This is Yuge!
Here is JUST THE NEWS article on this:
Just weeks after learning Joe Biden had improperly retained government documents, his administration began working with federal bureaucrats in spring and fall 2021 to increase pressure on Donald Trump for similar issues and eventually prompt a criminal prosecution of the 45th president, according to government memos newly unsealed by a federal judge.
The correspondence, released this week by U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida, provide the the most extensive accounting so far of how the Biden White House worked with federal bureaucrats to escalate pressure on Trump to return documents to the National Archives even as it slow-walked similar issues involving its own boss.
One email dated May 5, 2021, shows the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had already consulted the Biden White House about missing Trump records, more than a year before the public would learn that the former president president had kept some classified memos.
“I have had several conversations with [Person 40] since the end of the Trump Administration about various paper records that he believes were not transferred to us,” NARA General Counsel Gary Stern wrote to his colleagues in one May email.
“Person 40” was not identified by name in the document but was listed as working for the Biden White House in the Records Management Office, according to a motion filed by Trump’s lawyers in the case, which was previously redacted.
On August 30, 2021, NARA Archivist David Ferriero began to press Trump records representatives more explicitly about the documents, vowing to make referrals to “the Hill, DOJ, and the White House” if the documents had been destroyed or where not turned over soon.
“As you have seen in the press, the House has requested records,” Ferriero writes in one email chain. “Our ability to respond requires access to the 24 boxes which have yet to be accounted for. At this point, I am assuming that they have been destroyed. In which case, I am obligated to report it to the Hill, DOJ, and the White House.”
By September 2021, Stern had decided to draft a criminal referral against Trump to the Justice Department after documents were still not returned, according to an FBI interview summary with a NARA employee, identified as “Person 53” in the court documents.
“Stern approached [Per. 53] to formally draft a letter to DOJ raising concerns about PRA materials from the TRUMP administration which remained unaccounted for by NARA,” the FBI memo stated.
In his interview with the FBI, Person 53 noted in his “years of experience,” he “understood NARA never had to make such a referral to DOJ…to accomplish such an ask.”
When he circulated the draft letter internally, Stern told colleagues he had been in contact with “DOJ counsel” about the matter and was continuing to communicate with the White House Counsel’s Office, showing the Biden administration was in the loop about the efforts to repossess Trump’s documents.
“In addition, [White House] Counsel is now also aware of the issue, and has asked that I keep them in the loop to the extent that we make any reference to the White House Office of Records Management,” Stern wrote in the email.
While NARA and the White House were engaging DOJ on Trump, Biden aides were trying to figure out what to do with memos Biden kept at his University of Pennsylvania Biden Center office in Washington, some which turned out to be classified.
In March 2021, Annie Tomasini, an assistant to Biden, traveled to the Penn Biden Center to take inventory of documents, according to a House Oversight Committee letter. The Biden White House previously claimed that classified documents were “unexpected[ly] disover[ed]” on November 2, 2022, more than a year after Tomasini’s first visit to the center.
[….]
The new documents provide fresh contrasts in how the Biden administration dealt differently with the discovery of improperly-retained documents by the president and his political rival, Trump.
Sen. Ron Johnson, the top Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show on Tuesday night that the new memos confirm Trump and Biden were treated differently by federal bureaucrats.
Trump was eventually indicted, while Biden escaped criminal charges in part because prosecutors believed he’d be viewed as old and forgetful by a jury. “It’s just another outrageous example of the dual system of justice and just the partisan nature within these agencies,” Johnson said.
“President Biden gets let off scot free because I guess it’s because he’s senile. …. President Trump is being prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because he’s Donald Trump,” the Wisconsin senator said.
The court documents make clear that NARA collaborated and shared periodic updates with both Biden White House officials and Department of Justice officials throughout 2021 and 2022 as their efforts to retrieve classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property progressed.
By late January 2022, Stern “consulted” with Deputy White House Counsel, Jonathan Su, who referred the NARA officials directly to the Department of Justice, specifically Associate Deputy Attorneys General Emily Loeb and David Newman.
According to the FBI interview memo, Newman told NARA to refer the matter to both the Archives Inspector General office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Eventually, the NARA Inspector General would send the referral back to the DOJ, to the Public Integrity Section, according to the court documents.
The case against the former president was ultimately born from this referral. ….
