Showing posts with label special counsel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label special counsel. Show all posts

Monday, January 16, 2023

Drip, Drip, Drip

 

Everything was going well for Joe Biden until the roof caved in on him.  Again.

Just when we thought every government document in President Biden's pre-presidential Washington office and suburban Wilmington home had been recovered, another five documents showed up in his house.  Some of those same documents appear to have been where previous documents have been found - in the President's garage.  Biden pointed out that he keeps his valuable 1967 Corvette locked up in there, so it's not as if they were out on the street.  Right now, I think car thieves who could have broken into his garage would have said to hell with the Vette and taken the documents.

And that old argument that the Biden White House acted appropriately by alerting the National Archives and the Justice Department promptly doesn't make it with people anymore.  The White House still failed to get out ahead of this by informing the public as soon as the documents were discovered and examined (CBS broke the story), a situation that could have affected the midterms was kept secret until after people voted, and Biden's anger over Donald Trump's "irresponsible" behavior (expressed on  - you guessed it - CBS) seems hollow in light of a file problem of his own that never seems to run out of surprises.  The Biden administration's mistakes have turned the file issue into a situation where one detail drips out after another, and the possibility that there could be more files in Biden's possession as yet undiscovered makes those oceanic differences between the Biden document case and the Trump document case seem more riparian. 

The word "riparian," for those who don't know it, means "pertaining to a river."  And the river separating the Biden and Trump file scandals is more like the narrow Brandywine River in Biden's home state of Delaware than the mighty Mississippi.     

And that's why Attorney General Merrick Garland had to investigate former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate the Biden documents issue.   

House Republicans already planning to investigate possible Biden family connections to China and to Ukrainian energy companies now plan to investigate these matters in tandem with the classified documents found in Biden's possession, hoping to connect the dots to make the case to impeach the President for high crimes and misdemeanors they are already convinced were committed.  They undoubtedly plan to make any evidence, no matter how contrived, fit their pro-impeachment narrative.

Am I going to propose a backup presidential candidate for the Democrats if Biden is compelled to forego a shot at a second term?  Nope, I've had it with that sort of thing - I'm done! I can't be bothered anymore.  

Monday, November 21, 2022

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington

Meet Jack Smith.

Jack Smith is the new special counsel tapped to investigate Donald Trump in the events leading up to the January 6 insurrection and the confiscation of government documents at Mar-A-Lago.  Smith has held numerous prosecutorial positions, including a prosecutor of the Eastern District of New York, an assistant (and later acting) United States Attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee, and a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.  Smith, now in the Netherlands as I type this, is coming home to investigate another international criminal.
"Mr. Smith is the right choice to complete these manners in an evenhanded and urgent manner," Attorney General Merrick Garland said upon appointing him, and a friend of his ,Edward J. Loya, Jr., added, "When it comes to investigating allegations of sophisticated federal criminal matters, Jack Smith is the gold standard."  Garland made the appointment with awareness of needing to depoliticize the investigation into Trump because of a possible (likely?) Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. 
Smith must be a good prosecutor, mainly because Trump and his minions are bashing the appointment. Do they have reason to be worried?  Well, here's what Smith himself said:
"I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice. The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgement and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate."
Oh, yeah, they have reason to be worried, all right.