Classified files found at President's former office...
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Kamalalala Dingdong weighs in...
White House officials on Friday called the special counsel’s report into President Biden’s handling of classified material politically motivated, escalating their attempts to discredit a document that characterized the president as elderly and forgetful.
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document. Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said it was “inappropriate” and “troubling.”
The statements are part of an effort to rebuff the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to investigate how classified material from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president had ended up in his garage in Delaware and an office in Washington.
The report, which was released on Thursday, found that “no criminal charges are warranted,” a conclusion that was immediately overshadowed by the characterization of the president’s memory. The report said Mr. Biden, 81, was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/us/politics/kamala-harris-biden-special-counsel.html
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Kamalalala Dingdong weighs in...
White House officials on Friday called the special counsel’s report into President Biden’s handling of classified material politically motivated, escalating their attempts to discredit a document that characterized the president as elderly and forgetful.
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document. Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said it was “inappropriate” and “troubling.”
The statements are part of an effort to rebuff the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to investigate how classified material from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president had ended up in his garage in Delaware and an office in Washington.
The report, which was released on Thursday, found that “no criminal charges are warranted,” a conclusion that was immediately overshadowed by the characterization of the president’s memory. The report said Mr. Biden, 81, was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/us/politics/kamala-harris-biden-special-counsel.html
@Jolly said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document
I'm so old that I remember (and I posted just above) when questioning the Special COunsel's findings was an attack on our democracy (but then, these days, what the fuck isn't an attack on our democracy?).
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@Jolly said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document
I'm so old that I remember (and I posted just above) when questioning the Special COunsel's findings was an attack on our democracy (but then, these days, what the fuck isn't an attack on our democracy?).
@George-K said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
@Jolly said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the report was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document
I'm so old that I remember (and I posted just above) when questioning the Special COunsel's findings was an attack on our democracy (but then, these days, what the fuck isn't an attack on our democracy?).
Biden is selling FEAR! and ABORTION! The Bidenomics crap simply did not work, except among the upper middle class faithful, who really don't care if groceries are up 20%...
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Seriously, is it time to consider invoking the 25th?
The Brad
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Seriously, is it time to consider invoking the 25th?
@LuFins-Dad said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Seriously, is it time to consider invoking the 25th?
It Depends
....Remember all the armchair shrinks talking about it in the distant past - like 6 years ago?
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Seriously, is it time to consider invoking the 25th?
@LuFins-Dad said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Seriously, is it time to consider invoking the 25th?
I think it bears serious consideration.
It also serves two purposes:
- Removal of a President mentally incompetent for the job.
- I think it would discourage some older people from running.
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Had to look up the "25th" but it for sure appears that it is time.
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Had to look up the "25th" but it for sure appears that it is time.
@taiwan_girl said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Had to look up the "25th" but it for sure appears that it is time.
Where were you when Trump was POTUS. Every "journalist" in the MSM was waving a PDF of the 25th amendment on the air. So many psychologists saying it should be invoked.
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@George-K I maybe don't disagree with the assessment of President Trump either. 555 (Using Article 4 of the amendment)
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Hur himself outlined how much more serious the allegations against Trump are in his Biden report.
I’m guessing your news sources haven’t covered that bit very much.
Only non-witches get due process.
- Cotton Mather, Salem Massachusetts, 1692
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Had to look up the "25th" but it for sure appears that it is time.
@taiwan_girl said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Had to look up the "25th" but it for sure appears that it is time.
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/02/12/can-biden-be-removed-under-the-25th-amendment-dont-bet-on-it/
Now, some are calling for Biden’s removal from the presidency under the 25th Amendment. However, constitutional removal would require more than just memory lapses and “get off my lawn” press conferences.
The Hur report details alarming gaps in Biden’s memory, and what Hur described as the president’s “diminished faculties.” Given the detailed accounts in the report, Biden’s press conference bordered on self-immolation. On Thursday night, Biden insisted that he was still sharp and not diminished mentally…before confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. This followed a week when Biden repeatedly referenced conversations with long-dead world leaders.
