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Tag: white house
Kennedy Biden

Kennedy Family Visits Biden White House -- Without Disgraced RFK Jr.

Members of the Kennedy family visited the White House Sunday for President Joe Biden’s St. Patrick’s Day brunch, and in case there’s any doubt about the family’s allegiances this coming November, Kerry Kennedy posted an image of the clan with the president, writing, “President Biden, you make the world better. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

Erstwhile Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent, was missing from the happy tableau.

The famously Democratic Kerry Kennedy didn’t mention her brother, his strange presidential bid, or his bad ideas about vaccines and public health—but she didn’t have to.

In October, Kerry posted a statement on behalf of her siblings denouncing their brother’s candidacy and throwing their support behind Biden.

“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” she wrote. “Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”

RFK Jr.’s ideas on public health are so out there that his ally list includes speculative running mate Aaron Rodgers, who is an NFL quarterback and enthusiastic conspiracy theorist.

But that didn’t ruin the rest of the Kennedy clan’s St. Paddy’s Day fun. Biden acknowledged their attendance at the event, saying, “Welcome almost home. It wouldn’t be St. Patrick’s Day without you.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Robert Hur

Interview Transcript Proves Special Counsel Falsely Hyped Biden's 'Poor Memory'

Major news outlets that ran dozens of stories hyping then-special counsel Robert Hur’s claim that President Joe Biden evinced a “poor memory” during their interview are now acknowledging that Hur’s depiction was exaggerated after reviewing the newly released transcript.

Hur’s February report stated that following a yearlong investigation into Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents, he had concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted.” But journalists quickly fixated on Hur’s incendiary and unfalsifiable description of Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and his references to specific Biden memory lapses over the course of their five-hour interview.

The mainstream political press treated Hur as an impartial voice levying credible accusations, unleashing a deluge of reports calling Biden’s mental acuity into question. Hur’s background as a former clerk to right-wing judges and a Trump administration appointee — and his gratuitous swipes at a Democratic president that happened to align with a yearslong GOP campaign to portray Biden as addled — failed to raise their alarms.

But after reviewing the full transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, released Tuesday morning before Hur’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, several outlets are concluding that the then-special counsel’s claims in his report lacked necessary context.

The Washington Post ran 33 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to a review by Popular Information. On Tuesday, however, the Postreported that the transcript “paints a more nuanced portrait of the exchanges between Biden and the special counsel” and that “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.” With regard to some of the specific instances Hur cited in describing Biden’s memory as “significantly limited,” the Post found that “the transcript provides more detail on those exchanges, with questioning jumping around the timeline in some instances.”

The New York Times ran 30 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to Popular Information. But on Tuesday, the Timesreported the transcript “shows that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, while otherwise appearing clearheaded.” As to Hur’s claim that Biden “did not remember when he was vice president,” the Times noted: “The transcript provides context for those lines. In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”

The Times further found that “Mr. Hur was selective in portraying Mr. Biden’s memory of an ambassador’s position.”

The Wall Street Journal ran 18 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, Popular Information found. On Tuesday, however, the paper reported that the transcript shows Biden “veering into frequent digressions, but not stumped on basic factual questions.”

Hur has raised more questions about his own credibility since issuing his report. The lawyer who reportedly prepped him for Tuesday’s hearing is William Burck, a veteran Republican attorney who represented several senior Trump administration aides and serves as a Fox Corp. board member. And Hur arranged to leave the Justice Department on Monday, ensuring that “instead of appearing as a DOJ employee who is bound by the ethical guidelines which govern the behavior of federal prosecutors, he will appear as a private citizen with no constraints on his testimony,” The Independent reported.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Supreme Court

During State Of The Union, Biden Put Supreme Court On Blast Over Abortion

President Joe Biden’s fiery State of the Union address on Thursday was made even stronger with some near-seamless ad-libs. None were more unexpected or more effective than when he directly took on the Supreme Court justices over their 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

Biden’s prepared remarks included a reference to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, quoting Justice Samuel Alito’s excuse that the matter of abortion access should be handled at the ballot box in the states: “Women are not without electoral or political power.” Biden extemporaneously turned that passage into a direct attack on the high court.

