1. Did the Special Counsel's office overreach by saying that Joe Biden has a bad memory? From Politico:
The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents has concluded that no criminal charges are warranted in the matter and said they wouldn’t be even if the Department of Justice didn’t have a policy barring the prosecution of sitting presidents.
That conclusion was revealed in a 345-page report that the Justice Department released on Thursday.
But while the report withheld condemnation of Biden on legal grounds, it presented a harsh portrait of his conduct and mental faculties. Biden improperly took classified material related to the 2009 Afghanistan troop surge and shared classified information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir. The report also includes photos of classified documents in insecure places, including a cardboard box in Biden’s garage and a filing cabinet under his TV.
In the report, Special Counsel Robert Hur, a well-respected former U.S. Attorney, explained the president’s “lapses in attention and vigilance demonstrate why former officials should not keep classified materials unsecured at home and read them aloud to others, but jurors could well conclude that Mr. Biden’s actions were unintentional.”
But he said that Biden would make a defense that many jurors would find sympathetic.
“[A] trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” reads the report.
2. Is Justice Jackson going to side with President Trump in the Colorado case? From Slate:
If there was any surprise on Thursday, it was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s embrace of Mitchell’s main theory that the president is not an “officer” of the United States, so Section 3 does not apply to him at all. Jackson pointed out, correctly, that the amendment lists specific positions (like senator) from which insurrectionists are disqualified and does not mention the president. “Why is that?” she asked Murray. “And if there’s an ambiguity, why would we construe it … against democracy?” Jackson suggested that the amendment was “about preventing the South from rising again” and was intended to prevent Confederates from prevailing in “local elections” involving “local concerns.” Doesn’t it seem, she mused, that the Framers excluded the presidency because of the “troubling potential disuniformity of having different states enforce Section 3 with respect of presidential elections”?
To be clear, Jackson’s argument mirrored that of professor Lawrence Lessig in Slate, not the bizarre fringe hypothesis about a secret constitutional code distinguishing office and officers. (Only Justice Neil Gorsuch poked at that idea, and even then with little enthusiasm.) Jackson’s fundamental concern mirrored that of Roberts and Kagan: Letting states disqualify federal candidates would create a patchwork of 50 wildly different regimes, handing a few swing states the authority to decide each presidential election. Sotomayor eventually gestured toward this fear as well, though she sounded genuinely torn, more so than her left-leaning colleagues. She pummeled Mitchell over his reliance on Griffin’s Case, his departure from the constitutional text, and his distortions of history. If any justice dissents, it will be Sotomayor. Yet she, too, can be a team player when called upon. And it is easy to envision the justice signing on to an opinion for Trump to create the impression of consensus.
3. Is the federal prison system in crisis? From the Hill:
Due to officer shortages, other BOP employees including nurses, teachers, maintenance workers, and counselors are regularly pulled away from their main duties to fill in for officer vacancies. This practice, known as augmentation, affects the safety of both staff and inmates. The added workload and stress can lead to burnout, as individuals are managing multiple responsibilities without proper support. Pulling employees away from their regular duties also reduces inmate access to medical staff, education programs, and rehabilitation services and hampers our ability to fulfill the requirements of the First Step Act, which Congress passed in 2018 to improve an inmate’s eligibility for early release.
Ensuring everyone’s safety inside the prison walls is a major factor behind the use of special housing units, also known as restrictive housing. These units serve various purposes in prisons, including protecting vulnerable inmates and isolating dangerous ones. As BOP Director Colette Peters acknowledged while testifying before a House subcommittee in November, a large portion of inmates assigned to special housing units are there voluntarily for their protection. The pressure to limit or eliminate the use of these housing units has had a negative effect on prison security, making it even harder to retain officers.
Outside of staffing shortages, another major challenge facing BOP is the failing condition of its facilities due to lack of investment in maintaining them.
6 comments:
I hate “they did it first” arguments, but it’s democrats that started with the storytelling Indictments for public opinion and media use.
Cooperation isn’t the legal standard for possession of unauthorized secret documents either.
1. Probably. But it is hard to fault a prosecutor of laying out his thinking; of course, he was very enthusiastic and came across as unprofessional. Regardless, the guy has hitched his cart to MAGA and will do quite well during Trump's second term. What the price is for selling one's reputation, I do not know, but he will eventually find out.
2. Meh. The Court isn't allowing Trump to be kicked off. They would do a service to the Country by not playing semantics and instead coming up with a mechanism to determine whether, presidential candidates should be excluded for insurrection. For example, a trial in the Supreme Court! They could even apply Twombly and Iqbal (I miss South Florida Lawyers - Venetian Salami anybody?) to screen all the BS complaints that are sure to come.