The subsequent calls for Biden to be removed under the 25th Amendment are similar to demands made from Democrats and various law professors and pundits during the Trump administration. At the time, figures such as the University of Chicago’s Eric Posner argued that the “conventional understanding” of the amendment should be “enlarged” to include instances where both parties “lose confidence in the president’s ability to govern.”
The various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after his own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.
It is Section 4 that allows the removal of a president. One option is what I have called the “mutiny option.” It requires a vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and notify Congress that the vice president intends to take over. If Vice President Kamala Harris could get eight Cabinet officers to go along with a letter to Congress, her status as the “Acting President” would likely be short-lived. Joe Biden (who yesterday declared, “I’m elderly and know what the hell I’m doing”) would only have to declare to Congress that “no inability exists.” Biden would then resume his powers.
Harris would have to send another declaration with the Cabinet members within four days to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, rejecting Biden’s claims.
With that second declaration, Congress would have 48 hours to assemble to debate the issue. It would then have 21 days to vote on the removal. However, that would require two-thirds majorities in both houses. If Congress did not vote within 21 days, the president would resume and keep power.
In other words, it is about as likely as François Mitterrand coming forward to say that he faked his death and has indeed been in communication with Biden.
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Hur himself outlined how much more serious the allegations against Trump are in his Biden report.
I’m guessing your news sources haven’t covered that bit very much.
@jon-nyc said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Hur himself outlined how much more serious the allegations against Trump are in his Biden report.
I’m guessing your news sources haven’t covered that bit very much.
I figure the report was vetted by the Just-us Department before going public. Since they didn't want to charge Biden, I suspect the elderly comment was the fig leaf to cover up the fact that neither Senator Biden or VP Biden has the power to declassify documents.
Or have they changed the Constitution when I wasn't looking?
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Hur himself outlined how much more serious the allegations against Trump are in his Biden report.
I’m guessing your news sources haven’t covered that bit very much.
@jon-nyc said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Hur himself outlined how much more serious the allegations against Trump are in his Biden report.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report-from-special-counsel-robert-k-hur-february-2024.pdf
On page 250, he comments on the fact that Biden cooperated and Trump did not. That doesn't change the actual nature of the crime, does it? Obstruction of justice is a separate allegation.
I just searched the PDF for mention of "Trump" and that, other than citing court precedents, that's the only "much more serious" allegation I could find.
Perhaps I missed it?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Oh, no charges for this one either.
The president’s explanation does not address how and why he shared classified material with a ghostwriter, but it shines a light on the longtime assistant who was in charge of packing his papers, Kathy Sang-ok Chung.
Chung, an old friend of Hunter Biden, began working for Joe Biden in 2012 when he was vice president. She told investigators she oversaw the transfer of the contents of Biden’s file cabinets and desk drawers into 15 boxes when he moved out of the West Wing in January 2017. While other office material did go to the National Archives, Hur rebuked Biden for keeping more than 600 pages of classified information – including military secrets and intelligence sources and methods – in unlocked and unauthorized containers at multiple locations, including a tattered box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home. The stash included information marked “top secret” involving Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Some of the secrets are compartmented by codewords and can only be stored and read in a secure facility known as a SCIF.
The Biden documents that Chung herself packed, unpacked, and repacked “are the most highly classified, sensitive and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur wrote.
Yet the prosecutor let Chung as well as Biden off the hook in also declining to press charges against her, explaining that he found plausible her account that she packed and kept the classified papers “by mistake, ”even though she had prior government experience handling and identifying classified information and was told in a Jan. 3, 2017, National Security Council memo to be sure to remove "only unclassified personal records," and despite providing inconsistent answers to investigators
Hur also went to great lengths to protect her identity in his 388-page report. He refers to her only as “Executive Assistant” and her face is deliberately blurred through pixilation in a photo he published of her sitting in front of a file cabinet in her West Wing office, where she stored Biden’s secret papers.
