Special Counsel Cleared Biden - Then Attacked Him Anyway

 

Leading up to the 2016 election, the head of the FBI cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal conduct -- then issued a report that was little more than an obvious attack on her candidacy. It was a right-wing "dirty trick" and harmed her candidacy.

A right-wing special counsel has repeated that kind of nasty "dirty trick". He issued a report that cleared President Biden of any criminal wrongdoing in having government documents he was not supposed to have. Then unnecessarily, he attacked the president - calling him an elderly man with a poor memory (adding fuel to the fire of doubt about the president's age).

It was uncalled for, but lies and dirty tricks seem to be all the Republicans have these days.

Here's what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich had to say about this:

Special counsel, Robert K. Hur — appointed in January 2023 by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead an inquiry into President Biden’s possible criminality after classified files were found in the garage and living areas of Biden’s home in Delaware — cleared Biden of any wrongdoing.

 

But Hur also suggested that one reason Biden could not be prosecuted was because of his memory lapses — thereby underscoring one of the biggest issues that the public is concerned about in re-electing Biden: His aging brain. 

In recounting his interviews with Biden, Hur portrayed him as unable to remember key dates of his time in President Barack Obama’s White House. Hur wrote:

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and that it would be difficult to convince a jury that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a felony that “requires a mental state of willfulness.”

I don’t know how much this statement by special counsel Hur will hurt Biden, but it surely will not help. 

Yet let me point out five things: 

1. Special counsel Hur has no professional background or experience diagnosing age-related memory loss. In fact, he has no medical background at all. His conclusion that Biden has a “poor memory” is entirely subjective, based on Hur’s own guess about how a jury would respond to Biden. 

2. Some memory loss naturally comes with aging, and both Biden (age 81) and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump (age 77) have demonstrated memory loss as well as confusion. (Trump recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, for example.)

3. For the purposes of electing the next president, the relevant question isn’t a candidate’s memory. It’s his knowledge, temperament, and judgment. We have no reason to doubt these attributes in Biden. He has been the adult in the room. But the likely Republican nominee notably lacks all these qualities. To the contrary, Trump has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated willful ignorance, a sociopathic temperament, and the judgment of a five-year-old. Trump has been indicted on 91 criminal counts. 

4. Hur is a former Trump Justice Department official. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help wonder why Hur thought it useful to predict that a jury would likely find Biden to be an “elderly man with a poor memory” — unless, perhaps, Hur thought it politically useful. Could it possibly be that Hur — whom Trump appointed to the Justice Department, who was a top adviser to Trump’s then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and whom Trump then nominated to be U.S. attorney for Maryland — might have known he would set off a political bombshell? How could he not have known?

5. The two cases — Trump retaining classified documents and Biden retaining them — are utterly different. Trump refused to turn over documents that had been subpoenaed and undertook other efforts to thwart investigators. Biden, on the other hand, did not willfully retain papers; he cooperated with investigators the moment the documents were found.

Former Federal Prosecutors Say Trump Obstructed Justice

Attorney General William "Whitewash Willie" Barr told Congress and the American people that Robert Mueller did not find enough evidence that Donald Trump obstructed justice. That is a LIE!

Mueller found plenty of evidence that Trump obstructed justice, and details that evidence in the report he submitted to the Justice Department. The only reason Trump was not indicted on charges of obstructing justice was a Justice Department rule that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Barr's lies were just a pathetic attempt to cover-up Trump's crimes.

I'm not the only one that believes that. Hundreds of former federal prosecutors who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations say the same -- that Trump did obstruct justice.

Here is the letter they have posted online, and which as I write this, has been signed by at least 566 of those former prosecutors. They said:

We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include:

· The President’s efforts to fire Mueller and to falsify evidence about that effort;

· The President’s efforts to limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation to exclude his conduct; and

· The President’s efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with investigators probing him and his campaign.