3. BOP is being intentionally famished of funds in favor of private prisons, which are a huge lobby. Coming next, even greater MM, for all kinds of crimes. Need to feed the beast.
Hur's report is a fascinating cautionary tale for criminal defense attorneys & their clients. The Washington Post ran a piece on 2/10/24 titled "Inside Joe Biden's five-hour face off with Special Counsel..." A must-read.
At 71, Bob Bauer, Biden's personal attorney, is one of Washington's most influential lawyers, experienced beyond measure in modern day representations implicating presidential politics & representing presidents. Accepting that hindsight is 20/20, reading the detailed Washington Post article leaves the impression that Bauer got complacent & unnecessarily rushed his client to a critical interview, trusted too much on the status of his client (& perhaps himself,) & choose a strategy that ultimately bit him - & his client - on the backside.
As you likely heard Biden attempt to use as an excuse after the report was released, Bauer walked his client into the special counsel interview almost immediately after Biden hung up the phone with Netanyahu on October 8, "agonizing how to rescue hostages from Hamas," to be interviewed by a 51 year old special counsel nine (9) months into his investigation of Biden.
Bauer's team admitted discussing postponing the interview "but they'd already set aside two days," the investigation "had dragged on," and "they were eager to put it behind them." Further, they felt their client "had nothing to hide" and "would benefit from being transparent." Ouch.
What Bauer and his team didn't disclose, but what is clear to anyone who practices criminal defense law on any side of the isle, is that the President' elite legal team stressed the importance of relying on "I don't know" and "I don't recall" and "I have a lot going on as President, or as Vice-President," and "that happened a long time ago." Also, "that wasn't my job to know." Including, how a file marked "Beau Iowa" wound up in a well-worn carboard box in his garage that contained sensitive government material. Biden left day one of the special counsel interview & went to a BBQ. 1/2
Notably, Biden's personal legal team never informed senior administration officials that he had sat the day before for the interview with the special counsel, nor that he was to sit for day two, once his subsequent calls to Netanyahu and to allies on the Israel hostage crisis, concluded.
Day two involved questioning about a memo Biden authored to president Obama in 2009 regarding Afghanistan. It was the only memo Biden ever authored solely to Obama, and no one else in the government. The memo was found in Biden's garage, in a damaged cardboard box not capable of being locked, near a dog crate, a duct taped lamp, and synthetic firewood. Biden initially told Hur that he was not aware he had kept the memo. In his answer to a follow up question, however, Biden stated "I guess I wanted to hang onto it for posterity's sake." One wonders the amount of preparation that went into the interview.
A couple parting uncontroverted facts that the propogandists in the corporate, legacy, for-profit media are universally omitting from their talking points, and thus about which my fellow lefties seem unaware or unwilling to acknowledge.
1. Despite what Biden stated when he tried to cover his tracks and defend himself in his news conference, the material in his possession was highly classified. Higher classified categorizations exist, however, but one requires more than a basic security clearance to view the documents stored in Biden's garage (which, according to Biden, "was locked OR CAPABLE of being locked."
2. The classified material in Biden's possession spanned HIS ENTIRE political career. Accordingly, Biden's "strategy" to blame his vice-presidential staffers for the documents, was mendacious and a poor tactic, both in his interview and his speechifying after the report was released.
3. Biden shared the classified material with his ghostwriter as confirmed in audio recorded interviews which the ghostwriter attempted to delete. The ghost writer has no security clearance and never has.
4. Biden's recorded statement to the ghostwriter indicate Biden's awareness that he knew he was not supposed to have the classified material.
"The shock of Biden's lawyers is evident in a letter they wrote in response to the report." Biden's lawyers wrote to Hur that "it is 'hardly fair' to have asked the president about events years in the past..."
Oh my...hardly fair. Over three decades in the business and this is the first time I come across the "hardly fair" doctrine in criminal defense law. Must be a Washington doctrine or former prosecutor standard.
I am reminded, no matter how experienced, or how important a lawyer one may believe they have become: don't let your guard down; distrust and paranoia are healthy attributes in our profession, unfortunately; there is no such thing as over-preparation.
Uh - he was caught breaking the law and then not charged. I think his legal team did a really good job. And, he is old, that is the truth.
Gee: 1. If the special prosecutor did not come up with the stupid old age thing, then I guess they would have had to charge the old codger since they had found that he knowingly broke the law or does that only apply to Republicans? So, maybe they were just trying to protect him since following the report's publication, a parade of hypocritical Democrats came out and said how clear and cogent Biden is.
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