Julie Kelly’s back with more Trump trial news! A former tabloid executive Daniel Pecker testified today in court in Trump’s NYC case, while the classified documents case in Florida continues to unfold. New details emerge from that case show that the DOJ and other federal agents were heavily involved in the procurement and prosecution of Trump.
Here are the redated documents compared from Julie Kelly’s TWIX (you can link to her TWIXter to see more of the below previously redacted compared to the newer unredacted documents):
NEW: Thanks to order by Judge Cannon, key evidence related to classified docs case is now unredacted.
On the left: What DOJ/Jack Smith wanted to conceal.
On the right: Now we know why. More proof of collaboration btw Biden White House and NARA to concoct a case. pic.twitter.com/YVHVmAfOai
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 22, 2024
WHITE HOUSE ALSO COLLUDED w/PRESS…
the “FREE PRESS” – LOL
Fox News contributor Joe Concha weighs in after a Politico report revealed anti-Trump legal pundits hold off-the-record Zoom calls to discuss the former president’s legal battles.
All the Lefties and #NeverTrumpers were present according to POLITICO:
….The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work and learn about what to look for at the hearings.
The group’s gathering was not a one-time event, but in fact an installment in an exclusive weekly digital salon, whose existence has not been previously reported, for prominent legal analysts and progressive and conservative anti-Trump lawyers and pundits. Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.
The meetings are off the record — a chance for the group’s members, many of whom are formally or loosely affiliated with different media outlets, to grapple with a seemingly endless array of novel legal issues before they hit the airwaves or take to print or digital outlets to weigh in with their thoughts. About a dozen or more people join any given call, though no one takes attendance. Some group members wouldn’t describe themselves with any partisan or ideological lean, but most are united by their dislike of Trump.
The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment.
The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.
Sometimes there is a special guest, like the Jan. 6 committee staffers (who recalled briefing the group). One Friday last May, after E. Jean Carroll defeated Trump in the first of her two defamation cases to go to trial, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan joined as a guest to talk for roughly half an hour about her strategy for beating Trump in court. Another time, J. Michael Luttig, a conservative legal scholar and former judge who helped lead the public campaign to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment, showed up to make his case.
The existence of the call isn’t necessarily surprising: There’s a long history of commentators, journalists and newsmakers discussing current events in off-the-record settings, and similar groups gather regularly today in Washington. The concept has spurred controversy at times — including when news broke during the Obama administration that hundreds of left-leaning writers, commentators and academics had been convening in an off-the-record listserv known as JournoList. (Conservatives complained; journalists offered awkward defenses; the list was eventually shuttered.) But a group of legal analysts and political commentators who are largely up front about their anti-Trump leanings sharing opinions and theories off the record isn’t the same as a bunch of journalists who profess to be non-partisan.
There is also something very 2024 about this group: It’s the perfect emblem of today’s Trump-media-legal-industrial complex……..
JournoList:
The publisher of BigGovernment.com criticizes the liberal-leaning listserv at a tea-party rally in Philadelphia. (Recorded July 31, 2010)
- Listserve that allowed some 400 liberal and leftist journalists, academics, and political activists to brainstorm and collaborate among themselves between 2007 and 2010
- JournoList members secretly colluded to discredit and ignore stories that had the potential to harm Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008.
- Held conservatives and Tea Party activists in great contempt
- Ceased operations in June 2010
Founded in February 2007 by Washington Post blogger/columnist Ezra Klein, JournoList was an online listserve composed of some 400 self-described liberals—mostly journalists, but also some professors and political activists. It functioned essentially as a secret society of email correspondents who shared information with one another, discussed their thoughts on current events, and coordinated the way they reported on certain stories—all off the record. Conservatives were barred from joining the group.
JournoList was shut down by Ezra Klein in late June of 2010, a few days after someone had leaked a number of offensive comments that one of its members—Washington Post political reporter David Weigel—had written on the listserve regarding conservatives. The most damaging leaks, published in The Daily Caller, were laced with obscenities and charged that conservatives were predominantly racists who sought, above all else, to protect their own “white privilege”—even as they used the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” In two of his JournoList posts, Weigel expressed his hope that broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and newsman Matt Drudge would both die.
Weigel was not alone among JournoList members in posting such emotionally charged messages. For instance, Sarah Spitz—a producer for the show Left, Right & Center which aired on the National Public Radio affiliate KCRW—wrote that if Rush Limbaugh were to suffer a heart attack in her presence, she would “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” because “he deserves it.”
