Joe Biden

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      US turns back growing number of undocumented people after arduous sea journeys

      by

      US turns back growing number of undocumented people after arduous sea journeysBiden shifts toward political center as likely presidential rival Ron DeSantis calls out national guard Authorities in Florida have been turning back growing numbers of undocumented Cubans and Haitians arriving by sea in recent weeks as more attempt to seek haven in the US.Local US residents on jet skis have been helping some of the migrants who attempted to swim ashore after making arduous, life-threateningand days-long journeys in makeshift vessels.Joe Biden’s turn to the center over immigration comes as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, attempts to plot his own strategy for handling a sensitive situation in the south of his state, calling out national guard troops in a hardline approach.Last Thursday, the US Coast Guard returned another 177 Cuban migrants to their island nation, while scores of Haitians who swam ashore in Miami were taken into custody by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).As the Cuban exodus continues, Biden adjusts immigration policyRead moreThe coastguard says that since 1 October, it has intercepted and returned more than 4,900 Cubans at sea, compared with about 6,100 in the 12 months to 30 September.DeSantis, seen as a likely contender for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has taken swipes at the White House for what he claims are Biden’s “lawless” immigration policies and perceived open borders.The Biden administration has hit back, accusing DeSantis of “making a mockery” of the immigration system by staging his own series of political stunts, including an episode last year in which he sent a planeload of mostly Venezuelan migrants to Massachusetts, flying them from Texas at Florida taxpayers’ expense.The governor is under criminal investigation in Texas and defending a separate lawsuit over the flight, and another to Biden’s home state of Delaware that was canceled, which reports said involved covert operatives linked to DeSantis recruiting migrants at a San Antonio motel with false promises of housing and jobs.In the latest incidents of migrants attempting to land in south Florida, the TV station WPLG spotted city of Miami marine patrol jet skis rescuing at least two people found swimming in the ocean, and a CBP spokesperson, Michael Selva, said beachgoers on Virginia Key had helped others ashore on Thursday using small boats and jet skis.Two days earlier, another group of about 25 people made landfall near Fort Lauderdale. Authorities arrested 12, while others ran away.Increasing numbers of people are risking their lives to reach the US despite stricter policies from the Biden administration intended to deter irregular immigration and increase humanitarian visa numbers for Cubans, and others, to enter legally – but with a high bar to entry unattainable to many of the thousands fleeing existential threats including extreme violence, political oppression, severe poverty and hardships exacerbated by the climate crisis or failed states.Biden has responded to conservative voices inside the Democratic party and Republicans calling for a tougher stance. But critics say the president’s new “carrot and stick” approach, cracking down on undocumented immigration while appearing to offer an olive branch of more visas, presents obstacles that most migrants would struggle to overcome.Biden’s ‘carrot and stick’ approach to deter migrants met with angerRead moreThe White House says up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be admitted to the US, but only if they apply online, can pay their own airfare and find a financial sponsor.Writing in the Guardian last week, Moustafa Bayoumi, immigration author and professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, said Biden was “throwing migrants under the bus”.“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,” he said.DeSantis, seeking to build political capital from a president many expect him to challenge for the White House in 2024, accused Biden of under-resourcing the federal response to the Florida arrivals and placing a burden on local law enforcement.Meanwhile, the impact of the recent increase in migrant landing attempts continues to be felt in south Florida. The Dry Tortugas national park, off the Florida Keys, has only just reopened after being turned into a makeshift processing center for hundreds of people earlier this month.TopicsUS immigrationFloridaJoe BidenRon DeSantisUS politicsMigrationnewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      Are the Hunger Wars About to Begin in the US?

      by

      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveries

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 263 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopes | Observer editorial

