President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

In North Carolina, Tad and Buffy might be waiting tables and tending bar during the summer months, but the houses are being built year round by Jose and Pedro (who do a heck of a good job, and there are a lot of houses being built right now, I might ad).

 

Biden Justice Department fights release of legal memo on prosecuting Trump

 

Dear DoJ: Stop.

A federal judge accused former Attorney General Bill of plotting to get a “jump” on the department’s “public relations” spin of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and then obscuring that scheme in later Freedom of Information Act litigation.

The swipes at Barr’s handling of the Mueller probe came in previously redacted portions of a May 3 opinion that ordered the release of an internal DOJ memo related to the Mueller report.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson unsealed the unredacted opinion Tuesday after the Biden administration agreed to a release of her opinion in full, even as it’s fighting in court to keep some parts of the internal DOJ memo private.

The litigation and Jackson’s description of the memo sheds light on how Barr sought to shape the public perception of Mueller’s probe, by releasing a letter to Congress “summarizing” Mueller’s report several weeks ahead of when it made the report itself public.

…

The unredacted version of Jackson’s opinion includes a lengthy section in which she describes what Trump’s DOJ was up to in the withheld parts of the OLC memo.

One of the “apparent purposes of the memorandum” was to “justify the Attorney General’s plan to opine about the strength of the evidence,” Jackson wrote, “even though he and his team were well aware that under DOJ policy, there was no prosecution decision to be made.”

In Jackson’s telling, the department hid this purpose in the FOIA litigation and instead suggested that the OLC was advising Barr on whether to prosecute Trump. In a filing Monday night, the Biden administration acknowledged that a decision whether to prosecute Trump was never “in play,” given a DOJ policy prohibiting charges being brought against siting president.

Instead, the OLC was advising Barr on whether he could come to his own determination as to whether the conduct Mueller described would be of the sort that the DOJ would prosecute, if it were not for its internal policy of not charging sitting presidents. The OLC memo, according to the judge, also weighed in on whether Barr could communicate his determination to the public.

“This is news,” Jackson said, as the DOJ’s filings in the FOIA litigation did not inform “the Court that whether the Attorney General should offer a public opinion was even a subject of the memorandum.”

Once she herself got to review the memo in private, it revealed “that there was no decision actually being made as to whether the then-President should be prosecuted.”

Instead, “the agency was girding for a preemptive strike on the Mueller report,” she wrote.
​

Unsealed Order Shows Judge's Scorn For Barr's 'Public Relations' Plan For Mueller Report | TPM

 

Spew it all out.

 

Did having COVID get him this immunity?

 

Wheee! I love it when they can't figure out how to redact a document properly. Bet there were some tight sphincter muscles around D.C. when this came out.

Faulty redactions in court document show federal investigators seized more info in case against Rudy Giuliani than previously disclosed - CNNPolitics

"(CNN)New York federal prosecutors investigating Rudy Giuliani have seized material from a wider array of individuals than previously disclosed, including messages from email and iCloud accounts they believe belong to two former Ukranian government officials, as well as the cell phone and iPad of a pro-Trump Ukrainian businessman, according to a court document unsealed Tuesday.

The court filing, which contained redacted portions that CNN was able to read by copying and pasting them into another document, also disclosed that federal prosecutors have "historical and prospective cell site information" related to Giuliani and another lawyer, Victoria Toensing, both of whom were the subjects of search warrants executed late last month.

The Ukranians include the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, former head of the Ukrainian Fiscal Service Roman Nasirov and and businessman Alexander Levin."



"Bondy wrote that the evidence seized "likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications" between Giuliani, Toensing, former President Donald Trump, former Attorney General Bill Barr, "high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as a means to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump."

 

Very fine art. On both sides.

 

Another interesting tidbit: "Purge:" Gordon Sondland Probably Just Won Himself Another Subpoena | emptywheel

 

More details on what was happening with regard to this here: Frankenstein's OLC: DOJ Says DOJ Can't Do What DOJ Did in the Barr Memo | emptywheel

 

This tweet is something: