Wednesday, June 14, 2023

FAQ

We've got a question from Kevin in Bakersfield:

Your friends in the House Intelligence Committee could explain to you that a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, is a place where you're allowed to keep SCI, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, and the current president, who is former Senator Joe Biden (I guess you knew that), like former Rep. Mike Pence, probably never had any SCI at his house. The overwhelming majority of classified documents are not SCI, so that's the most likely reason.

Unlike former president Trump, who had a SCIF installed at Mar-a-Lago as president, and is known to have sent himself some SCI in the 80 boxes of presidential documents he shipped there on January 19 2021, a few hours before he stopped being president; some that turned up in the 15 boxes he shipped from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in January 2022, and some in the 65 boxes he kept there in spite of many polite requests and a subpoena. Including one of the 11 sets of classified documents he tried to hide from the FBI by keeping them in his desk drawer.

Hope that helps.

***

Marco in Orlando wonders, 

"You think this ends here?... The next Republican president is going to be under tremendous pressure to bring charges and indict Joe Biden, his family, crackhead son, whoever. The pressure will be extraordinary."

Fortunately we know the next Republican president is unlikely to be able to manage that, no matter how great the pressure. Consider the previous Republican president, Donald J. Trump, who told his fellow candidate Hillary Clinton during his first presidential campaign that if he were president she'd "be in jail". He began working on making it happen in spring 2018, when he asked White House counsel Don McGahn to "order the Justice Department" to prosecute Clinton, as well as fired FBI director James Comey (he wanted to get Comey for "illegally having classified information shared with The New York Times" when he let The Times have his memos of conversations with Trump in which Trump demanded Comey's declaration of personal loyalty to Trump as a condition for keeping his job, though the memos were not in fact classified).

McGahn had a memo written up explaining that this was a very bad idea which would have terrible consequences, up to and including Trump's likely impeachment, and Trump seemingly cooled off on it, but began talking about it again after McGahn had left the White House and Trump had hired a more complaisant attorney general to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—Matthew Whitaker, the big-dick toilet guy.

the president has continued to privately discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second special counsel to investigate both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump about the issue. He has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs. Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said.

And he kept exerting pressure on the Justice Department to hunt down Clinton and Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and others, to the point where his next and most compliant attorney general, William Barr, was moved to public protest:

Donald Trump has ignored a plea from his attorney general, William Barr, to not tweet about ongoing legal cases, by using his Twitter account to say he has a “legal right” to do so.

Barr delivered a remarkable public rebuke of the president just hours earlier, saying that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job” and that he would not be “bullied or influenced” over justice department decisions.

Pretty much the same thing he said when asked whether he'd ever shown anybody classified documents, at the CNN town hall: "Not really. I would have the right to."

And it's clear to me that Trump was directly involved in the launching of the Durham investigation, visible in the coordination of his responses to those of Barr and Durham to Inspector General Horowitz's report in December 2019:

Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.

Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”

And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.”

And let's not forget Trump's efforts to get the Ukrainian government to prosecute Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, which Barr's DOJ was following up on in December 2020:

Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged Monday that the Justice Department would evaluate material that Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about former vice president Joe Biden and his family — though Barr and other officials suggested Giuliani was being treated no differently than any tipster.


At a news conference on an unrelated case, Barr confirmed an assertion made Sunday by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that the Justice Department had “created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”


Barr said he had established an “intake process in the field” so that the Justice Department and intelligence agencies could scrutinize information they were given.

Anyhow, Marco, it's clear that Trump did everything he could to indict all sorts of people, including Joe Biden and his family and "whoever", and signally failed to do it. It's really hard to bend the Justice Department to indict people who haven't committed any crimes (there are lots of innocent people getting charged and convicted, but the pressure comes upwards from cops and local prosecutors, not down from the president and attorney general). It's hard enough to convict a president who actually is a criminal, as we know from the stories of Nixon and Trump—maybe impossible.

I appreciate your concern for President Biden, but I think he's probably going to be just fine, regardless of what happens with this federal Trump indictment.

***

And from an anonymous Twitter user:


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