Category: Justice Department

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Congress GOP Justice Department

Jim Jordan’s 1,050-Page ‘Report’ On The DOJ Gets A Brutal Fact Check From The Washington Post

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee (led by Ohio’s Jim Jordan) told the media on Friday that they would be releasing a “1000-page report” documenting the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and FBI.

And yet, when the report came out and was examined by Philip Bump of The Washington Post, it soon became clear that Jordan had just dumped a massive nothing burger that was little more than attachments, letters, and other worthless information that has been public knowledge for months.

News broke early Friday: The Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a “1,000 Page Report” on alleged politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department. The length was mentioned in the group’s tweet and in its press release, reinforcing the heft that 1,000 pages of documentation would obviously convey.

There’s just one problem with this assertion: The report itself was less than 50 pages. Most of the rest of the document was letters sent by the minority members of the committee to various people. In fact, there were more than 1,000 pages of material that wasn’t the report itself, instead mostly those letters.

Included were pages with nothing but signatures on the letters: There were more than seven times as many pages that had nothing of substance on them except signatures than there were pages in the report.

Letters. Signatures. A 50-page missive that had been hyped as a giant tome that would blow the lid off the DOJ.

As Bump notes, the entire thing was laughable and suggests just how desperately Republicans are clutching at straws in the final days before next week’s midterm election.

Here’s a graph breaking down what was in the ballyhooed report:

Impressive, huh? A lot of fluff and not much actual content.

And a quick fact-check by The Post also put a serious dent in the report’s credibility.

This is an intentional tactic, of course. Conservative media outlets like the Daily Caller (“ ‘Rotted At Its Core’: House Judiciary GOP Releases Massive 1,000-Page Report On Alleged FBI Misconduct”) and Fox News (“House Republicans release 1,000-page report alleging politicization in the FBI, DOJ”) included the purported length of the document in their article headlines. The idea is that the Judiciary Republicans either have 1,000 pages of analysis to share with the country or, at least, 1,000 pages of evidence to bolster their claims. At most, they have about two dozen.

So what exactly did we learn Friday as a result of Jim Jordan’s pathetic bid for attention and relevance? That the GOP is running (yet again) on lies and misinformation. It’s all they have.

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Congress Fox News GOP Justice Department

WATCH: Jim Jordan Gets Nervous When Maria Bartiromo Urges Him To Impeach Merrick Garland

As eager as he usually seems when it comes to attacking everything President Joe Biden or his administration does, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) seemed to get more than a bit nervous when urged to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

Bartiromo, host of “Sunday Morning Futures,” told Jordan:

“The first thing that Republicans should do when they take back Congress is impeach Merrick Garland. What are your plans for Merrick Garland?”

The Ohio Republican replied:

“Well, you, you — they’re right that we have to look real closely at the Justice Department. And I think we may have to do some major changes. There may need to be structural changes at the FBI. I mean, you may need — the Washington field office has way too much power. You may need to disperse power around.”

Jordan added that he believed disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been treated unfairly even though he lied to the FBI, which just so happens to be a felony:

“Because we know they went to set up Michael Flynn back in the early days of the Trump administration. So, maybe we need to deal with their funding.”

Set him up? He was asked questions and he gave untruthful responses. That’s a crime.

While he was at it, Jordan also suggested that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act shouldn’t be reauthorized because it was used to investigate possible collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

“And then there’s also the impeachment question which I think the committee will look at. That will be a decision for the entire conference under then-Speaker McCarthy.”

The radicals in the GOP (which is now the vast majority of the party) have said ever since Biden took office that they plan to try and impeach him if they win the midterm elections. It’s yet another reason they need to be soundly defeated at the ballot box and never again given power.

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Crime Donald Trump Espionage Justice Department

Trump Attorney Ready To ‘Cooperate’ With Justice Department In Mar-a-Lago Case

 

A member of failed, one-term former president Donald Trump’s legal team has lawyered up and told the Justice Department she’s ready to “cooperate” with prosecutors investigating the ex-president for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort in violation of federal law, according to The Washington Post.

Christina Bobb, has told other Trump allies that she is willing to be interviewed by the Justice Department about her role in responding to the subpoena, according to people familiar with the conversations. Another, M. Evan Corcoran, has been counseled by colleagues to hire a criminal defense lawyer because of his response to the subpoena, people familiar with those conversations said, but so far has insisted that is not necessary.

When asked if she had indeed agreed to assist the DOJ with the ongoing investigation, Bobb responded:

“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

Another attorney Trump recently hired, former Florida Solicitor General Christopher Kise, is trying to get the former president to find an “off ramp” to avoid facing criminal charges.

Kise told others he wanted to de-escalate the Trump team’s pugilistic approach to federal prosecutors, according to three people familiar with his comments.