      by

      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopesObserver editorialMore harmful than the alleged misplacement of classified documents will be a further erosion of trust in US politics It is almost a Washington tradition that, sooner or later, a sitting president will face investigation by a federal special counsel or special prosecutor – the terms are interchangeable. In recent history, only Barack Obama has escaped this fate and that was not for lack of opponents accusing him of nefarious misdeeds.Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn and wolves are once again baying at the door of the Oval Office.At first glance, last week’s revelations that old, possibly outdated classified documents had been found at a thinktank where Biden worked after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017, and in a garage at his home in Delaware, may not seem such a big deal. But such a view fails to understand the way Washington works. Significant or not, the find has given the flailing Republican party a stick with which to beat the president and it has seized it with grateful alacrity.A clutch of GOP-controlled committees in Congress has already launched a series of investigations, in addition to the independent special counsel inquiry ordered by Biden’s attorney-general, Merrick Garland. They want to know whether national security was compromised; whether Biden’s son Hunter – a longtime Republican target – had access to the files; and why the White House failed to admit their existence until forced to do so by a CBS TV scoop.Crucially, Biden’s opponents are posing the classic Watergate questions: what did the president know, when did he know it and was there a cover-up? It’s a sad fact that whatever Biden says now or in the course of what are likely to be wearying, attritional months of testimony and hearings, many Americans will not believe him. The distrust that infects and distorts US politics can only be expected to deepen.The distraction of attention from Biden’s agenda and achievements is one of many prospective negatives for the president. Another is the unfair, potentially disastrous conflation of his alleged wrongdoing with the ostensibly much more serious case of his predecessor. Donald Trump is accused of secreting hundreds of contemporary classified papers at his Florida home and refusing to hand them over.Biden previously accused Trump of “irresponsible” behaviour, words that are now being thrown back in his face. Suggestions that the misplacing of the documents was a mere oversight or act of forgetfulness play into the hurtful Republican narrative of a senile, incompetent 80-year-old president.Biden did not help himself by joking that his garage was a secure space because he keeps his classic Corvette car there. If the word “Corvette-gate” has not already entered the lexicon, it soon will.The extent of the damage to Biden and the Democrats will depend in part on whether Trump, the Republicans and their Fox News boosters succeed in sustaining and widening the scandal. They will propagate lies, disinformation and conspiracy theories.The White House will try to play down the affair. Yet if, for example, the special counsel discovers the documents – reportedly relating to Ukraine, Iran and the UK – are not merely historical but contain current, sensitive or embarrassing secrets, Biden could be in deep water, politically and legally.It’s almost exactly two years since Biden took office. After a rough start, his fortunes have steadily improved. Inflation is sharply down, Covid is mostly over (unlike in China), Russia is losing in Ukraine, Democrats did better than expected in the midterm elections and Maga Trump-ism continues to divide House Republicans. An announcement of a Biden run for a second term had been expected soon. All these gains suddenly appear in jeopardy and all because of a few dusty boxes of files.TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenRepublicansDonald TrumpeditorialsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald Trump

      by

      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpBiden’s retention of classified papers is different from the Mar-a-Lago case, but it is a big setback for his administration The discovery of government secrets at two locations associated with Joe Biden appears to have produced one big political winner: Donald Trump.The White House was in rare crisis mode last week as it emerged that lawyers for Biden had found classified material at his thinktank in Washington DC and home in Delaware. At an unusually contentious press briefing, one TV correspondent dubbed the affair “garage-gate”.The justice department appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as vice-president. It was a rare setback for an administration that promised to be transparent and scandal-free. It also complicated an investigation into Trump over an ostensibly similar matter.‘It’s going to be dirty’: Republicans gear up for attack on Hunter BidenRead moreAnother special counsel is already examining the ex-president’s retention of top secret papers at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate and club. Although the situations are very different, the nuances and subtleties are likely to be lost in the court of public opinion.“This may be pure sloppiness on Biden’s part or the Biden team’s part but it doesn’t matter,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “In the public mind, now they will say, ‘Well, a pox on both your houses. You’re both guilty. Shame on you both.’ It’s over.”The issue could become a continuing political headache for Biden, Sabato added. “It’s just a real distraction. It was totally unnecessary. Every White House makes mistakes and this is a big one they made.”Despite superficial similarities, the two cases are like chalk and cheese. In January last year the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s home, telling justice department officials they contained “a lot” of classified material.In August, after prolonged resistance from Trump’s associates to requests and even a justice department subpoena, FBI agents took about 33 boxes and containers of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office. The FBI warrant showed it was investigating crimes including the wilful retention of national defence information and efforts to obstruct a federal investigation.The Biden papers are far less voluminous. First it emerged that a “small number” with classified markings had been found in November in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center thinktank in Washington.Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Mexico City, the president claimed that he was surprised when he was informed about them. His lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately alerted the National Archives, he said. “I don’t know what’s in the documents.”Then came news that a second batch of classified documents had been discovered in the garage at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and one additional classified page was found in his personal library there. Again, his lawyers informed the archives.Biden’s offence is seen by analysts as significantly less grave than his predecessor’s. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, said: “Given what we know now, it seems that there is a difference in kind, rather than degree, between Trump’s case and Biden’s case.Classified documents: how do the Trump and Biden cases differ?Read more“For example, quantitatively and qualitatively, Trump’s cavalier and even intentional misconduct regarding the documents, especially those related to national security, appears substantially more egregious than Biden’s apparent neglectful behaviour in not safeguarding certain documents.”Even so, the White House refused to disclose the content and exact number of the Biden records, how they arrived at his thinktank and home , why they stayed there and why the administration waited more than two months to acknowledge their discovery.The questions deepened on Saturday when the White House lawyer Richard Sauber revealed that a total of six pages of classified documents had been found in Biden’s personal library in Wilmington; the administration had previously said only a single page came to light there and insisted that the search was “complete”.White House reporters, who have endured lean times since the wildly norm-busting Trump presidency, have seized on the day-by-day revelations like hungry lions. In the kind of confrontation seldom seen over the past two years, Peter Doocy of the conservative Fox News network asked Biden bluntly: “Classified material next to your Corvette: what were you thinking?”The president replied: “I’m going to get a chance to speak on all this, God willing, soon, but as I said earlier this week, people – and, by the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So, it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.”Merrick Garland, the attorney general, selected Robert Hur, a Trump-appointed former US attorney, to investigate the matter. Many legal commentators suggested that a special counsel would not normally have been warranted but the move reflected Garland’s sensitivity to the unique political dynamics.Trump himself seized on the news, seeking to use it to undermine the investigation into his actions. “It’s over,” he told conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. “When all of these documents started coming out and Biden had them, it really changed the complexion and the intensity that they were showing to me because, you know, what they did is – I don’t say far worse, I did nothing wrong – what they did is not good. What they did is bad.”In reality, the twist is unlikely to affect the justice department’s decision making with regard to charging Trump. But it could make a criminal case a harder sell to voters, fuelling the scepticism of congressional Republicans and others who have doubted the basis for a viable prosecution.Jay Town, who served as US attorney in the northern district of Alabama during the Trump administration, told the Associated Press: “I don’t think that it impacts Trump’s legal calculus at all, but it certainly does impact the political narrative going forward. To the extent that the political narrative is a consideration, it does make it harder to bring charges against former President Trump as it relates to the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago.”Joe Biden may have broken the Espionage Act. It’s so broad that you may have, too | Trevor TimmRead moreThe drama is unfolding just after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives eager to target the federal government with accusations of politically motivated prosecutions. On Friday, Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, announced an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, particularly what the justice department knew about the matter.Republicans are also well practised in the political art of false equivalence and “whataboutism”. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia were effectively neutralised by a controversy over rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server.The week’s events dealt an unexpected blow to Biden as approval ratings were rising, inflation was slowing and Republicans had just endured a chaotic election for House speaker. They also threw a lifeline to Trump, whose 2024 presidential election campaign made a wretched start. But he still faces myriad investigations into his business affairs and his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.TopicsJoe BidenThe ObserverDonald TrumpRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden lawyers found more classified documents at his home than was known

