90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Visage à trois #482

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #664

Special Master Order Reveals Biden’s Direct Involvement In Trump Raid And Six Other Bombshells

The federal judge’s 24-page order further calls into question the DOJ’s targeting of Trump.

A federal judge on Monday granted former President Donald Trump’s request for the appointment of a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago home last month. Presiding Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, further held that the Department of Justice cannot review or use for criminal investigative purposes any material seized pending the review process.

Besides handing Trump a victory in his battle for some oversight of the Biden administration’s digging into his documents, Cannon highlighted several significant facts over the course of her 24-page order that further call into question the DOJ’s targeting of Trump.

Here are the seven top-line takeaways:

1. President Biden Was Directly Involved

In the order granting Trump’s request for the appointment of a special master, Cannon began by providing a summary of the backdrop that led to the search. Throughout 2021, Trump and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”), “engaged in conversations concerning records from [Trump’s] time in office,” the court noted. Those discussions resulted in Trump in January 2022 transferring 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago to NARA. NARA subsequently informed the Department of Justice that some items in the boxes contained markings of “classified national security information.”

Following the archive’s outreach to the Justice Department, NARA notified Trump on April 12, 2022, that it intended to provide the 15 boxes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump’s attorneys sought a delay in the transfer to assess whether any documents contained privileged material. But then, as Cannon wrote, after obtaining a short delay, on May 10, 2022, NARA informed Trump it would proceed with “provid[ing] the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022.”

In including this quote in her order, Cannon cited the letter the NARA’s acting archivist sent to Trump’s lawyer. That letter explained that Biden had decided to defer to the archivist’s “determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not [the archivist] should uphold the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege.’” Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall then explained in the letter that based on her consultation with the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, she had decided not to honor Trump’s claim of privilege.

While the media has previously highlighted those aspects of the letter, Monday’s order highlighted a key sentence in that same letter that went less noticed by the press: “NARA will provide the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022” (emphasis added).

This language indicates that Biden did not merely defer to the NARA but asked the NARA to give the documents to the FBI. Of course, deferring to the NARA’s judgment equated to Biden authorizing the hand-off to the FBI, but this passage suggests a more direct connection between Biden and the investigation into Trump.

2. Timeline of the Trump Targeting Is Suspect

A second significant detail revealed by Monday’s order concerns the timeline of events, which the court exposed by providing a clear chronology. On May 10, 2022, the archivist informed Trump’s lawyers that the “NARA will provide the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022.” And on May 11, 2022, before the DOJ received possession of the 15 boxes from NARA, the DOJ “obtained a grand jury subpoena,” for “[a]ny and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings.”

But why would the DOJ seek a grand jury subpoena for any and all documents in Trump’s possession bearing classification markings before reviewing the material provided by the NARA? And given that the DOJ obtained the subpoena the day after the NARA told Trump’s lawyer “the incumbent President” had requested the archive provide the documents to the FBI, one must ask: Did Biden direct the DOJ to obtain the grand jury subpoena?

3. Not So Fast Joe — Trump’s Executive Privilege Can’t Be So Quickly Sidestepped

Another important detail from Monday’s order concerned the court’s handling of Trump’s request for a review of the seized material to address issues of “executive privilege.” In opposing Trump’s request for a special master, the Biden administration argued that Trump lacked the right to assert “executive privilege” against the current executive branch. The court concluded that the Biden administration’s “position arguably overstates the law,” noting that the Supreme Court has not “rule[d] out the possibility of a former President overcoming an incumbent President on executive privilege matters.”

“Further, just this year,” Cannon continued, “the Supreme Court noted that, at least in connection with a congressional investigation, ‘[t]he questions whether and in what circumstances a former President may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent President to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns.’” To protect former President Trump’s ability to raise a question of executive privilege, then, a special master should review the documents and make an initial assessment, the court concluded.

This analysis tees up the possibility that Trump will later assert executive privilege, prompting a showdown with the Biden administration.

4. Members of the Investigative Team Saw Confidential Attorney-Client Documents

While the Biden administration had not reviewed the seized documents to assess any potential executive privilege concerns, a Privilege Review Team had screened the material to determine if it is protected by attorney-client privilege. Because it had already screened the material, the government objected to the appointment of a special master to conduct “another round of screening,” arguing in essence, that such screening would be “unnecessary.”