Attempts to fire Mueller and then create false evidence

Despite being advised by then-White House Counsel Don McGahn that he could face legal jeopardy for doing so, Trump directed McGahn on multiple occasions to fire Mueller or to gin up false conflicts of interest as a pretext for getting rid of the Special Counsel. When these acts began to come into public view, Trump made “repeated efforts to have McGahn deny the story” — going so far as to tell McGahn to write a letter “for our files” falsely denying that Trump had directed Mueller’s termination.

Firing Mueller would have seriously impeded the investigation of the President and his associates — obstruction in its most literal sense. Directing the creation of false government records in order to prevent or discredit truthful testimony is similarly unlawful. The Special Counsel’s report states: “Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn’s account in order to deflect or prevent scrutiny of the President’s conduct toward the investigation.”

Attempts to limit the Mueller investigation

The report describes multiple efforts by the president to curtail the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation.

First, the President repeatedly pressured then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his legally-mandated decision to recuse himself from the investigation. The President’s stated reason was that he wanted an attorney general who would “protect” him, including from the Special Counsel investigation. He also directed then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to fire Sessions and Priebus refused.

Second, after McGahn told the President that he could not contact Sessions himself to discuss the investigation, Trump went outside the White House, instructing his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to carry a demand to Sessions to direct Mueller to confine his investigation to future elections. Lewandowski tried and failed to contact Sessions in private. After a second meeting with Trump, Lewandowski passed Trump’s message to senior White House official Rick Dearborn, who Lewandowski thought would be a better messenger because of his prior relationship with Sessions. Dearborn did not pass along Trump’s message.

As the report explains, “[s]ubstantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct” — in other words, the President employed a private citizen to try to get the Attorney General to limit the scope of an ongoing investigation into the President and his associates.

All of this conduct — trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others — is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions.

Witness tampering and intimidation

The Special Counsel’s report establishes that the President tried to influence the decisions of both Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort with regard to cooperating with investigators. Some of this tampering and intimidation, including the dangling of pardons, was done in plain sight via tweets and public statements; other such behavior was done via private messages through private attorneys, such as Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani’s message to Cohen’s lawyer that Cohen should “[s]leep well tonight[], you have friends in high places.”

Of course, these aren’t the only acts of potential obstruction detailed by the Special Counsel. It would be well within the purview of normal prosecutorial judgment also to charge other acts detailed in the report.

We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment. Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. In our system, every accused person is presumed innocent and it is always the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.

As former federal prosecutors, we recognize that prosecuting obstruction of justice cases is critical because unchecked obstruction — which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished — puts our whole system of justice at risk. We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report.

A Special Prosecutor Has Been Appointed

The public pressure has worked. The Justice Department (in a move sure to enrage Trump) has appointed a special prosecutor -- and he seems to be a pretty good one.

That special prosecutor is Robert Mueller -- who served for 12 years as the nation's 6 FBI Director. He was confirmed for that job on a 94 - 0 Senate vote, and served under both President Bush and President Obama. He's not a politician, but a career law enforcement guy -- having also served as U.S. Deputy Attorney General, U.S. Attorney (in both California and Massachusetts), and U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division.

This will probably delay the results of the investigation, but that's not all bad. At least we'll know that a real investigation was done (instead of a GOP-led congressional whitewash). And the investigation will probably be going strong as the 2018 election approaches.

I'm sure we'll hear the Republicans whine that everyone needs to shut up now and let the investigation proceed. That will not happen. It didn't happen when Nixon was being investigated, and it won't happen now. The media will continue to report on every new detail, and that's also a good thing -- since the people have the right to know what Trump and his aides did.

Is Trump Trying To Stop The Investigation Into His Russia Ties By Firing FBI Director James Comey ?

(This caricature of James Comes is by the inimitable DonkeyHotey.)

I am not a defender of James Comey, who has just been fired from his position as FBI Director by Donald Trump. Personally, I think Comey should have resigned (or been fired) months ago.

Comey's announcement just 10 days before the 2016 election that he was re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's e-mails inferred that there was something nefarious regarding her e-mails -- and definitely affected the election's outcome. Of course, that turned out to be false (as he would have known if he had just done a perfunctory reading of those e-mails (which were from Huma Abedin -- not Hillary Clinton).

