N.E. Brigand wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 6:04 pm
Last night I listened to a bit of Mark Levin's conservative radio talk show. Among other things, he was eager to let the public know that the Espionage Act was signed into law by a racist president, Woodrow Wilson, and that it's a law that permits questionable government overreach. The first is indisputably true and the second is certainly worth arguing. But if conservatives really believed the law was wrong, they would have said so before now.
I see Mark Levin was also on Fox last night,
complaining that "President Trump is 76 years old. If the Department of Justice gets its way, he will die in federal prison." But earlier yesterday, Republicans were all talking about an FBI document that the House Oversight Committee had viewed
in camera. It's a report from a source about something he was told by someone else about corruption in Ukraine and a supposed $5 million dollar payment to Joe Biden. The FBI received this information in 2020, and then-Attorney General Bill Barr assigned a U.S. Attorney look into it along with a bunch of information about Joe and Hunter Biden that had been provided by Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. That investigation was reportedly closed, while Barr was still A.G, although Congressional Republicans yesterday intimated that a new investigation of the matter may have been opened. Later in the day, many Republicans were claiming that the indictment against Donald Trump is only a distraction from the earlier news about Biden. We'll see if anything comes of the Biden matter. But the point is: they very much want Joe Biden to go to prison -- and he's older than Trump! Why would that be OK but this be out of bounds?
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The big lie that many, many, many Republican elected officials have been pushing for the past 18 hours is that President Biden ordered these charges to be brought.
He did not. Nor did Biden's appointees Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco, the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, respectively. By law, the Special Counsel, Jack Smith, acts independently of the politically-appointed leadership. He has to tell Garland when he's bringing charges, and if Garland thinks Smith is overstepping his remit in bring charges, then Garland has the right to
prevent Smith from doing so -- which Garland then has to explain to Congress when the investigation closes -- but he's not allowed to direct Smith to charge anyone.