Classified files found at President's former office...
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@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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@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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@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.
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@Rainman said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Ya know, this kinda is startin to piss me off. Wasn't there some guy that got nailed and jailed for taking a picture inside one of our nuclear subs?
That’s right.
And, many of the documents that Biden was found to have dated back to his days in the Senate. He had no authorization to have those, so what were they doing there?
And the fact that the special council found no reason to prosecute is the most Comey like thing I’ve seen in about eight years
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NBC News notices that Biden broke the law:
The controversy over special counsel Robert Hur’s characterization of President Joe Biden’s memory has obscured one of the most surprising findings in his report: evidence that Biden knowingly kept classified materials at home for years and failed to turn them in.
After a yearlong investigation, Hur found that the evidence of “willful retention” — the language in the criminal statute — wasn’t strong enough to justify a prosecution. And he explained in detail why the criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his handling of classified materials include far more serious allegations of misconduct than Biden’s case.
To Democrats, Hur’s finding that there was no criminal case to bring against the president is the most important takeaway.
But to some national security experts, the disclosure that Biden told his ghostwriter that he discovered classified documents in his Virginia home in 2017 — with no indication he returned them — was unexpected and troubling. So was the revelation that Biden disclosed classified information to the ghostwriter on at least three occasions, and that he stored notebooks full of state secrets in unlocked drawers in his home office.
They said a senior government official like Biden should be held to a higher ethical standard than whether a jury would convict him of a felony.
“It may not be criminal, but it’s reckless and awful, because you have no idea what sources and methods you are putting at risk,” said NBC News legal contributor and former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg. “Someone who served as the vice president of the United States should know better.”
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Haley on 2024 election: 'It will either be me or it will be Kamala Harris'
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
"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.
