiot, and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is an idiot.

DocBarrister

Yeah, I think there are a few contender's for worst strategic mistake in Israel's history that Bibi has overseen or authored,

Do you care to expound on that logic? What " strategic" mistake are you alluding to?

[Typical Lax Dad]

President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal might have been the most disastrous foreign policy miscalculation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The only competitor for that dubious honor is the one-sided agreement that Trump concluded with the Taliban and that President Biden implemented.)

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran got rid of 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and limited its uranium enrichment to just 3.67 percent purity. Its “breakout” time to produce enough material to make a nuclear bomb was estimated to be more than a year.

Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to rev up its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that Iran had 12 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the deal. It is also enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, just short of the 90 percent needed to make nuclear weapons. Its breakout time has shrunk to as little as three weeks. It will take longer to manufacture the warheads needed to create nuclear weapons, but Iran is far closer to that dreaded milestone than it was in 2018.

… Even former Israeli security officials, most of whom opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, now admit that pulling out of it has backfired. Benjamin Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said last month: “Looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal of the U.S. administration from the agreement.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo described the pullout as a “tragedy.” Retired general Isaac Ben Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency, called “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement … the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... lear-iran/

Let’s face facts … anyone who supported Trump is an idiot, and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is an idiot.

DocBarrister

Yeah, I think there are a few contender's for worst strategic mistake in Israel's history that Bibi has overseen or authored,

Re: The Politics of National Security
Post Sat Dec 11, 2021 5:02 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑
As many of you know, even the Israelis now believe that it was a catastrophic mistake for Trump to dump the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... story.html

How bad are things? Now the U.S. is seriously considering its military options.

(CNN)The Biden administration has reviewed military options that could be part of an effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, if a multilateral deal between the United States, Iran and other nations on Tehran's nuclear program is not salvaged, according to administration officials.

In October, at the direction of President Joe Biden, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan received a briefing by Pentagon leaders on a full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, administration officials said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/11/politics ... index.html

People who supported Donald Trump have now been proven to be idiots on a massively dangerous and tragic scale.

DocBarrister
Just now so proven?

[cradleandshoot]

President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal might have been the most disastrous foreign policy miscalculation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The only competitor for that dubious honor is the one-sided agreement that Trump concluded with the Taliban and that President Biden implemented.)

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran got rid of 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and limited its uranium enrichment to just 3.67 percent purity. Its “breakout” time to produce enough material to make a nuclear bomb was estimated to be more than a year.

Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to rev up its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that Iran had 12 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the deal. It is also enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, just short of the 90 percent needed to make nuclear weapons. Its breakout time has shrunk to as little as three weeks. It will take longer to manufacture the warheads needed to create nuclear weapons, but Iran is far closer to that dreaded milestone than it was in 2018.

… Even former Israeli security officials, most of whom opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, now admit that pulling out of it has backfired. Benjamin Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said last month: “Looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal of the U.S. administration from the agreement.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo described the pullout as a “tragedy.” Retired general Isaac Ben Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency, called “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement … the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... lear-iran/

Let’s face facts … anyone who supported Trump is an idiot, and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is an idiot.

DocBarrister

Yeah, I think there are a few contender's for worst strategic mistake in Israel's history that Bibi has overseen or authored,

Re: The Politics of National Security
Post Sat Dec 11, 2021 5:02 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑
As many of you know, even the Israelis now believe that it was a catastrophic mistake for Trump to dump the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... story.html

How bad are things? Now the U.S. is seriously considering its military options.

(CNN)The Biden administration has reviewed military options that could be part of an effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, if a multilateral deal between the United States, Iran and other nations on Tehran's nuclear program is not salvaged, according to administration officials.

In October, at the direction of President Joe Biden, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan received a briefing by Pentagon leaders on a full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, administration officials said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/11/politics ... index.html

People who supported Donald Trump have now been proven to be idiots on a massively dangerous and tragic scale.

DocBarrister
Just now so proven?