Continuing to attack the Justice Department and the FBI, he argued, was likely to cause federal authorities to be more aggressive. Kise has suggested to other Trump advisers that the best solution would be to try to find an “off-ramp” with the Justice Department before a possible indictment or trial; he has said he thinks Trump can avoid criminal charges.

But if Bobb is ready to tell what she knows to the Justice Department, it seems unlikely that Kise’s rosy scenario of avoiding charges will come to pass.

Bobb also denies that she was ever actually defending Trump on the documents case, which is odd since she did a majority of the interviews in the weeks after the ex-president’s Palm Beach club was searched by FBI agents:

Despite giving numerous interviews in the days immediately after the FBI search in which she was identified as a lawyer for Trump, Bobb told a fellow RSBN anchor during a Sept. 23 broadcast that she was not acting as a Trump attorney while serving as custodian of the records in responding to the subpoena. The difference is important: The Justice Department team investigating the handling of the documents would face few hurdles to compel her to testify if she had not been serving as Trump’s lawyer at the time.

“I think people were a little bit confused,” Bobb told her fellow anchor. “I am on President Trump’s legal team. I do work for him on election issues. I was never on the legal team handling this case, just to be clear on that. Which is why I came in as the custodian of records — because I wasn’t on that team.”

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Crime Donald Trump Espionage Justice Department

DOJ May Move To Have Trump-Appointed Judge Removed From Secret Documents Case

Now that U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has ruled that a special master will be appointed to determine if any of the classified documents former president Donald Trump was hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago resort are protected by attorney-client or executive privilege, the Justice Department has until Friday to appeal that ruling.

But it may not be enough to merely appeal to a higher court, according to three legal experts who say Attorney General Merrick Garland should move to have Judge Cannon removed from the case completely since she clearly has a conflict of interest.

On MSNBC Wednesday evening, Andrew Weissmann, who served as general counsel for the FBI and was also a prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team, said the DOJ has a clear case to make:

“This is like a thief taking documents then saying, ‘Judge, I want them back.’ This is a complete farce. And to have somebody like Laurence Tribe and Neal Katyal have to address this, as if it’s a serious argument, just tells you the depths that we are in. And just to be very serious for a moment the notion that in the documents there are state secrets involving nuclear capabilities — it means that there is present harm to national security. Our allies and countries that want to quietly cooperate with us are looking at all of this and making decisions about whether they should continue to do so if we cannot keep secrets. That is how we protect this country. It is how we thwart terrorist attacks. It is how we conduct important, lifesaving undercover operations.”

Neil Katyal, former acting Solicitor General in the Obama administration, then joined the debate:

“Every day, every week, we learn a new fact about just how bad Trump’s behavior was. Now, it is nuclear secrets. That also underscores just how bad the decision was by this judge in Florida. So, appointing a special master is one thing, but stopping a criminal investigation of this magnitude in its tracks because you think, as a federal judge, that some documents might be privileged. That is insane. That is a bazooka when one needs, at most, a scalpel. And if you have lost Bill Barr, and Bill Barr is — God. That is….”

Katyal added:

“She pleaded herself out of her own court. Because she planted remedies to the special master via the Presidential Records Act. And she has a footnote on this, Footnote 16, which says basically, the Presidential Records Act says that you can only bring these cases in Washington D.C. and only Washington D.C. judges can oversee them. So, that maybe that’s what the Justice Department, I think, should do here. Get this case before judges who are experts on presidential records and executive privilege and the like.”

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Crime Donald Trump Espionage GOP Justice Department WTF?!

Lindsey Graham Ominously Predicts: If Trump Is Prosecuted, ‘There’ll Be Riots In The Streets’

It now appears that disgraced ex-president Donald Trump is in the deepest legal jeopardy of his life, ironically because of something he did that he tried to accuse Hillary Clinton of: Mishandling classified information.

Clinton, it should be noted, was not president, and she didn’t have access to the highest level of top-secret data that Trump had as president. Also, Clinton didn’t leave such information laying around in cardboard boxes at a resort where almost anyone could have had access to the documents.

And yet, despite those very different facts, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is warning that if Trump is indicted and prosecuted, there’s going to be rioting in the streets.

Sounds like a threat, doesn’t it?

Appearing on Fox News, Graham said:

“I’ll say this: If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

Graham got some well-deserved pushback on social media for his remarks:

https://twitter.com/KevinSixx13/status/1564030055701188609?s=20&t=GR9gDxBrdHoQW4PZjA0ppg
https://twitter.com/RichL315/status/1564030334349574144?s=20&t=GR9gDxBrdHoQW4PZjA0ppg

https://twitter.com/DataDrivenMD/status/1564043242043191296?s=20&t=GR9gDxBrdHoQW4PZjA0ppg