Tag Archives: Executive privilege

What An Incredible Coincidence

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On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the Justice Department has the transcripts of President Biden’s interviews with his biographer. Previously the Justice Department has denied that they have these transcripts.

The article reports:

The Justice Department revealed late Monday in a court filing that it does in fact have transcripts of President Biden’s interviews with a biographer after initially having denied possessing the documents. 

While juggling Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to former special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents following his departure as vice president in the Obama administration, DOJ attorneys said it would be time-consuming to process audio files into transcripts related to the president’s conversations with biographer Mark Zwonitzer. 

“We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy,” DOJ lawyer Cameron Silverberg told U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich last month. 

Isn’t it odd that as soon as President Biden is no longer running for a second term, these transcripts magically appear.

The article concludes, reminding us:

The findings sparked widespread outrage that Biden was effectively deemed too cognitively impaired to be charged with a crime yet could still serve as president.

In May, the White House asserted executive privilege over audio and video recordings related to Hur’s investigation, including the interviews between Biden and Zwonitzer.

“The audio recordings of your interview and Mr. Zwonitzer’s interview fall within the scope of executive privilege. Production of these recordings to the Committees would raise an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations–in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important,” Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote to Biden in a letter obtained by Fox News at the time.

I wonder if the existence of these transcripts was part of the persuasion used to get President Biden to step down from the campaign.

As Steve Bannon Prepares For Jail…

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Steve Bannon is preparing to go to jail on July 1st on charges that he defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Peter Navarro is currently in jail on contempt of Congress charges. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has stated that it will not press charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for defying a subpoena from a Congressional Committee. I guess contempt of Congress only matters if you are a Republican.

On Friday, The Gateway Pundit reported:

The Justice Department won’t prosecute Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress over the Biden audio tapes.

The House of Representatives on Thursday voted to hold Merrick Garland in criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena.

Last month two GOP-led House committees passed resolutions recommending US Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over audio of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur.

Merrick Garland has reportedly “classified at the highest level” the audio tapes of Joe Biden’s embarrassing interview with Special Counsel Hur. The tapes have been locked away in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), according to investigative journalist Paul Sperry.

The White House has already admitted that the transcripts of the tapes were slightly altered, and the transcripts have already been released, so what are they hiding?

The article concludes:

It was revealed that during interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur, Joe Biden struggled to answer even basic questions, such as when he served as Vice President or the year his son Beau passed away from brain cancer.

The Justice Department said Merrick Garland did not commit a crime when he defied a congressional subpoena and refuse to hand over the Biden audio tapes.

The AP reported:

Attorney General Merrick Garland will not be prosecuted for contempt of Congress because his refusal to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview in his classified documents case “did not constitute a crime,” the Justice Department said Friday.

In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Justice Department official cited the department’s longstanding policy not to prosecute officials who don’t comply with subpoenas because of a president’s claim of executive privilege.

So why is Peter Navarro in jail and why is Steve Bannon headed for jail?

The Truth Is Slowly Seeping Out

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On June 2nd, Hot Air posted an article about the transcripts of the Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Biden about the classified information stored in President Biden’s garage.

The article reports:

You may recall that President Joe Biden previously sat down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur regarding the investigation into the many classified documents that Biden improperly removed from the White House over the years. A transcript of that interview was grudgingly produced later, informing the public that charges would not be filed against Biden because he was supposedly unlikely to be convicted, being an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Something didn’t seem right and the House sought the original audio recording of the interview, but the White House refused to allow it to be made public, with Biden making the stunning assertion of executive privilege based on “privacy” concerns to keep it hidden. Now, thanks to some digging by Judicial Watch, we may (possibly) know why that was done. According to a release from the Justice Department on Friday night, the transcript was altered with various words removed and significant “clean-up” work having been done to it. (You can read the original transcript here.)

On May 19, I reported the following (article here):

As Robert DuChemin stated in the RADLaw Newsletter:

There are two reasons for not releasing the video. Either the transcript is not the real transcript or Joe looks so bad that the AG knows its release will sink Joe’s chance of re-election. I am betting on the former, but it could be both.

I believe Mr. DuChemin called it correctly.

The article notes:

Judicial Watch announced that the White House admitted in a federal court that the transcript of President Joe Biden’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Hur is not accurate and is missing “filler words (such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’)” and words that “may have been repeated when spoken (such as ‘I, I’ or ‘and, and’)” which were sometimes “only listed a single time in the transcripts.” In its new filing the Biden Justice Department makes the extraordinary assertions of executive privilege and privacy to hide the Biden audio. The agency makes the unprecedented assertion that because “AI” could be used to alter Biden’s words the material should be kept secret.

The article reminds us:

Transcripts of presidential records are not supposed to be altered. That is made clear in the Presidential Records Act. Of course, this is far from the first time we’ve seen the Biden administration playing fast and loose with those rules. We have regularly seen this White House “cleaning up” the transcripts of various speeches and press interviews that Joe Biden has done. Sometimes they simply change the words to reflect what Biden had “intended” to say. In other cases, his meandering utterances are simply recorded as “inaudible.” Shockingly, Biden’s team went even further, claiming that an audio recording could be “altered” using Artificial Intelligence. That’s one of the dumbest claims we’ve heard coming out of this White House since virtually every appearance that he or any other official makes is potentially subject to the same type of hoax. 

