Feb. 9, 2024 - Biden remembers, and don't you forget it
… Biden document case … Biden memory claim … Carlson/Putin interview … Climate-change legal battle …
Here’s just some of the shit that happened yesterday:
A prosecutor decided not to prosecute Pres. Joe Biden for stealing government documents even though he’s guilty.
The prosecutor said Biden’s memory is shitty and a jury would like him too much to convict him.
Biden said his memory is great and then referred to Egypt as Mexico.
Russia detained another western media figure, torturing Tucker Carlson for more than two hours.
Supreme Court justices suggested they won’t stop an insurrectionist from running for president.
Those justices included Clarence Thomas, because he didn’t recuse himself.
A jury returned a verdict in a 12-year-old climate-change case that…what, you didn’t hear about that one? Yer gonna like it, but let’s get started, shall we?
Prosecutor: Biden Probably Guilty, but Prosecuting Him Too Hard to Try
Special counsel Robert Hur yesterday released the final report on his team’s investigation of how Pres. Joe Biden and his staff handled and/or mishandled federal documents, the umpteenth time since 1537 that a political leader mishandled documents and/or entire countries.
Hur’s report concluded that Biden “willfully” kept federal documents he wasn’t supposed to, but also acknowledged that Biden returned them when asked and drew serious distinctions between Biden and D4FRFP1 Donald Trump.
For one thing, Trump took more reading material from the White House than he’s ever owned, let alone read, in his life. Also, Biden made a legal claim of ownership to papers he actually wrote, for which there’s some precedent, while Trump’s legal claim of ownership was based on the fact that he saw it first and also said, “I call it!” first.
Anyway, the point is Hillary Clinton had some emails.
Look, there are a few takeaways that didn’t get much oxygen last night. One, none of these people should be allowed to take this shit home with them. The presidency isn’t a kid’s birthday party: No fucking goodie bags. But also, all of us should have been allowed access to almost all of these documents — the government overclassifies a massive overamount of government documents. We own them. Let us see them. I call it.
But also, let’s spend some quality time with Hur’s reasoning for not prosecuting Biden. It wasn’t that Biden’s innocent.
Hur’s argument for letting Biden get away with it is that a jury would probably sympathize with him. Y’know, the way prosecutors never in the history of everything have ever decided to let a poor Black kid get away with shoplifting because a jury would be sympathetic.
As journalist Isaac Bailey pointed out, the media have for decades treated presidents as god-kings to the extent that we’ve convinced America that presidents should be held to a lower standard when it comes to obeying the law. But the media forgot about all of this law stuff almost instantly with the emergence of one particular shiny object from Hur’s report…
Prosecutor Claim That Biden’s Losing His Shit Makes Media Lose Their Shit, Which Makes Biden Lose His Shit
Hur’s report said Biden would be too hard to prosecute because it’d be too hard to convince a jury to convict Biden because he’d be too sympathetic, too old, too presidenty, and too forgetty. This is the passage, media bait highlighted, that made the media lose their minds about the possibility that Biden is losing his mind:
Specifically, Hur described Biden’s slow responses during his interview and multiple apparent memory failures, including forgetting the years of key events in his life, like when he was vice president and when his son died. In Biden’s defense — which he won’t have to mount in court because he’s president — I started forgetting important shit when I still had fewer than 30 years to choose from. Biden’s got eighty.
But not in defense of Biden, he’s clearly lost a step and voters see it and so do some Democratic leaders even if they won’t say so publicly. What should the American people do about that? Obviously invent time travel and go back in time to 2020 so they can take their past selves forward to the future of 2024 to see how old Biden is because apparently the voters of 2020 couldn’t add “four” or “eight” to Biden’s age at the time.
Perhaps most troubling, Biden’s memory lapses are apparently contagious via osmosis, as most of the journalists couldn’t remember the main point of the report just minutes after reading it. Instead, America’s journalists saw the part about Biden forgetting when things happened years ago and instantly forgot about things they had read just minutes ago. Having forgotten all about the “guilty” stuff, the media pounced on the forgetting-stuff stuff:
As congressional staffer Aaron Fritschner pointed out, while clinging fiercely to his sanity, those media accounts were wrong. Hur didn’t call Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” In his report, Hur said his team (hur team?) “considered [italics added for reading comprehension] that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself as [ditto] a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
In other words, Hur was speculating how Biden might present himself to a jury.
