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      ‘Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated’: Chris Whipple on his White House book

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      Interview‘Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated’: Chris Whipple on his White House bookDavid Smith in Washington Fight of His Life author on Kamala Harris’s struggles and growth, Afghanistan, a strong second year … and if Biden will run againThere are those who believe that at 80, Joe Biden is too old to serve a second term as president. Yet few clamour for him to hand over to the person who would normally be the heir apparent.The Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winnerRead moreTwo years in, Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to be vice-president, has had her ups and downs. Her relationship with Biden appears strong and she has found her voice as a defender of abortion rights. But her office has suffered upheaval and her media appearances have failed to impress.Such behind-the-scenes drama is recounted in The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, written by the author, journalist and film-maker Chris Whipple and published this week. Whipple gained access to nearly all of Biden’s inner circle and has produced a readable half-time report on his presidency – a somewhat less crowded field than the literary genre that sprang up around Donald Trump.“In the beginning, Joe Biden liked having Kamala Harris around,” Whipple writes, noting that Biden wanted the vice-president with him for meetings on almost everything. One source observed a “synergy” between them.Harris volunteered to take on the cause of voting rights. But Biden handed her another: tackling the causes of undocumented immigration by negotiating with the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.“But for Harris,” Whipple writes, “the Northern Triangle would prove to be radioactive.”With the distinction between root causes and immediate problems soon lost on the public, Harris got the blame as migrants kept coming.One of her senior advisers tells Whipple the media could not handle a vice-president who was not only female but also Black and south Asian, referring to it as “the Unicorn in a glass box” syndrome. But Harris also suffered self-inflicted wounds. Whipple writes that she “seemed awkward and uncertain … she laughed inappropriately and chopped the air with her hands, which made her seem condescending”.An interview with NBC during a visit to Guatemala and Mexico was a “disaster”, according to one observer. Reports highlighted turmoil and turnover in Harris’s office, some former staff claiming they saw it all before when she was California attorney general and on her presidential campaign. Her approval rating sank to 28%, lower than Dick Cheney’s during the Iraq war.But, Whipple writes, Biden and his team still thought highly of Harris.“Ron Klain [chief of staff] was personally fond of her. He met with the vice-president weekly and encouraged her to do more interviews and raise her profile. Harris was reluctant, wary of making mistakes.“‘This is like baseball,’ Klain told her. ‘You have to accept the fact that sometimes you will strike out. We all strike out. But you can’t score runs if you’re sitting in the dugout.’ Biden’s chief was channeling manager Tom Hanks in the film A League of Their Own. ‘Look, no one here is going to get mad at you. We want you out there!’”Speaking to the Guardian, Whipple, 69, reflects: “It’s a complicated, fascinating relationship between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.“In the early months of the administration they had a real rapport, a real bond. Because of Covid they were thrown together in the White House and spent a lot of time together. He wanted her to be in almost every meeting and valued her input. All of that was and is true.“But when she began to draw fire, particularly over her assignment on the Northern Triangle, things became more complicated. It got back to the president that the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, was complaining around town that her portfolio was too difficult and that in effect it was setting her up for failure. This really annoyed Biden. He felt he hadn’t asked her to do anything he hadn’t done for Barack Obama: he had the Northern Triangle as one of his assignments. She had asked for the voting rights portfolio and he gave it to her. So that caused some friction.”A few months into the presidency, Whipple writes, a close friend asked Biden what he thought of his vice-president. His reply: “A work in progress.” These four words – a less than ringing endorsement – form the title of a chapter in Whipple’s book.But in our interview, Whipple adds: “It’s also true that she grew in terms of her national security prowess. That’s why Biden sent her to the Munich Security Conference on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She spent a lot of time in the meetings with the president’s daily brief and Biden’s given her some important assignments in that respect.”A former producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, Whipple has written books about White House chiefs of staff and directors of the CIA. Each covered more than 100 years of history, whereas writing The Fight of His Life was, he says, like designing a plane in mid-flight and not knowing where to land it. Why did he do it?