The abandonment of the nuke deal with Iran has benefitted the terrorist regime greatly. They can now concentrate their efforts on the manufacture of IEDs to be used against the American military. You know what they say...when life gives you lemons then make lemonade. In this case you can replace lemonade with IEDs.

[old salt]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/ ... re-gambit/

Biden’s Collusion in the Anti-Trump Lawfare Gambit

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, April 27, 2024

Some of the collusion between President Biden and his party’s politicized lawfare campaign against his 2024 Republican opponent is so undeniable it can’t be hidden.

Biden’s collusion is easy to spot when it comes to Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecutions of former president Donald Trump. As I’ve noted a few times, Smith’s special-counsel designation is a political artifice, not a legal necessity. There is no conflict of interest between the Biden DOJ and Biden’s political opponent — as there is, by contrast, in the Biden DOJ’s investigation of Biden’s son. Indeed, the Biden Justice Department, under Biden’s appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, was investigating Trump for two years before Garland named Smith special counsel.

Smith’s appointment was not called for by DOJ’s special-counsel regulations. It was sheer partisanship: Biden and Garland knew that Trump’s would campaign on the claim — a quite colorable claim – that Biden was exploiting his executive authority to his political advantage by having his rival prosecuted (pretty much the same thing House Democrats impeached Trump for in 2019, after he tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden). To try to blunt Trump’s claim, Garland appointed Smith in order to project the illusion of independence: We were to see Smith as an earnest career prosecutor making a unilateral assessment of whether to charge Trump, free of oversight by Garland and Biden.

That is fiction, of course. All executive power is reposed in the president. Jack Smith has no power of his own; the power he exercises is Biden’s. In so doing, he answers to Biden’s AG, who also answers to Biden.

No one should be surprised, then, at this gem buried in a February 10 Politico report: 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.” I believe this is why Smith — who could have pushed hard for a relatively swift trial in Florida on a very strong obstruction case against Trump regarding the Mar-a-Lago documents — brought such a legally dubious case against Trump in Washington: Biden and Democrats have made the Capitol riot central to their 2024 campaign, so Smith was under great pressure to bring whatever related charges he could theorize.

In any event, the notion that Biden has no involvement and no stake in prosecutions of his election opponent being pursued by his subordinates in his Justice Department employing his executive power is daft.

Need more? At Thursday’s Supreme Court argument regarding Trump’s immunity claim, Justice Samuel Alito asked prosecutor Michael Dreeben whether, in taking an important stand regarding the scope of executive power, Dreeben was speaking in his capacity as a lawyer on Smith’s staff or for the Biden Justice Department. Dreeben conceded: “I am speaking on behalf of the Justice Department.” Manifestly, there is no daylight between President Biden, the Biden Justice Department, and the federal prosecutions of Biden’s opponent that — if Smith has his druthers — will keep Trump chained to courtrooms for four to six months while Biden is out campaigning in battleground states.

Naturally, it is easier to discern Biden’s lawfare collusion in the federal prosecutions of Trump than in the criminal cases brought by elected Democratic prosecutors in the states of Georgia and New York. But the collusion is plain to see there, too.

It came to light in connection with the defense motions to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her paramour, Nathan Wade (formerly the lead prosecutor on Trump’s case), that Wade consulted with the Biden White House Counsel’s Office during the investigation. This came on the heels of reported consultations between Willis’s office and the Democratic-dominated House January 6 Committee — the committee to which then-speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a move even she conceded was unprecedented, nixed the appointment of members chosen by Republican leadership.

The J6 Committee worked cooperatively with the Biden Justice Department, then theatrically issued criminal referrals calling for Trump’s prosecution, after which Smith filed his indictment at a time designed to trigger a trial in the months leading up to Election Day 2024. Two weeks later, Willis filed her RICO indictment against Trump, echoing the same “election interference” allegations and relying on common evidence.