Why would Biden do that? To get away with all his document-criming. And as I pointed out to myself — while reading Fritschner’s thread and bidding farewell to my own sanity — this means that Hur, far from describing Biden as damaged goods (which he did elsewhere), in that passage was essentially conceding that Biden would beat the prosecutors in front of a jury.
BTW, props to Roll Call for getting it right:
Biden, however, tossed raw meat to the pack with his dumb-ass choice to take questions from the media. During which he mistakenly called Egypt Mexico.
As someone noted last night, Egypt is south(ish) of Israel just like Mexico is south of the U.S., so there’s at least a theory for why Biden’s neurotransmitters took that left turn at Albuquerque, New Egypt.
Also in Biden’s defense, he’s always been a verbal thrill-ride and it’s not clear whether or how badly it has impaired his abilities. And more also in Biden’s defense, we all fuck shit up verbally — especially when we have to juggle a lot of really complex shit.
Here’s Trump mixing up Hungary and Turkey, presumably because he was hungry for turkey. Here’s Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) saying the U.S. sent support to Iran when he meant Israel. (Or did he?!?)
Anyway, it all felt really important last night but most of it doesn’t matter because (a) either Biden never screws up again, in which case we’ll forget about it, or (b) Biden screws up again in which case yesterday’s shit just gets pushed down the list, or (c) if it did matter, our future selves would’ve stopped off on the way back from 2016 to mention it.
Carlson Survives Brutal Russian Torture Session
In a brutal hostage video released last night, Russian President Vladimir Putin can be seen torturing an American tentatively identified as 54-year-old Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson for more than two hours. Carlson survived the ordeal and was released, although it’s not clear what emotional trauma he suffered.
Putin deployed some of the most fearsome weapons in any national leader’s arsenal: A platform and unrelenting boredom. People who should know better had howled in protest that this would be some kind of propaganda coup for Carlson, Putin, and probably Satan. Instead, the torture session — which was even longer than half of a Scorsese movie! — showed Putin toying with Carlson, steamrolling him, and beating him down with boring history lessons and a total lack of self-awareness.
The parallels — and differences — in the Biden video and the Putin video last night were striking. Biden was universally proclaimed as mentally weak for mistakenly referring to Egypt as Mexico one time. Putin, however, is treated as tough and strong after mistaking Ukraine for Russia for two years. And that’s despite numerous attempts to correct Putin by killing thousands of his soldiers.
The other parallel, of course, is that Putin was questioned by Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox and heir to the Swanson fortune, while Biden was questioned by Peter Doocy, currently of Fox and heir to Steve Doocy’s misfortunes.
Supreme Court Skeptical of Kicking Trump Off Ballots
If you read TFN because I predict things good — like Putin being boring — then you might recall how yesterday I suggested that even some of the non-right-wing judges might surprise us in yesterday’s oral arguments on the Colorado presidential ballot case. Hopefully, you don’t care, because I should not be trying to predict shit. It’ll only get me in trouble (shit, that’s a prediction, too. Dammit.)
Anyway… by the Associated Press’s count, all but one judge was sympathetic to the argument that Colorado should be forced to put D4FRFP Donald Trump back on the ballot. Justice Elana Kagan, for instance, wondered “why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”
Hilariously, when Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed soberly (ha!) that the way to disqualify a candidate for insurrection is to prosecute them for it (looking at you, Attorney General Merrick Garland!), Trump’s lawyer agreed and then quickly added that Trump cannot be prosecuted for anything ever because he once lived in the magic house.
(Trump’s immunity-from-prosecution argument in his not-quite-insurrection but fucking-with-an-election federal case will also go before the Supreme Court soon, as Trump has a Monday deadline to file his appeal of a ruling that no he does not have immunity because although he was president he is still, technically, biologically human.)
Justice Clarence Thomas was at yesterday’s hearing — presumably because a majority of the other judges allowed him to be — despite the fact that his wife was an active participant in and attempted leader of the actual insurrection at issue. Thomas didn’t explain his failure to recuse himself, but did plan to laugh about it over cocktails next month during his secret trip to Billionaire Sandals - Maldives.
Legal Triumph for Climate Scientist
Twelve years ago, a right-wing writer at a right-wing think tank funded by right-wing rich people defended their right to destroy the environment by calling a prominent climate scientist “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”
The scientist, Michael Mann, was based at Penn State, like Sandusky. (GET IT?!? Two things had something in common, which is a thing that right-wing writers consider “jokes”!)
Mann sued that writer and right-wing writer Mark Steyn, who piled on, for defamation. Yesterday, a jury ordered the two right-wing writers to pay Mann more than $1 million. The defense lawyers had argued that the attacks on Mann were just the opinions of the two writers, who are both the Jeffrey Dahmer of defamers IN MY OPINION.
Five Quickies
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) got roundly roasted for calling the failed border deal — that he helped negotiate — “half-assed,” suggesting he might go for a deal that was full-assed.
Two former surgeons general (they’re not generals, people, it’s an adjective) write in an opinion piece today that the government should approve a proposed Food and Drug Administration ban on menthol cigarettes or else as many as 238,000 Black people AND 416,000 other people will die.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) got a big legislative victory yesterday in his push to pass an amendment that would let politicians skip the airport lines that already make you want to kill yourself. No, it’s not Cruz’s attempt to lose re-election or win Most Hated Man Smirking, he’s pushing this amendment because having to stand on line could lead to embarrassing videos like the one that showed Cruz bound for Cancun while a winter storm savaged his state like Vladimir Putin “Stuck in the Middle with You”ing Tucker Carlson.
D4FRFP Donald Trump yesterday won all of Nevada’s delegates in the caucuses that he forced the Republican Party to hold so he could win all the delegates, which he might not have won if the delegates had been apportioned based on the state-mandated primary, which was held Tuesday even though it didn’t count. Former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) did not compete in the caucuses, alleging that the process had been rigged by Trump, whom she will endorse.
Unless a federal appeals court intervenes, former D4FRFP Donald Trump advisor Peter Navarro is gonna have to suit up in a prison jumpsuit soon, after a judge denied his request to remain free while he appeals his conviction and four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, which he’s guilty of since he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena in the Jan. 6 investigation and also because Navarro literally holds Congress in contempt.
TCB
SIGNORILE Thanks to Michelangelo Signorile for having me on his SiriusXM radio show last night. Always enjoy joining Michelangelo, one of the few folks who knows exactly where to drill in on my reporting about The Family. SiriusXM subscribers can check it out here.
POP QUIZ, HOT SHOT While we’re all judging Biden’s shitty memory, anyone remember what year I cited at the top of today’s TFN when I said this was the umpteenth time since _____ that a national leader mishandled documents? (Answer below, no peeking!)
TFN FIGHT! My argument that Democrats flipped just as much on immigration as Republicans did prompted a reader to take me to task. Me! Can you imagine? They write:
“I feel like you have an incorrect unstated premise that the facts on the ground have been constant and that the flip can only be explained by ‘craziness’. Crossings are way up, and the bussing along with [New York Mayor] Eric Adams’ vocal sniping has had a big effect. Maybe the Republicans claims about deleterious effects of unregulated migration are finally ringing true for those in urban centers where the bussing is taking place, after years of seeming like hyperbolic fear mongering. ..can’t the Democrats’ flip at least be plausibly claimed as an attempt to address a problem that the public wants them to deal with, while the Republicans’ position has no such claim?”
Yes! And also no.
Yes, there is genuine and increasing political pressure on Democrats to act on immigration. But on the Republican side there is genuine and increasing political pressure to save the country from Joe Biden by not giving him a victory on immigration. We can debate how factual the threats of Biden / immigrants really are, but both threats are political realities. Thanks for the discussion and for keeping me on my toes!
POP QUIZ ANSWER ㄥƐϛƖ
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND! I am working on several stories that I hope to bring you soon. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can spend more time on the reporting and writing and less time on the tawdry business of marketing and promotion. Sharing TFN with your fellow newsfuckers also helps!
Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.