“How could I not? When you think about it, Joe Biden and his team came into office confronting a once-in-a-century pandemic, crippled economy, global warming, racial injustice, the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol. How could anybody with a political or storytelling bone in his body not want to tell that story? Especially if you could get access to Biden’s inner circle, which I was fortunate in being able to do.”Even so, it wasn’t easy. Whipple describes “one of the most leakproof White Houses in modern history … extremely disciplined and buttoned down”. It could hardly be more different from the everything-everywhere-all-at-once scandals of the Trump administration.What the author found was a tale of two presidencies. There was year one, plagued by inflation, supply chain problems, an arguably premature declaration of victory over the coronavirus and setbacks in Congress over Build Back Better and other legislation. Worst of all was the dismal end of America’s longest war as, after 20 years and $2tn, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.“It was clearly a failure to execute the withdrawal in a safe and orderly way and at the end of the day, as I put it, it was a whole-of-government failure,” Whipple says. “Everybody got almost everything wrong, beginning with the intelligence on how long the Afghan government and armed forces would last and ending with the botched execution of the withdrawal, with too few troops on the ground.”Whipple is quite possibly the first author to interview Klain; the secretary of state, Antony Blinken; the CIA director, Bill Burns; and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, about the Afghanistan debacle.“What became clear was that everybody had a different recollection of the intelligence. While this administration often seems to be pretty much on the same page, I found that there was a lot more drama behind the scenes during the Afghan withdrawal and in some of the immediate aftermath,” he says.The book also captures tension between Leon Panetta, CIA director and defense secretary under Barack Obama, who was critical of the exit strategy – “You just wonder whether people were telling the president what he wanted to hear” – and Klain, who counters that Panetta favoured the war and oversaw the training of the Afghan military, saying: “If this was Biden’s Bay of Pigs, it was Leon’s army that lost the fight.”Whipple comments: “Ron Klain wanted to fire back in this case and it’s remarkable and fascinating to me, given his relationship with Panetta. Obviously his criticism got under Ron Klain’s skin.”Biden’s second year was a different story. “Everything changed on 24 February 2022, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Joe Biden was uniquely qualified to rise to that moment and he did, rallying Nato in defiance of Putin and in defence of Ukraine. Biden had spent his entire career preparing for that moment, with the Senate foreign relations committee and his experience with Putin, and it showed.“Then he went on to pass a string of bipartisan legislative bills from the Chips Act to veterans healthcare, culminating in the Inflation Reduction Act, which I don’t think anybody saw coming.“One thing is for sure: Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated from day one and, at the two-year mark, he proves that he could deliver a lot more than people thought.”Biden looked set to enter his third year with the wind at his back. Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterm elections, inflation is slowing, Biden’s approval rating is on the up and dysfunctional House Republicans struggled to elect a speaker.But political life moves pretty fast. Last week the justice department appointed a special counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents, from Biden’s time as vice-president, at his thinktank in Washington and home in Delaware.Whipple told CBS: “They really need to raise their game here, I think, because this really goes to the heart of Joe Biden’s greatest asset, arguably, which is trust.”The mistake represents a bump in the road to 2024. Biden’s age could be another. He is older than Ronald Reagan was when he completed his second term and if he serves a full second term he will be 86 at the end. Opinion polls suggest many voters feel he is too old for the job. Biden’s allies disagree.Whipple says: “His inner circle is bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.“Bruce Reed [a longtime adviser] told me about flying back on a red-eye from Europe after four summits in a row when everybody had to drag themselves out of the plane and was desperately trying to sleep and the boss came in and told stories for six hours straight all the way back to DC.”During conversations and interviews for the book, did Whipple get the impression Biden will seek re-election?“He’s almost undoubtedly running. Andy Card [chief of staff under George W Bush] said something to me once that rang true: ‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying to you.’“Who was the last president to walk away from the office voluntarily? LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson]. It rarely happens. I don’t think Joe Biden is an exception. He spent his whole career … thinking about running or running for president and he’s got unfinished business. Having the possibility of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee probably makes it more urgent for him. He thinks he can beat him again.”
