Click here to close
New Message Alert
List Entire Thread
Msg ID: 2693916 Walter Schaub  +1/-3     
Author:obumazombie
6/23/2021 6:36:04 PM

Commenting on Hunter's art, direct corruption...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRweYMJlnms

You libz complained about nepotism with TRUMP, hen there was very little.

Not a peep when it is rampant in Biden administration.


Good job Goodlibs!



Return-To-Index  
 
Msg ID: 2693920 Walter Schaub Who Was An Official With … +1/-3     
Author:obumazombie
6/23/2021 7:04:17 PM

Reply to: 2693916

The owebuma administration said it was gritty...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_afOmuWVhUM

Ethics Chief is a lib, so you libz can't say it's partisan.

And, you libz can't say it's a...

 

Good job Goodlibs!



Return-To-Index  
 
Msg ID: 2693953 Walter Schaub  +1/-2     
Author:obumazombie
6/23/2021 11:05:21 PM

Reply to: 2693916

Biden is the most divisive president since owebuma.

Remember when owebuma said get to the back of the bus?
Remember when owebuma told Joe the plumber that he had to spread the wealth around?
Biden, if it is even possible, is even more divisive...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXdZy6fvrIA

Divisiveness is a...

 

Good job Goodlibs!



Return-To-Index  
 
Msg ID: 2693974 Trump’s DOJ Was More Dangerous Than We Knew +2/-1     
Author:TheCrow
6/24/2021 9:57:00 AM

Reply to: 2693953

Your Dear Leader was attempting to subvert the DoJ, turn them into a government institution of political oppression.

Trump’s DOJ Was More Dangerous Than We Knew

An illustration of the Department of Justice seal with Donald Trump's eye.
ADAM MAIDA / THE ATLANTIC

Sometimes, the actions a government takes look bad at the time, but posterity treats them kindly. Other times, a president might look good in the moment but see his reputation sink in retrospect. Then there’s the Trump administration, and especially its Justice Department, which looked bad when it was in power and now looks even worse.

 

Late yesterday, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department subpoenaed Apple to try to obtain data from accounts belonging to Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, their aides, and even one of their children as part of an investigation into leaks about Trump associates’ ties to Russia. Even after the probes produced few results, Attorney General Bill Barr insisted that prosecutors keep them alive.

 

David A. Graham: What’s the Justice Department actually for?

This is only the latest ugly revelation about the Trump Justice Department to emerge since January 20—sometimes despite the best efforts of the Biden team to keep things secret. We now know that prosecutors sought to compel records of reporters from The Washington PostCNN, and the Timesfailed to prepare for right-wing violence because of a focus on antifa; and even saw a plot by the assistant attorney general and the president to oust the acting attorney general in order to overturn the result of the presidential election.

The scope of the subpoenas disclosed last night by the Times is still not clear. Schiff and Swalwell were perhaps natural suspects for the White House, because they were among the noisiest of the president’s critics. Yet if that’s the case, that makes the subpoenas only more troubling, because they then smack of political retribution. It is not unusual for members of Congress to be investigated by federal law enforcement—corruption cases against members are distressingly common and warranted—but a leak hunt has seldom if ever targeted members in this way. (The subjects only recently learned of the subpoenas from Apple, which had previously been under a judicial gag order.)

The odor of revenge is especially strong, given that initial attempts to tie the leaks to the men had sputtered. “Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry,” the Times reports. “But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later.”

 

Two ironies emerge from the story. The first is that the Barr DOJ’s politically motivated leak hunt was hobbled by the administration’s politically motivated release of some of the secret material in question: “John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.”

The second is that although we still don’t know where the leaks did in fact originate, a great deal of the damaging leaks during the Trump administration came not from its political enemies but from inside the administration. Members of the administration leaked information as part of political ploys, as part of internecine power struggles, for self-aggrandizement, and probably just for amusement. The president himself was a prolific leaker. Detective, investigate thyself!

 

These new stories about the Trump DOJ do not qualitatively change the existing impression of a department that was weaponized for personal gain, run by unqualified and/or malevolent actors, and reoriented to political warfare. Under Jeff Sessions, the department aggressively undermined civil-rights protections and spearheaded a push to separate immigrant families at the southern border. When Sessions was finally defenestrated for, remarkably, being too politically independent, he was replaced by a wildly unqualified political hack, Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker was never formally nominated for the job, probably because he was unconfirmable, and was replaced by Barr. A formidable lawyer and former attorney general, Barr was clearly qualified, but also comfortable using the department for malign purposes, including misleading the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and espousing bizarre conspiracy theories ahead of the election. Things could have been worse still. To Barr’s credit, and to the credit of Jeffrey Rosen, his interim successor who was the target of the internal coup, the Justice Department resisted Trump’s pressure to try to overturn the election after the fact.

Yet the new revelations do more than add fine detail to the existing portrait of decay. These stories are important for understanding the abuse and politicization of the Justice Department and how it could be repeated by any future administration. They also demonstrate why Merrick Garland faces the biggest challenge of any attorney general since Watergate to reforming his department—and perhaps an ever greater one.

 
 
<div class="ArticleBio_imgContainer__2ZYsD">
DAVID A. GRAHAM is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
>


Return-To-Index  
 
Msg ID: 2693978 ‘Pure insanity’: Emails show DOJ response to Trump election fraud claims +3/-1     
Author:TheCrow
6/24/2021 10:23:23 AM

Reply to: 2693974

 The Dear Leader Trump, who will return to the Oval Office in August according to QAnon.

 

LEGAL

‘Pure insanity’: Emails show DOJ response to Trump election fraud claims

The former president’s aides and emissaries pressed Justice Department leaders to join legal challenges to the vote.

Former President Donald Trump stands before a crowd at the NCGOP state convention.
 

Top Justice Department officials derisively dismissed a series of last-ditch efforts by then-President Donald Trump’s aides and emissaries to get DOJ lawyers and the FBI to investigate outlandish election fraud claims in the waning weeks of Trump’s presidency, newly-released emails show.

The emails — made public by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — detail the Justice Department’s response to attempts by Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to get investigators to look at bizarre allegations in a YouTube video where a former intelligence officer named Brad Johnson asserted that individuals in Italy were manipulating votes in the U.S. through satellites.

“Pure insanity,” then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue wrote in response to one New Year’s Day email from Meadows relaying the Italy theory. 

That exchange appeared to put then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen into a defensive mode, recording events in writing for posterity and the very kinds of investigations congressional committees are now pursuing.

“Yes,” Rosen replied. “After this message, I was asked to have FBI meet with Brad Johnson, and I responded that Brad Johnson could call or walk into FBI’s Washington Field Office with any evidence he purports to have.”

Rosen goes on to relate that Johnson was collaborating with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The acting attorney general seems to revel in his refusal to engage with Giuliani.

“On a follow up call, I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as ‘an insult.’ Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and re-affirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this,” Rosen wrote.

In another email, Meadows asked Rosen to have the acting Civil Division chief Jeffrey Clark “immediately” look into “allegations of signature match anomalies" in Fulton County, Ga.

“Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to message below,” Rosen wrote to Donoghue.

Donoghue replied: “At least it’s better than the last one, but that doesn’t say much.”

The newly-released emails also disclose that a lawyer urging the Justice Department to file a case at the Supreme Court to overturn the election results, Kurt Olsen, drove from Maryland to Washington, D.C., in an effort to meet with Rosen over the issue but was apparently rebuffed.

“The President of the United States has seen this complaint, and he directed me last night to brief AG Rosen in person today to discuss bringing this action,” Olsen wrote to John Moran, chief of staff to Donoghue, on Dec. 29.

Moran said he told Olsen that Rosen was tied up in meetings at the White House, but Olsen later said he was on his way to Washington to see Rosen without any scheduled appointment.

“Mr. Olsen just called to tell me (a) that he just tried to call you again and (b) that he is in the car driving down to DC (from Maryland) in the hopes of meeting with you at Main Justice later today,” Moran wrote.

Some of the emails also appear to allude to an effort Trump considered in late December and early January to remove the top leadership of the Justice Department and install Clark, who some Trump allies perceived as more willing to make legal moves to back Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results.

 

“I have only limited visibility into this, but it sounds like Rosen and the cause of justice won,” an aide to Donghue, Patrick Hovakimian, wrote on Jan. 3.

“Amazing,” National Security Divison chief John Demers replied.

“Still at WH. But that is correct,” Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Engel wrote back that evening.

Trump reportedly abandoned the plan to replace Rosen after nearly all the senior leaders of the Justice Department threatened to quit, which would have overshadowed Trump’s election fraud claims.

House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said the messages illustrate attempts by Trump to exert improper influence over the Justice Department.

“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” Maloney said. “Those who aided or witnessed President Trump’s unlawful actions must answer the Committee’s questions about this attempted subversion of democracy.”

Some of the emails in which Meadows pressed the Justice Department to investigate various fraud theories were reported last week by The New York Times after those messages were obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The emails the House panel released Tuesday were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.



Return-To-Index