Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

There are no bad ideas in brainstorming

Another angle out there is that the Biden admin is doing damage control on a botched FBI operation.

“President Trump has great care for the importance of presidential records and presidential record keeping, so much so that both himself and his representatives have spent nearly two years painstakingly working with appropriate entities to ensure any items improperly moved by the General Services Administration were appropriately returned,” Budowich said in a written statement.

The GSA said in a written statement that “the responsibility for making decisions about what materials are moved rests entirely with the outgoing president and their supporting staff.”

Ironically, that's why I drop in to this forum.

You folks actually believe "your" president runs the show.

There is a litany of reasons there’s been a slow degradation of life for ordinary people in the US. The emphasis on the Wild West individualism and competition, the nature of corporations and capitalism to grow and eat everything in their path — even the foundation they’re sitting on, the flippant disregard European colonizers had and still have for other cultures, pure always classic corruption, the effectiveness of the American media apparatus, that same media and politicians wielding never healed race relations, the myth of the American dream, and ahistorical anti-communist rhetoric, as well as the cycles of economies and empire, could all be said to have played a role — and a million other things.

America is a corporate-welfare hellscape of egregious inequality masquerading as a meritocratic ‘free market’ utopia. The government is bought and purchased. Corporate America is hollowing out the country from the inside.

The citizens are afterthoughts and a Princeton study showed public opinion has almost zero effect on policy, which means the nation is very much not a democracy.

So, unfortunately, the ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric isn’t entirely wrong. Right-wingers simply have it upside down and backward; the corruption and corporate control of government is the problem.

Last year, officials with the National Archives discovered that Mr. Trump had taken a slew of documents and other government material with him when he left the White House at the end of his tumultuous term in January 2021. That material was supposed to have been sent to the archives under the terms of the Presidential Records Act.

Mr. Trump returned 15 boxes of material in January of this year. When archivists examined the material, they found many pages of documents with classified markings and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which began an investigation and convened a grand jury.

In the spring, the department issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump seeking additional documents that it believed may have been in his possession. The former president was repeatedly urged by advisers to return what remained, despite what they described as his desire to continue to hold onto some documents.

In an effort to resolve the dispute, Mr. Bratt and other officials visited Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., in early June, briefly meeting Mr. Trump while they were there. Two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, spoke with Mr. Bratt and a small number of investigators he traveled with, people briefed on the meeting said.

Mr. Corcoran and Ms. Bobb showed Mr. Bratt and his team boxes holding material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House that were being kept in a storage area, the people said.

According to two people briefed on the visit, Mr. Bratt and his team left with additional material marked classified, and around that time also obtained the written declaration from a Trump lawyer attesting that all the material marked classified in the boxes had been turned over.


A short time after the meeting, according to people briefed on it, Mr. Bratt sent Mr. Corcoran an email telling him to get a more secure padlock for the room. Mr. Trump’s team complied.

The Justice Department also subpoenaed surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago recorded over a 60-day period, including views from outside the storage room. According to a person briefed on the matter, the footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room.

That activity prompted concern among investigators about the handling of the material. It is not clear when precisely the footage was from during the lengthy back-and-forth between Justice Department officials and Mr. Trump’s advisers, or whether the subpoena to Mr. Trump seeking additional documents had already been issued.

Mr. Budowich said it was “no surprise that boxes may be moved in and out of a storage room.”

“That’s not news,” he said. “If there was actual concern, the D.O.J. could have asked, just like they had previously, and they would have, again, received full cooperation.”

In recent months, investigators were in contact with roughly half a dozen of Mr. Trump’s current aides who had knowledge of how the documents that had been kept at Mar-a-Lago were handled, two people briefed on the approaches said. At least one witness provided the investigators with information that led them to want to further press Mr. Trump for material, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.

Concern about Mr. Trump’s cavalier handling of classified information dates back to the early days of his administration. When Mr. Trump left office, President Biden quickly took the extraordinary step of barring him from receiving the intelligence briefings traditionally provided to former presidents, saying that Mr. Trump could not be trusted because of his “erratic behavior.”

The security of classified information at Mar-a-Lago was also a concern for government officials even while Mr. Trump was in office. During his presidency, the government built what is known as a SCIF — a sensitive compartmented information facility — for Mr. Trump’s use while he was at the club.

Good article here, too long to post:

Charles Koch Won; We the People Lost

‘Government is the problem’ ideology has permeated America, and most have no idea how to affect change

Quote:

There is a litany of reasons there’s been a slow degradation of life for ordinary people in the US. The emphasis on the Wild West individualism and competition, the nature of corporations and capitalism to grow and eat everything in their path — even the foundation they’re sitting on, the flippant disregard European colonizers had and still have for other cultures, pure always classic corruption, the effectiveness of the American media apparatus, that same media and politicians wielding never healed race relations, the myth of the American dream, and ahistorical anti-communist rhetoric, as well as the cycles of economies and empire, could all be said to have played a role — and a million other things.

America is a corporate-welfare hellscape of egregious inequality masquerading as a meritocratic ‘free market’ utopia. The government is bought and purchased. Corporate America is hollowing out the country from the inside.

The citizens are afterthoughts and a Princeton study showed public opinion has almost zero effect on policy, which means the nation is very much not a democracy.

So, unfortunately, the ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric isn’t entirely wrong. Right-wingers simply have it upside down and backward; the corruption and corporate control of government is the problem.