      The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is published in the US by Scribner
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      Confidential files found with Biden’s Corvette – Politics Weekly America podcast

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      Last week, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel to investigate how several batches of classified documents were reportedly found at locations linked to President Biden.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Ankush Khardori, who worked in the US Department of Justice from 2016 to 2020, about what the outcome to this investigation may be

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’ President gave sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and spoke about the need to protect democracy Joe Biden marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden said he was “humbled” to become the first sitting president to give the Sunday sermon at King’s church, also describing the experience as “intimidating”.“I believe Dr King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention,” Biden said. He later noted he was wearing rosary beads his son, Beau, wore as he died.“I doubt whether any of us would have thought during Dr King’s time that literally the institutional structures of this country might collapse, like we’re seeing in Brazil, we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Biden said.In a sermon that lasted around 25 minutes, the president spoke about the continued need to protect democracy. Unlike some of his other speeches on the topic, Biden did not mention Donald Trump or Republicans directly.The GOP has embraced new voting restrictions, including in Georgia, and defended the former president’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.“Nothing is guaranteed in our democracy,” Biden said. “We know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy.”He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted at a ceremony after she was confirmed it had taken just one generation in her family to go from segregation to the US supreme court.“Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy,” Biden said, quoting King.Biden preached in Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to pass sweeping voting reforms.“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.A Democratic voting rights bill named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, would have made election day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the justice department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference.But that effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster. Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Since then, there has been no federal action on voting rights. In March 2021, Biden issued an executive order telling federal agencies to do what they could do improve opportunities for voter registration.The speech also comes as the US supreme court considers a case that could significantly curtail Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that was one of the crowning achievements of King and other activists. A ruling is expected by June.Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments in office. The task is even steeper now Republicans control the House. In advance of Biden’s visit to Atlanta, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, also said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.This is a delicate moment for Biden. On Thursday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King was co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Like many battleground state Democrats in 2022, Warnock kept his distance from Biden as the the president’s approval rating lagged. But with Biden beginning to turn his attention to an expected 2024 re-election effort, Georgia can expect plenty of attention.Warnock told ABC’s This Week: “I’m honored to present the president of the United States there where he will deliver the message and where he will sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr, Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we are tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together.”In 2020, Biden won Georgia as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up much of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities, citing efforts to encourage states to take equity into account under the $1tn infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.The administration highlights Biden’s work to diversify the judiciary, including his appointment of Jackson as the first Black woman on the supreme court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts – more than under all previous presidents.King fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of his family attended Biden’s sermon. The president planned to be in Washington on Monday, to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast, held on the MLK holiday.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveries

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveriesHouse oversight chair requests Delaware visitor logs as Democrats stress difference from Trump classified records case Republicans pounced on the discovery on Saturday of more classified documents at Joe Biden’s residence, accusing the president of hypocrisy and questioning why the records were not brought to light earlier.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden lawyers have discovered at least 20 classified documents at his residence outside Wilmington, Delaware, and at an office in Washington used after he left the Obama administration, in which he was vice-president.It is not yet clear what exactly the documents are, but Biden lawyers have said they immediately turned over the documents to the National Archives. This week, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel, former US attorney Robert Hur, to look into the matter.The materials are already a political headache for Biden. When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to obtain classified material the former president kept, Biden said: “How could that possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible?”On Sunday, Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, told ABC’s This Week: “It just just reminds me of that old adage, ‘If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones.’ And I think President Biden was caught throwing stones.”James Comer of Kentucky, the new chair of the House oversight committee, told CNN’s State of the Union: “While he was doing this, he knew very well that he himself had possession of classified documents so the hypocrisy here is great.”There is no evidence Biden was aware he had the documents. His lawyers have said they were misplaced.Comer also noted Biden’s attorneys discovered the classified material on 2 November, days before the midterm elections, and questioned why the discovery hadn’t been made public earlier.“Why didn’t we hear about this on 2 November, when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?” he said.Comer has requested visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware residence from January 2021 to the present as well as additional communications about the search for documents, CNN reported.Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Mike Pence in the Trump administration, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “Why’d they hold it? Why didn’t anybody talk about it? Is it because of the midterm elections they didn’t want to interfere with?”Even though two special counsels are looking into how both Trump and Biden handled classified material, there are key differences between the cases.Trump had hundreds of classified files and rebuffed government efforts to return them. The White House has said the 20 or so Biden documents were inadvertently misplaced and turned over as soon as they were discovered.Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, told CNN: “We were delighted to learn that the president’s lawyers, the moment they found out about the documents that day, turned them over to the National Archives, and ultimately to the Department of Justice.“That is a very different posture than what we saw with Donald Trump. He was fighting for a period of more than eight months to not turn over hundreds of missing documents that the archives was asking about.“There are some people who are trying to compare having a government document that should no longer be in your possession to inciting a violent insurrection against the government of the United States,” Raskin added, referring to the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress Trump incited after losing the 2020 election to Biden.“And those are obviously completely different things. That’s apples and oranges.”The California Democrat Adam Schiff, the former chair of the House intelligence committee, praised the appointment of a special counsel in the Biden matter and said he wanted Congress to do its own intelligence assessment of the Biden and Trump materials.But Debbie Stabenow, a Democratic senator from Michigan, acknowledged that the discovery of additional documents on Saturday was “certainly embarrassing” and that Republicans would use it as a distraction.“It’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose,” she told NBC.Biden’s lawyers, she said “don’t think [this] is the right thing and they have been moving to correct it … it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.“But what I’m most concerned about, this is the kind of things that the Republicans love.”TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS national securityRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      The Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner

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      ReviewThe Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner Chris Whipple’s assured account of the president’s first two years in power after beating Trump is fascinating and timely“Maybe we don’t suck as much as people thought.”That was the email the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, sent to Chris Whipple at 1.16am after the 2022 midterms, as it became clear Democrats were likely to hold the Senate and lose far fewer seats in the House than almost every reporter predicted.Whipple’s inside look at Joe Biden’s White House is a ringing confirmation of Klain’s judgment. Though Whipple’s friendships within the Washington press corps prevent him from saying so, this is a book-length rebuke of the incompetence of legions of reporters who have persistently underestimated this extraordinary president.A crucial reason for Democrats’ midterm success was Biden’s instinct to emphasize the importance of reproductive rights and the Republican threat to democracy. Reporters derided him, insisting voters only cared about the price of gas. And yet, as Whipple writes, “exit polls showed that both concern for democracy and a backlash against the supreme court’s Dobbs decision had been winning issues”.How will Biden handle a hostile Republican House and what does it mean for 2024?Read moreThe brilliant and likable Klain began his career clerking for Byron White, John F Kennedy’s only appointee to the supreme court. Klain is the second-most important character in this book, after Biden. He was a great source with many great stories to tell, and Whipple has a special fondness for White House chiefs of staff, the subject of one of his previous volumes.One of many mini-scoops in the book is a description of a Zoom meeting Klain had, a month before Biden’s inauguration, with 18 former chiefs of staff, including George W Bush’s Josh Bolten, who in 2016 tried unsuccessfully to get all former Republican chiefs to declare Donald Trump unfit to be president. Dick Cheney and James Baker refused to do so.At the end of Biden’s first year in office, Klain hailed “the most successful first year of any president ever. We passed