“In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following—and with all due respect, justices—‘women are not without electoral or political power,’” Biden said, directly addressing the six judges attending. “You’re about to realize just how much you were right about that.”

“Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women, but they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot, we won in 2022 and we will win again in 2024,” Biden continued. “If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

That’s an “astonishing” moment in a state of the union, said Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC commentator and former Senate aide. “There was that moment that I think we all remember of the way he attacked—I guess, is the word for it—the Supreme Court to their faces, where the camera then goes to this shot of the six SCOTUS justices, three of whom he was very specifically attacking,” he said.

Three, that is, because Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the author of the horribly momentous Dobbs decision, didn’t bother to show. “That’s never been done before, to the extent that a president has a disagreement with the Supreme Court expressed in the State of the Union address,” O’Donnell continued. “That was just astonishing.”

It’s not just astonishing. It’s a critical admonishment to the Supreme Court, which still has some democracy-defining decisions to make this term, not the least of which is whether an insurrectionist ex-president is above the law.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

James Comer

Comer Complains White House Is 'Using Tax Dollars' To Expose His Shell Company

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should be celebrating. After all, he got what he wanted for Christmas on Wednesday when the House, in a party-line vote, handed him a no-evidence-required impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Considering that all Comer has done since he took control of the committee is sift through the bank accounts of Biden family members, their friends, families of their friends, and friends of those friends, the House bill might as well have been stuffed straight into his … stocking.

But in an interview with Fox News on Thursday morning, Comer seemed more than a bit depressed. First, when asked about his best evidence that Biden might have done something wrong, Comer didn’t mention anything that he had come up with in his months of scanning bank accounts and going through over 100,000 documents. Instead, he repeated false claims that Rudy Giuliani brought back from Ukraine in 2019. Lies that were almost immediately debunked and that were thoroughly discredited again during Donald Trump’s first impeachment.

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo first asked Comer about an Associated Press story concerning his shell company, a piece of property that’s kept in his wife’s name, and some extremely shady connections. Comer insisted that the Associated Press is financially illiterate because this isn’t a shell company at all. It’s a land speculation LLC. Totally different thing.

Daily Koshas covered Comer’s not-a-shell-company before, including a series of land swaps among his family that definitely seem less than above board.

Much of Comer’s business activity seems to follow inheriting land in Kentucky following his father’s death in 2019. But exactly what happened with that land is the opposite of transparent. In one case, Comer reportedly sold his interest in a piece of land to his brother, then bought it back five months later, slipping his brother $18,000 in the process. That purchase ran through a shell company owned by Comer, the value of which doubled in two years. That company appears to have dealt exclusively with agricultural land deals at a time when Comer was on the House Agriculture Committee.

Of course, we did use the term “shell company.” Comer wants to pretend it’s not a shell company, because it controls all of six acres, so it has assets. But those six acres (now five, since one acre has since been sold off) are only a small fraction of the value that runs through this shell company.

But Comer’s ridiculous claims and finger-pointing at Biden seems to satisfy Bartiromo, who then turned to an even more critical question.

“Do you think that this is the media trying to begin to muddy up Republicans,” asked the Fox host, “or continue to muddy up Republicans because you are getting so close to your target that you have actually been able to release all this evidence on the Biden family? That now the White House is maybe calling media to try and plant these stories?”

Comer was quick to not just agree but to elaborate on this conspiracy theory. “It comes from the White House. They have their own war room. They have two dozen people we’re paying tax dollars in there so they can attack the investigators.”

Comer went on to complain about the media attacking him and Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. “This is the biggest public corruption scandal of my lifetime,” Comer said.

Things are so bad that Comer is even afraid to go on Fox & Friends. According to The Hill, Comer declared that he wouldn’t return to the show after co-anchor Steve Doocy said that Comer’s investigation had “got a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets, but they have not connected the dots.” Which is the truth. But then, Comer’s relationship with the truth is like the connection between vampires and sunlight.

And after all, it’s not as if Comer has ever done anything wrong. Such as sending this note to a legitimate whistleblower seeking to report sexual abuse when Comer was in the Kentucky legislature.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.