Please follow the link to read the entire article. This is another example of the Biden administration positioning itself as above the law.

Will We Ever Get The Blindfold Back On Lady Justice?

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On Monday, Just the News posted an article with the following headline, “Biden White House facilitated DOJ’s criminal probe against Trump, scuttled privilege claims: memos.:

The article reports:

“I have therefore decided not to honor the former President’s ‘protective’ claim of privilege,” acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote Trump’s team in May.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump’s estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president’s claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

Where was the FBI when it came to dealing with the illegal server and email account Hillary Clinton was using? Hillary Clinton was not President and did not have the authority to declassify documents. President Trump did have that authority at the time the documents were removed from the White House.

The article notes:

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump’s Florida home.

By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor’s claims to executive privilege, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.

The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump’s Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump’s lawyers summarizing the White House’s involvement.

The article reports:

“We have requested the ability to review the documents,” Corcoran wrote National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern on April 29, copying Su on the letter. “That review is necessary in order to ascertain whether any specific document is subject to privilege. We would respectfully request that you restrict access to the documents until we have had the opportunity to review the documents and to consult with President Donald J. Trump so that he may personally make any decision to assert a claim of constitutionally based privilege.”

But a dozen days later, Wall informed Corcoran that she had the blessing of Biden to overrule those privilege claims and share all materials requested by the DOJ and FBI.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. This is a breathtaking abuse of power on the part of the Biden administration.

How Much Privacy Is A President Entitled To?

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Hot Air posted an article today about the ongoing court battle regarding the Congressional subpoena of former White House Counsel Don McGahn. Counsel McGahn was summoned by the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the time he worked for President Trump.

The article reports:

Whether or not he would appear was a bone of contention for a while until a federal judge issued a dramatic proclamation on Monday, stating that “Presidents are not kings” and ordering McGahn to appear.

Well, that lasted for all of three days. By Wednesday evening, that same judge had backed down, allowing a request from the Justice Department to delay the implementation of the ruling until the appeals process has played out. Of course, this doesn’t mean McGahn (and the President) are totally off the hook, but they’ve at least bought a bit of breathing room. (Daily Mail)

The article concludes:

That doesn’t mean that the final decision on McGahn won’t cast a long shadow, however. How this plays out will have consequences for the ongoing impeachment circus. At issue here is the question of whether or not aides to the President are shielded from revealing details of private conversations they’ve had with the boss or the counsel they offered. Also, whether or not that shielding lasts indefinitely even after they’ve left their positions with the White House.

That sort of privacy has long been assumed to be part of the President’s executive privilege. But does that extend to investigations of potential criminal conduct? That’s the question that will be answered when the dust settles on McGahn’s subpoena. If he’s ordered to show up and testify, that could open the gate for numerous other Trump aides to be called in to talk about all of the Ukraine events. And that’s likely not something President Trump will want to see after we’re in the thick of the final push to next year’s election.

I guess my question is whether or not the President has the same civil rights as ordinary citizens, If you are an ordinary citizen, your conversations with your lawyer are protected by law. We saw this Constitutional principle violated when Michael Cohen’s offices were raided. Now the question is whether or not we are going to continue to violate President Trump’s Constitutional rights. All of us need to remember–if the President does not have Constitutional rights, then none of us have Constitutional rights.

Amoral vs. Immoral

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According to the ConstitutionCenter.org:

If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.

Somehow we have not done as good a job of keeping our republic as we might have. The recent election was a ray of hope, but we have a long way to go to get back to the government our Founding Fathers envisioned.

Fox News is reporting:

The Justice Department released nearly 65,000 pages of subpoenaed documents related to the DOJ’s botched gunrunning sting, after a federal judge overruled the Obama administration’s decision to withhold the records by invoking executive privilege. The program, which targeted Mexican gun cartels, came under scrutiny after weapons involved in the operation were connected to the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010.

“Issa and his idiot cronies never gave a damn about this when all that was happening was that thousands of Mexicans were being killed with guns from our country,” Holder wrote to members of his staff in April 2011, after Issa threatened to subpoena a Federal Firearms Licensee witness to testify on the investigation. “All they want to do — in reality — is cripple ATF and suck up to the gun lobby,” he continued, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the branch of the Justice Department that was in charge of the gunrunning operation.

“Politics at its worst — maybe the media will get it,” Holder’s email added.

It is obvious from that statement that Eric Holder did not believe he had done anything wrong. There is no acknowledgement that running guns to Mexico might be illegal or immoral.

According to the dictionary:

amoral – lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something

immoral – not conforming to accepted standards of morality

Somehow we have morphed from the representative republic created by the U.S. Constitution to a country ruled by a bunch of elite political class who can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. If we do not remedy this situation in 2016, we will lose our republic.

Also, please note that the documents released were released on the eve of the election in the hopes that no one would pay attention to them.