more legislation than any president in his first year” – including the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. “We created more jobs than any president in his first year” and – least noted – “we got more federal judges confirmed than any president since Nixon.”Which was all the more astonishing with a 50-50 Senate and a slim House majority. Sixty years ago, to enact Medicare and the rest of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson needed huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.In 2022, long after everyone assumed the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin had killed it, the Build Back Better bill came roaring back to life as the Inflation Reduction Act. To corral Manchin, the administration had to give up on an extension of the child tax credit and throw in a pipeline. But in return there was a $391bn investment in energy and fighting the climate crisis.A big reason Biden struggled in the polls was a decision that required more political courage than anything his three predecessors did: withdrawal from Afghanistan.Biden understood the folly of the war back in 2009, when generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus begged Barack Obama for a troop surge even after Petraeus acknowledged that the Afghan government was a “criminal syndicate”.According to Bob Woodward, then Vice-President Biden went to the heart of the matter: “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?”Woodward reported that Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, was the only other clear-eyed adviser, explaining: “All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads and more troops, the Taliban would make more money.”Obama approved a surge of 40,000 troops anyway.Whipple adopts the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan withdrawal, calling it “a whole-of-government failure” in which “everyone got nearly everything exactly wrong”. He assumes an orderly withdrawal was possible without a reliable Afghan fighting force – an idea for which I have never seen any serious evidence.But unlike other commentators, Whipple at least includes some of the real reasons for the chaos, including a decision driven by Stephen Miller. The leading xenophobe in the Trump White House was determined to destroy the special immigrant visa program, the only way Afghans who worked for the US could come here. In 2020, Trump virtually closed the program, creating a backlog of 17,000 applicants. One of Whipple’s sources described the attitude of the Trump administration this way: it felt America “wasn’t ready to have a lot of hook-nosed, brown-skinned Muslims … coming into this country”.Leon Panetta, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations always quick to jump on CNN to attack his former bosses, compared Biden’s handling of the withdrawal to John F Kennedy’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.To Whipple, Klain shoots back: “Joe Biden didn’t pay a trillion dollars to these people to be trained to be the army. He wasn’t out there saying for years, as Leon was, that we had built a viable fighting force. Leon favored the war. Leon oversaw the training of the Afghan army … if this was Biden’s Bay of Pigs, it was Leon’s army that lost the fight.”Trump’s political fate may have been decided – by a Georgia grand juryRead moreWhipple makes one other point about Afghanistan. “As an operational success,” the evacuation “ranked with the Berlin airlift.” In 17 days and 387 sorties, the US evacuated 124,000 people.One of the largest sections of Whipple’s book describes Biden’s prescience about Vladimir Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, and the extraordinary efforts the Biden administration has made to unite Nato and send weapons to Kyiv.Even Panetta was impressed.“This war in Ukraine has really strengthened Joe Biden’s image as a world leader,” he said. “His confrontation with Putin is going to determine what the hell his legacy is going to be as president. I think it’s that big a deal.”
      The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is published in the US by Scribner
      TopicsBooksJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpreviewsReuse this content More

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      Biden under scrutiny as second batch of classified documents reportedly found

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      Biden under scrutiny as second batch of classified documents reportedly foundAnother set of materials discovered at a separate location, as White House addresses first discovery at Biden’s institute Joe Biden was facing fresh scrutiny over his handling of government secrets on Wednesday after a second batch of classified materials was reportedly found at a location linked to him.The White House was already on the defensive after revelations that classified documents were discovered last November in an office used by Biden after he served as US vice-president. On Tuesday he said he was “surprised to learn” of their existence.Then came a report from the NBC News network, followed by other media outlets, that said the president’s aides had found another set of classified documents at a separate location. The classification level, number and precise location of the material was not immediately clear, NBC News added.In the case of the classified documents, it’s more serious for Trump than BidenRead moreThe allegation handed fresh ammunition to Republicans seeking to draw a false equivalence with a justice department investigation into former president Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator for Missouri and ardent Trump defender, responded to the disclosure by tweeting: “Special counsel”.Biden maintained an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a thinktank in Washington, after he left the vice-presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign. It was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and continued to operate independently of the Biden administration.Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, has said “a small number of documents with classified markings” were discovered on 2 November 2022 in a locked closet at the centre as Biden’s personal lawyers were clearing out the offices. According to Sauber, the lawyers immediately alerted the White House counsel’s office, which notified the National Archives, which took custody of the documents the next day.But it remains unclear why the administration waited more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the records and what exactly they contain. Trump weighed in on his social media site, demanding: “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?”At a press conference in Mexico on Tuesday, Biden said he takes classified documents “seriously” and his team acted appropriately by quickly turning the documents over. “They did what they should have done. They immediately called the Archives.”But a day later his spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, faced tough questioning from a White House press corps starved of scandal since the end of the Trump presidency. She declined to say how the documents came to be at the office or when Biden was informed of their existence or provide assurances that other materials would not come to light.“I know you all are going to have a lot of questions on this but at this time I’m not going to go beyond what the president said yesterday,” Jean-Pierre said. “I’m not going to go beyond what my colleagues from the White House counsel shared with many of you as well on Monday. I want to be prudent here and make sure that my colleagues really truly handle this issue.”Asked why it had taken so long for the existence of the document to be disclosed, she replied: “This is under review by the Department of Justice.”There was an unusually acrimonious exchange with Ed O’Keefe, senior White House correspondent of CBS News, who pointed out that Biden had started his tenure by acknowledging that he would make mistakes and be transparent about them. Jean-Pierre retorted: “We don’t need to have this kind of confrontation. Ask your question.”Attorney general Merrick Garland has reportedly asked US attorney for the northern district of Illinois John Lausch – one of the few US attorneys to be held over from Trump’s administration – to review the matter after the Archives referred the issue to the department.The situation contrasts sharply with that of Trump, who had around 300 documents with classification markings, including some that were recovered in an FBI search after his lawyers provided a sworn certification that all government records had been returned.In November Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption cases, to lead investigations into Trump’s retention of classified documents, as well as key aspects of a separate investigation regarding the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.But such distinctions are likely to be lost for many voters, especially as Republicans and rightwing media capitalise on the apparent misstep and accuse the justice department of double standards. Reports of a second batch of documents are likely to add fuel to the fire.Congressman Jim Jordan, chair of the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee, said the American public deserved to know earlier about the revelation of Biden’s classified documents.“They knew about this a week before the election, maybe the American people should have known that,” he told reporters. “They certainly knew about the the raid on Mar-a-Lago 91 days before this election, but nice if on November 2, the country would have known that there were classified documents at the Biden Center.”Congressman Mike Turner of the House intelligence committee has requested that the US intelligence community conduct a “damage assessment” of the documents found at the Penn Center.The White House did not respond to a request for comment.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      I survived Guantánamo. Why is it still open 21 years later? | Mansoor Adayfi

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      I survived Guantánamo. Why is it still open 21 years later?Mansoor AdayfiA generation was born and came of age since the prison opened. Four US presidents have served. Yet 35 men remain there The US prison at Guantánamo Bay opened 21 years ago this Wednesday. For 21 years, the extrajudicial detention facility has held a total of 779 men between eight known camps. In two decades, Guantánamo grew from a small, makeshift camp of chainlink cages into a maximum-security facility of cement bunker-like structures that costs close to $540m a year to operate.Twenty-one years is a long time – a generation was born and came of age in that time. Four American presidents have served. The World Trade Center was rebuilt.During that time, the US military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies experimented with torture and other human rights violations. Soldiers and even leaders committed war crimes. The US Congress researched, wrote and released a report documenting torture, abuse and inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and at black sites around the world, while also making it impossible to close Guantánamo.Of those 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo, we know that nine died there; 706 have been released or transferred out; 20 have been recommended for transfer but remain there; 12 have been charged with crimes; two have been convicted; and three will be held in indefinite law-of-war detention until someone demands their release.I was 19 when I was sent to Guantánamo, I arrived on 9 February 2002, blindfolded, hooded, shackled, beaten. When soldiers removed my hood, all I saw were cages filled with orange figures. I had been tortured. I was lost and afraid and confused. I didn’t know where I was or why I had been taken there. I didn’t know how long I would be imprisoned or what would happen to me. No one