That announcement showed that either Comes used his government position to intentionally affect the presidential election (which would be a violation of federal law), or he exhibited gross incompetence. Either way, he was not worthy of leading this nation's top law enforcement agency.

Trump says he fired Comey because he was not doing a good job (i.e., was incompetent). But that was clearly evident several months ago. If that was the real reason, then Comes should have been fired in January or February.

Trump's firing of Comes at this time, when the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian officials during the 2016 campaign was picking up momentum, stinks to high heaven. It smells a lot like Richard Nixon's firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which was just an effort to block the investigation into Nixon's misdeeds. And indeed, Nixon's action was later included in the articles of impeachment passed by the House of Representatives.

Is Trump pulling a "Nixon" here? Is the firing of Comey an attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation? It certainly looks like that. If the FBI investigation now fizzles out, how are we to know whether there was nothing to be found or his new FBI director was picked to kill the investigation? We can't know, and the perception will be bad for Trump.

There is only one way to insure that a fair and impartial investigation is now conducted. A bipartisan special prosecutor must be appointed (something that was already supported by a huge majority of Americans).

Here is Dan Rather's take on the situation:

Future generations may mark today as one of the truly dark days in American history, a history that may soon take an even more ominous turn. 

President Trump's sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey is a matter that should deeply concern every American, regardless of party, partisan politics or ideological leanings. 

The independence of our law enforcement is at the bedrock of our democracy. That independance, already grievously shaken under the brief tenure of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is now shattered by uncertainty. 

The firing of an FBI Director is always a very serious matter in normal times. But these times aren't normal. Far from it. The Bureau is engaged in one of the most important and perilous investigations of this or any other presidency—the investigation of connections between the Trump election campaign and the Russian government.

The questions mount and the shadow grows darker. What were those connections? What did Mr. Trump know about them and when did he know it? How can the President explain the serious allegations against his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn? And what is President Trump hiding in this regard? It’s imperative that the nation—We The People—get answers to those questions. It will take time, but the process must start now. 

A politicized FBI is the last thing we need as we struggle through the maze of lies, concealment and ever-deepening mysteries. The last time a President fired prosecutors who were investigating him was Richard Nixon during the widespread criminal conspiracy known for short as “Watergate.” We all know how that turned out. In real ways, this potential scandal and coverup are much graver. We are talking about the very security of the United States and the sanctity of our republic.

Thomas Paine famously wrote in 1776: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. "

I see this as having the potential for a similar reflection point in our American story. If there is a cover up, if our nation is at the risk that has certainly been more than suggested, it is incumbent upon everyone who claims to love this nation to demand answers. 

We need a special prosecutor. We need an independent investigation. There is, obviously, much we don’t know about what has just happened, why it happened and why now. Just as obviously there is much more, so much more that we need know. We need to damn the lies and expose the truth.

Most Want A Special Prosecutor To Investigate Russian Ties

Donald Trump has done everything he can think of to divert the public's attention away from the growing realization that many of his aides had ties to Russian officials during the campaign. He has attacked the press, told numerous lies, and even accused President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. It's not working.

Most Americans are troubled by the continuing revelations about Trump aides contacting Russian officials. They want to know if Trump colluded with the Russians to sway the election, and if so, what has Trump promised the Russians in return? And they want a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate it.

A majority (51%) of Americans say they want a special prosecutor, while only 28% don't want one -- a difference of 23 points. And that feeling crosses gender, age, and racial lines -- men (by 16 points), women (by 31 points), 18-29 year-olds (by 33 points), 30-44 (by 29 points), 45-64 (by 18 points), those 65 and older (by 15 points), Whites (by 16 points), Blacks (by 59 points), Hispanics (by 34 points), and other races (by 20 points).

Those are some pretty substantial numbers, and they show the Trump/Russian scandal is not going to go away -- at least not until it is thoroughly investigated (by a bipartisan special prosecutor with the subpoena power to find the truth).

The chart above was made with information in a recent Economist / YouGov Poll -- done on March 6th and 7th of a random national sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,359 registered voters), with a margin of error of 3.4 points.