“The Court takes a different view on this record,” Cannon explained in rejecting the government’s argument. The court then stressed that the evidence suggests the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening for potentially privileged material was faulty.

“The Privilege Review Team’s Report references at least two instances in which members of the Investigative Team were exposed to material that was then delivered to the Privilege Review Team and, following another review, designated as potentially privileged material,” Cannon noted. “Those instances alone, even if entirely inadvertent, yield questions about the adequacy of the filter review process.”

The federal judge further expressed concern about the fact that “the Filter Review Team’s Report does not indicate that any steps were taken after these instances of exposure to wall off the two tainted members of the Investigation Team,” with the “tainted members” being the ones who had seen the material presumed protected by attorney-client privilege.

While a special master cannot address the issue of the “tainted members” on the investigative team, the court’s highlighting of the problem will likely push the DOJ to keep those agents away from any related part of the investigation. But what the special master can do is review the documents and determine if others were protected by attorney-client privilege. If so, the DOJ will have bigger problems.

5...

The Inspector General of the Department of the Treasury is beginning an audit of the Internal Revenue Service after it has come to light that in 2019 1,250 employees had not paid their taxes.

Note that 2019 was pre-pandemic.

Some of the offenders offered great excuses like "I didn't know how." Some of these were rehires after being previously fired for "willful failure to properly file their Federal tax returns."

The audit was triggered by Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) following the Democrat initiative to hire 87,000 new employees at the tax enforcement agency.

Ernst said,

"Ironically, hundreds of employees at the IRS itself may have willfully failed to pay their taxes. More than 300 of these were repeat offenders, yet the tax agency did little to discipline the tax offenders on its payroll. Before Biden's army of auditors starts harassing innocent taxpayers, let's first make sure the tax collectors have paid their own taxes.

"Innocent, hardworking Americans should not be subjected to unfair and costly IRS audits when the agency is ignoring tax cheats on its own payroll."

It's unclear what good the audit will do.

In the 2019 audit in question, the Inspector General had found that of the 1,250 IRS employees that had not filed their taxes, only 90 were "willful" offenders. The rest did not file for various reasons, including such classic excuses as "I forgot" and "I had technical issues."

And at least the willful offenders were fired, along with some of the "oopsie" offenders, but don't feel too bad for them because the IRS hired 200 of them back, even the ones who had "falsified government documents" to willfully avoid...

Visage à trois #481

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #662

The Defense Department Has a ‘Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer.’ Here’s Why She Hates You.

This angry, self-righteous racist is the perfect person to oversee diversity, equity, and inclusion.

If you’re a patriotic American, black, white, or whatever, who believes in the equality of dignity and rights of all people, regardless of race, Kelisa Wing, the Department of Defense’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, hates you. Beyond all the double talk and cant, that’s what “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are all about.

Wing, who calls herself a “woke administrator,” demonstrated that she would be a perfect person to serve as a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer when she took to Twitter and unleashed her hatred against white people. Now, this angry, self-righteous racist oversees diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), which, according to a Tuesday Fox News report, “provides K-12 education to the DoD community in the U.S. and all over the world.” It “directs…education programs for school-age children of Department of Defense personnel” and “provides support and resources to Local Educational Agencies throughout the United States that serve children of military families.”

Once her rancid Twitter feed started to get media attention, Wing protected her tweets, but the cat was already out of the bag. In June 2020, Wing wrote: “I’m exhausted with these white folx in these [professional development] sessions.” Wing was misusing the Left’s insane lexicon here, for “folx,” as Merriam-Webster, which is now as woke as everyone else, tells us is a spelling that is “used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized.” So the exhausting white people in Wing’s meetings couldn’t have been “folx,” but Wing has more than enough racist anti-white tweets to maintain her woke bona fides.

In another tweet, Wing complained that “this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too…I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS…we are not the majority, we don’t have power.” “CAUdacity” is “Caucasian audacity,” and you can see how marginalized poor Wing really is: she had to stop the session and lecture this uppity white woman about how powerless black folx such as...