knew where I was. I was given a number and became suspended between life and death.I didn’t know a lot about America. I knew it was supposed to be a land of laws and opportunity. Everyone wanted to live there. We all believed our detention would be short. We hadn’t done anything. They couldn’t keep us long without someone caring. I never could have imagined that I would spend eight years in solitary confinement, that I would be held for 15 years and released without ever being charged with a crime.I turned 40 recently, and even though I am a grown man I still feel like the 19-year-old who first arrived at Guantánamo. In one sense, I came of age there – learning how to protest my detention, how to use my body to hunger strike, how to resist. I think about my time there a lot. While my childhood friends went to university, married, got jobs and began their lives, I fought prison guards who harassed me while I tried to pray.In Guantánamo’s early days, when it was just an undeveloped prison, a baby really, we all had questions: when would we be released? Why were interrogations getting worse? Why didn’t anyone believe what we told them? But we weren’t the only ones with questions. Young guards wanted to know what they were doing there, who we were, and why some leaders said we were the “worst of the worst” terrorists while other leaders called us nobodies or dirt farmers.I think Guantánamo itself had the same questions. I think Guantánamo wanted to know what kind of place it would become, how long it would be used, if it would be useful.We all waited for those answers, year after year, as we grew older. I grew a beard and my hair turned gray. Guantánamo rusted, peeled, decayed; Camp X-Ray, the first camp, became overgrown with weeds and grass. Guards rotated out and so did camp leaders. Guards who were kind to us were often demoted or punished or left Guantánamo confused about the conflict between their official duty and what they knew was right and wrong. General Miller, the architect of what the US calls “enhanced interrogation” and everyone else calls torture, went to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. Some prisoners were released. Some – like Yassir (21 years old), Ali (26), and Mani (30) – died violently and mysteriously in custody.The years passed like chapters in a book, and with each new chapter we thought our questions would be answered or at least that the chapters would change. There were new beginnings and new phases, but the story remained the same: interrogations continued. So did our inhumane treatment and religious harassment.Each chapter grew darker as we lost touch with the stories of our lives before Guantánamo. When we were taken to Guantánamo, we were fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands; we had families, dreams, and lives in the outside world. But at Guantánamo we were just numbers, animals in cages, totally cut off from the world we knew; we were caught in an endless loop of interrogations trying to get us to admit that we were al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters. We lived Guantánamo’s lawlessness and abuses, we watched Guantánamo grow and evolve, while our story remained stuck.We became Guantánamo and so did our stories. We resisted and protested our arbitrary and indefinite detention, we fought and went on hunger strikes to make the world hear us, see our suffering, and know our humanity. We also had moments of happiness, creativity, and brotherhood. We sang, danced, joked and laughed. We created art. We became brothers and friends, even with some of the guards and camp staff who treated us like we were human. We gradually lost touch with our old selves until Guantánamo became our life, our world, our only story.As Guantánamo grew older, stronger, and more permanent, we grew older, too, but weaker, more fragile, still bound within its cages. We heard that some people around the world protested our imprisonment and our torture and campaigned to close Guantánamo. That gave us hope and made us feel that we had not been forgotten. But others, like politicians outside of Guantánamo, learned to use the prison to create their own false stories – stories that feasted on us to create fear. They kept Guantánamo open.Toward the end of my time, Guantánamo had grown, in some respects, more mature and more open. We had changed too; we had reconnected with the outside world. We tried to reclaim those parts of ourselves that had been taken away and lost. I took classes and created art. I learned English and wrote stories about Guantánamo. After 15 years, I worried that I wouldn’t survive in the world once I left. I had grown up there and become a man. Guantánamo is what I knew. It’s where my friends were.I thought that by leaving, I would finally be able to write new chapters, ones that changed and had a good ending. I would end the story the way I wanted to: Guantánamo would become just a memory; I would move on, go to school, get married, start my life. But the prison didn’t want to let go. It surprised me with a new story.Like me, hundreds of men have been released from Guantánamo. Some went home to their countries and to their families. Many were sent to places they don’t know – Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Slovakia. I was sent to Serbia, where I didn’t have friends or family and didn’t speak the language. We have tried to create our own stories in these new places, ones without Guantánamo. But Guantánamo won’t let us go. We live with the stigma of having been held there.Thirty-five men remain there. President Biden has quietly worked to wind down the prison camp, but without cooperation from the US Congress, Guantánamo will remain open.For years now, former prisoners, activists, lawyers and journalists have been working to write Guantánamo’s final chapter, one that ends with justice, accountability, reconciliation, and the closure of the prison. Let’s make that happen, so that in one year, we can write a new story about life after Guantánamo.