One could argue that, because of the commonality, it is only natural that Willis would work with the feds. When state and federal prosecutors investigate and charge crimes arising out of the same factual transactions, they must of necessity consult on matters of scheduling and the questioning of witnesses. Of course, that would not explain why Wade, a state line prosecutor, would be meeting with Biden’s White House staff — i.e., the political side of the administration — rather than his law-enforcement counterparts in the “we never, ever do politics, no siree” Biden Justice Department.

Willis is sufficiently tainted and incompetent that there is little prospect she can get her unwieldy case to trial before the November election, as Democrats hoped. Still, Biden’s fingerprints are on it.

Biden’s collusion with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump, which has just finished its first week of trial testimony, is more subtle — more of the dog-that-didn’t-bark variety. If you were unfamiliar with how the federal government works, you might well miss it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all subtlety. To be his lead prosecutor, Bragg recruited Matthew Colangelo. Most prosecutors see themselves as working in law enforcement; Colangelo specializes in anti-Trump enforcement. He comes to the DA’s office from a stint as one of the very top lawyers in the Biden Justice Department — the associate attorney general overseeing the government’s civil, civil-rights, antitrust, and tax-enforcement activities.

To put it mildly, it is highly unusual for a lawyer in so lofty a federal perch to decamp to a county DA’s office for a line-prosecutor post — even allowing that the county is in the Big Apple and the trial gig is a prosecution of Donald Trump, which will make Colangelo a very famous fellow. But in this instance, it is a seamless transition. Prior to joining the top echelon of Biden’s Trump-hostile Justice Department, Colangelo had worked at the New York attorney general’s office — where Bragg was then a top deputy and where Colangelo specialized in lawsuits against Trump and his organization. It was Colangelo’s work against Trump that Bragg touted in running for district attorney in blue, blue Manhattan — the borough where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden beat Trump by close to 80 percentage points in the 2016 and 2020 elections, respectively.

But let’s put Colangelo aside as the bridge from Biden to Bragg. The best collusion evidence in the New York case is the silence of the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission.

The FEC was created by Congress in 1974 to ensure uniform enforcement of federal campaign law, for which Democrats began pushing in the post-Watergate years. A specialized bureaucracy was deemed necessary because the regulation of campaign funding has profound implications for the projection of political speech — the core of the First Amendment’s free-expression guarantee. Hence, the campaign laws are abstruse and controversial — subject to repeated court challenges, many of them successful, since their inception.

To get a firm grip on federal campaign-finance enforcement, and to avoid overly aggressive applications of this dubious legal edifice that could easily lead to further chipping away by the federal courts, the Justice Department and the FEC have been given exclusive jurisdiction over enforcement, as the FEC put it in approving a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between itself and the Justice Department just a year ago — i.e., not long after Bragg filed his indictment of Trump, in which he did not dare admit that he was endeavoring to enforce federal campaign law. The feds take up the entire campaign-finance-enforcement field, as one would expect given that we’re talking about federal law that controls federal campaigns and elections. As the MOU elaborates, the Justice Department has “exclusive jurisdiction” over criminal enforcement; the FEC has “exclusive jurisdiction” over civil enforcement.

The campaign laws are so complex that the FEC’s role includes the promulgation of “regulations to implement and clarify these laws.” For its part, the Justice Department has produced an exacting enforcement manual of well over 200 pages, which has been edited numerous times, in order to walk federal prosecutors through the complex web of statutes and regulations.

Why does this matter? Well, if you weren’t born yesterday and you follow the news even casually, then you know that the Department of Justice is so territorial about its jurisdiction that it would make a tiger wilt in admiration. Similarly, the FEC jealously guards its turf. Do you really think for a moment that the Biden Justice Department and the FEC would sit in silent passivity if any other state prosecutor, besides Bragg in this particular case, usurped federal authority and undertook to enforce federal law — in a matter as to which the DOJ and FEC, after thoroughly investigating, had decided not to prosecute?

Unlike Trump, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign actually did violate the campaign-finance laws by misdescribing its disbursements in concocting the Russiagate smear (e.g., the production of the Steele dossier) as legal expenses rather than opposition research. Consequently, the FEC fined Clinton’s campaign.

Now, let’s say a district attorney in some deep-red county in Florida, Texas, or Oklahoma theorized that Hillary had schemed to steal the 2016 election, and that the shady description of the Russiagate expenditures in her campaign’s ledgers amounted to falsification of business records under the laws of that DA’s state. Let’s say that ambitious Republican DA, in order to court the affections of MAGA populists or Clinton-loathing conservatives, had gotten a grand jury to indict Hillary on the Bragg theory — namely, falsification of records to conceal a violation of federal campaign law.

Ask yourself this question: In those circumstances, do you think there’s a scintilla of a chance that the Biden Justice Department, with its exclusive jurisdiction over criminal enforcement of federal campaign law in the United States, would sit idly by while a red-state prosecutor, with no federal authority, indicted a Democratic icon? Or do you figure that they would instantly bury the state and federal courts in voluminous legal briefs to get the case shut down as a lawless abuse of power? Would the media–Democrat complex be cheering the prosecutor, or ripping him as a reckless hack who was making up his own version of federal campaign law in order to persecute a partisan rival?

Yet, when it comes to the trial in Manhattan, the Biden Justice Department is sitting on its hands and ignoring the district attorney’s usurpation of federal authority. There’s one reason and one reason alone for that: Bragg indicted Donald Trump.

In the end, maybe this will all backfire on Democrats. But regardless of how it is being executed, never forget what the lawfare campaign is designed to do: Joe Biden hopes to ride these prosecutions of his opponent to a second term in the Oval Office.

[ggait]

Salty and McCarthy. Like ham and eggs.

Terrible that Trump is being so persecuted. He’s being treated even worse than Abe Lincoln!

I mean he didn’t do anything to deserve all these cases against him.

[a fan]

Salty and McCarthy. Like ham and eggs.

Terrible that Trump is being so persecuted. He’s being treated even worse than Abe Lincoln!

I mean he didn’t do anything to deserve all these cases against him.

You forgot to add that he's OVERJOYED that Barr and Giuliani and Co. thoroughly politicized the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden.

It's totally cool to weaponize our Judicial system to go after Democrats.

Anyone keeping track of how long they've been investigating Hunter now? Started in 2018, for those keeping score at home.

Six years, and counting, for a boilerplate tax evasion/fraud/whatever case. Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable.

[cradleandshoot]

Salty and McCarthy. Like ham and eggs.

Terrible that Trump is being so persecuted. He’s being treated even worse than Abe Lincoln!

I mean he didn’t do anything to deserve all these cases against him.

You forgot to add that he's OVERJOYED that Barr and Giuliani and Co. thoroughly politicized the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden.

It's totally cool to weaponize our Judicial system to go after Democrats.

Anyone keeping track of how long they've been investigating Hunter now? Started in 2018, for those keeping score at home.

Six years, and counting, for a boilerplate tax evasion/fraud/whatever case. Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable.

How the eff did Barr politicize this Hunter Biden chit show? He was AG for a short time and this chit show with Hunter proceeded him for several years. FFS Barr has explained his methodology numerous times. You can disagree with his rationale all day long, but he did explain it to the extent that he could.

[SCLaxAttack]

"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.”"

So let me try to understand this. By inclusion in his editorial McCarthy acknowledges that Biden didn't get involved to influence Garland to move to an indictment and trial sooner, and that's evidence that Biden has influence over DOJ? W T F kind of convoluted logic is that?

[MDlaxfan76]

"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.”"

So let me try to understand this. By inclusion in his editorial McCarthy acknowledges that Biden didn't get involved to influence Garland to move to an indictment and trial sooner, and that's evidence that Biden has influence over DOJ? W T F kind of convoluted logic is that?

Hard right wing Russian and Chinese fed propaganda “logic”.