In 2009, when Tea Party activists nationwide advocated for limited government and demanded fiscal responsibility from their elected representatives:
- JournoList member Ryan Donmoyer of Bloomberg News saw “parallels here between the teabaggers [a vulgar term referring to a sexual practice] and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts” in Nazi Germany.
- Liberal magazine writer Richard Yeselson attributed the Tea Partiers’ dissatisfaction with government to the fact that “the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama.” Conservative activists, said Yeselson dismissively, were merely a collection of “gun nuts,” “anti-tax nuts,” “religious nuts,” “homophobes,” “anti-feminists,” “anti-abortion lunatics,” “racist/confederate crackpots,” “anti-immigration whackos,” and “pathological government haters.”
- Blogger Lindsay Beyerstein said of conservatives: “I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists, but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate [sic] of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.”
When the conservative author and historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article about immigration for National Review, JournoList member Ed Kilgore, a blogger, reflexively dismissed the piece (without reading it) as “the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement.” “It’s very close in spirit,” Kilgore continued, “to the classic 1970s racist tome, The Camp of the Saints, where White Guys struggle to make up their minds whether to go out and murder brown people or just give up.”
Another focal point of JournoList members’ wrath was the Fox News Channel, for its alleged conservative bias. Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, for instance, wrote that he was “genuinely scared” of Fox because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation cannot be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised.” “In order to have even a semblance of control,” he added, “you need a tough legal framework.” Michael Scherer of Time magazine concurred with Davies’ assessment, saying that Fox News president Roger Ailes “understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization.” And UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff pondered, “I hate to open this can of worms, but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull [Fox’s] broadcasting permit once it expires?”
Perhaps the most significant revelation about JournoList came to light in July 2010 in The Daily Caller, which reported that when the racist, anti-American rantings of Barack Obama‘s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright had become an issue during the heart of the 2008 presidential primaries, JournoList members actively conspired to discredit and bury the story.
This occurred, for instance, after an April 2008 ABC News debate in which: (a) moderator Charlie Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him nearly a year to formally dissocate himself from Wright’s remarks, and (b) co-moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Obama, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” JournoList members who watched the debate were outraged. Richard Kim of TheNation accused Stephanopoulos of “being a disgusting little rat snake.” The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky wrote: “Listen folks—in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have…. We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”…..
- The Fix Was In (NEW YORK POST)
- Documents Show Media Plotting To Kill Stories About Rev. Jeremiah Wright (DAILY CALLER)
CLIMATEGATE
His is an interview from a “fill-in host” on the Hugh Hewitt Show of Chris Horner in 2012 of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
The so-called “Climategate” scandal erupted in late November of 2009. Its name was coined by the English journalist James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog. The controversy began when some Russian computer hackers obtained and publicized 1,073 private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, possessor of the world’s largest temperature-data set. The e-mails in question — some of which dated back as far as 13 years, and 241 of which were from 2008 and 2009 — had been exchanged between a number of leading American and British climatologists known for their belief that mankind’s industrial activity was causing a dangerous “global warming” trend in the earth’s atmosphere. In their correspondences, the authors candidly acknowledged that they had intentionally:
- manipulated scientific evidence in order to provide “proof” that their warnings were justified;
- conspired to illegally conceal, falsify, or destroy data that did not support their global-warming claims; and
- plotted to keep opposing scientific views out of the peer-reviewed journals whose editorial boards they controlled.
In a November 22, 1996 email to other top global-warming scientists, Geoff Jenkins — the self-described “front man explaining climate change” — spoke of “inventing” temperature readings and releasing fake “estimates” of temperature data for the year, even before the year was over. He added: “Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures, with early release of information (via Oz), ‘inventing’ the December monthly value, letters to Nature etc etc? I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year….”
Jenkins further pledged to pass along falsified temperature information “selectively to Nick Nuttall [spokesman and ‘Head of Media’ for the United Nations Environment program], so that he can write an article for the silly season.”
In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing the climate patterns of the last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime CRU climate researcher, boasted that he had used a “trick” — also employed by another scientist, Michael Mann — to “hide the decline” in temperatures. In another e-mail, a climate scientist referred to global-warming skeptics as “idiots.”……
See more at W.U.W.T.!