      Mansoor Adayfi is an artist, advocate, and former Guantánamo prisoner, released in 2016 after being detained without charge or trial for more than 15 years. He is the author of the memoir Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo
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      Biden is throwing migrants under the bus to appease Republican fearmongering | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Biden is throwing migrants under the bus to appease Republican fearmongeringMoustafa BayoumiThe Biden administration criticizes conservatives as anti-immigrant – yet pursues policies not so different from Trump’s Imagine for a moment you are a dissident citizen of Nicaragua. Forced out of bed in the middle of the night and hounded out of your homeland because of your political activities, you have been deprived of all chances to work, let alone live, in the country you’ve always called home. Your opposition to Daniel Ortega’s regime has put your life and your family’s lives in danger. You must find safety immediately.You know that, despite its long history of meddling in your country, the United States also has laws and traditions that enable people in your position to seek asylum. It may be far away, but the US is also the closest country where you believe you can truly feel safe. You must find a way there – any way at all – and it has to be quick.Biden visits border for first time as critics condemn his migrant crackdownRead moreNow, according to new rules just announced by the Biden administration, up to 30,000 Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians may soon be able to apply for “humanitarian parole” to the US, expanding a program that had previously been directed solely at Venezuelans. What a relief! you might think, until you discover more about the proposed program, which requires: a valid passport, a plane ticket, the ability and permission to travel to the US by plane, a US-based sponsor, a cell phone that can download a specific app that requires two-factor authentication, and a host of other requirements.This is a program obviously designed to favor those with means and pre-established connections in the US, and it’s hard to imagine it as anything but meaningless for those forced to flee for their lives without money or planning. As Human Rights Watch explains, Biden’s proposed program is “contrary to international refugee law and international human rights law which prohibits discrimination in accessing asylum, including based on financial means”. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has also stated that the new measures are “not in line with international standards”.Yet this problematic humanitarian parole provision is in fact the proverbial carrot of Biden’s proposed border program. The dreaded stick, found in how the administration now plans on processing asylum claims made at the border, is much worse. The opportunity to have your asylum claim heard if you’re a citizen from one of these four countries – all countries with deep legacies of American political interference, it should be pointed out – will now be severely curtailed, according to the proposed rules.For one thing, the administration will require these asylum seekers to request refuge in the first country they cross into, similar to Trump-era “transit ban” policies which led to widespread human rights abuses in countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador.If these asylum seekers somehow make it to the US’s southern border, they must claim asylum at an official port of entry at a previously scheduled time, even though, per US law, “you may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status”, as the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website states. Those who try to cross the border would also be subject to “expedited removal”, with Mexico accepting 30,000 of them each month, and be subject to a five-year ban from re-entry to the US.The plan also expands the Biden administration’s use of Title 42, a rarely used clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law that allows the government to take emergency action “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries.” Through their own anti-immigrant hocus-pocus, the Trump administration conjured Title 42 as a quick and easy way to deport people at the US’s southern border.Though Biden, as recently as last Thursday, has said that he doesn’t “like Title 42,” his administration continues to use the code to prevent people from entering the US. Since March 2020, almost 2.5 million people have been expelled, most of them during the Biden administration. And the new rules will translate into many more expulsions for asylum seekers from these four countries.Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey got it right. “The Biden administration’s decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump Administration’s racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border,” he said in a statement. “Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.”What’s going on here? There’s no question that the current situation presents all kinds of challenges at the border. The US government recorded almost 2.4m encounters with migrants at the border last fiscal year, a record number. Extreme climate events, political corruption, and economic instability all play a role, and the US shares some responsibility in all those arenas. But it’s also clear that Biden feels compelled to get in front of the border issue ahead of Republican fearmongering (hence his visit Sunday to the border).“Immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on,” the president said. “But now they have a choice: They can keep using immigration to try to score political points or they can help solve the problem.”But, in this terrible move rightward on the issue of border enforcement, Biden has proposed solutions that seem devised more to quell Republican objections (which, let’s face it, can never be mollified) rather than to take humanitarian and legal concerns to heart and turn them into workable policy. The proposed changes are also certain to bring greater chaos, confusion, and misery to the border.I’m all in favor of foregrounding Republican obstructionism when necessary, and Republicans halted Biden’s proposed comprehensive immigration reforms from the moment they were announced, almost two years ago. But Biden can’t accuse his Republican opponents of exploiting immigration and then turn around and lean on their misbegotten policies. Not only is that playing politics with people’s lives, but it’s also playing with fire. If Biden’s proposed rule changes go through, we should worry for all those – Biden included – who are about to get burned.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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