      by

      Biden lawyers found more classified documents at his home than was knownWhite House acknowledges six pages of classified documents had been found in a search of private library Lawyers for Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged on Saturday.The White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page had been found there.The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice-president.Sauber said in a statement on Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, had stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material on Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice (DoJ).“While I was transferring it to the DoJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DoJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake”.Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of classified documents. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office.The latest development appears to bring the total number of documents marked classified and found at Biden’s home and former office to at least 20.The trove is understood to include material categorized as top secret, among approximately 10 documents discovered at the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center for Diplomacy, a thinktank in the capital named after him, a federal law enforcement official familiar with the investigation into the discoveries told CBS News on Saturday.The latest revelations prompted Andrew Weissmann, former federal prosecutor and senior member of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that investigated Donald Trump’s links with Moscow during his 2016 presidential election campaign, to tweet: “This may explain why the WH [White House] has not been transparent with the public about exactly what docs were found.”He did not elaborate but, like other analysis, previously had drawn a clear distinction between the situation with documents retained from Biden’s time and Donald Trump’s hoarding of boxes of secret documents from his presidency, despite federal requests for all material to be returned, which prompted the FBI to raid his Florida residence last summer.In the case of the classified documents, it’s more serious for Trump than BidenRead moreBiden’s legal team voluntarily turned the documents found over to federal officials after they were discovered last November.“Let’s remember that what we are (correctly) asking the current WH to do – be as transparent as possible about what happened and when – is something Trump has not done at all, to this day, with respect to the MAL [Mar-a-Lago] docs, other than put out a series of lies,” Weissman tweeted on Thursday.Trump and Biden are now both under investigation by separate special counsels at the request of the Department of Justice. House Republicans, now in control of the lower chamber of Congress, on Friday announced an investigation of Biden by the judiciary committee.The current White House explanation for Biden’s situation, offered by Sauber, is that the special counsel’s inquiry “will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced” – a “mistake” with the nation’s secrets, after the former vice-president’s office was hastily packed up at the end of the Obama administration, just before Trump took office.Richard Painter, the top ethics official in the George W Bush administration, called such behavior “incredibly careless and really quite shocking” but emphasized that Biden probably would avoid the criminal issues looming over Trump because there is so far no sense that Biden intentionally mishandled classified records.“You never just pack stuff up and cart it out of there,” Painter said. Aides and lawyers are supposed to carefully sift through what are official records that are property of the National Archives and personal records that may be removed.“To say nothing of classified documents which have these distinctive markings on them. It’s a serious national security breach,” he added.Later on Saturday afternoon, Weissmann retweeted a sarcastic post from George Conway, founder of the anti-Trump Republican group the Lincoln Project and married to the former Trump senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, drawing contrast between Trump’s and Biden’s cases.“What a crazy approach, looking for documents and immediately turning them over to the government. Why not instead declassify the documents in your head and spend the next year stonewalling, lying and obstructing justice? Weak. Sad,” tweeted Conway, who was quote-tweeting a post with the Biden White House statement, and mocking Trump’s prior claims that he had declassified material later found at Mar-a-Lago “by thinking about it”.What a crazy approach, looking for documents and immediately turning them over to the government. Why not instead declassify the documents in your head and spend the next year stonewalling, lying and obstructing justice?Weak. Sad. https://t.co/40D5jPsV84— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) January 14, 2023
      TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More