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With a wink and that sly smile for which he is known, President Joe Biden snuffed a document grab by the Democrat controlled Congressional Committee investigating the so called “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
According to a
recent Associated
Press (AP) story, carried by a Hartford Paper on page 4 in its World and Nation
section, “A federal appeals court ruled this month [December] against [former
President Donald] Trump, and he [Trump] has filed an appeal to the Supreme
Court, though the high court has yet to decide whether to take up the case.
“Judge Patricia
Millett, writing for the court in the Dec. 9 opinion, said Congress had a ‘uniquely
vital interest’ in studying the events of Jan. 6 and Biden had made a ‘carefully
reasoned’ determination that the documents were in the public interest and that
executive privilege should therefore not be invoked. Trump also failed to show
any harm that would occur from the release of the sought-after records, Millett
wrote.
“’On the record
before us, former President Trump has provided no basis for this court to
override President Biden’s judgment and the agreement and accommodations worked
out between the Political Branches over these documents,’ the opinion stated.
But as December
rolled into the New Year, Biden, according to the most recent AP report, began
singing a very different song: “The House committee investigating the Jan. 6
insurrection at the Capitol has agreed to defer its attempt to get hundreds of
pages of records from the Trump administration, holding off at the request of
the Biden White House.
“The deferral is in
response to concerns by the Biden White House that releasing all the Trump administration
documents sought by the committee could compromise national security and
executive privilege.
“President Joe Biden
has repeatedly rejected former President Donald Trump’s blanket efforts to cite
executive privilege to block the release of documents surrounding that day. But
Biden’s White House is still working with the committee to shield some
documents from being turned over.
“Trump is appealing
to the Supreme Court to try to block the National Archives and Records
Administration, which maintains custody of the documents from his time in
office, from giving them to the committee.”
There is no
indication in the AP’s story that the news organization had asked Judge
Millet to comment on Biden’s about face.
Perhaps some savvy White House lawyer or some wide-awake member of the vast White House communication team had advised the President that a Supreme Court decision favoring Trump’s legal argument that the invocation of executive privilege by recent prior presidents such as Barack Obama – whose curriculum vita lies unexamined behind a Berlin Wall of collegiate privilege – was likely to be sustained.
In any case, the
huffing and puffing from Democrat members of the Investigating Committee has
now been tragically cut short by Biden who, according to the AP story has
determined that “releasing all the Trump administration documents sought by the
committee could compromise national security and executive privilege,”
according to the AP story.
The fat lady has now
sung. The windy proclamations that once filled the sails of Connecticut’s
all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation will be less effective as campaign
fodder. Due to arrive before Election Day is John Durham’s report – and possible
prosecutions of Hillary Clinton co-conspirators – on the “presumed
collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russian President
Vladimir Putin.”
The pivot that
turned Biden around on the point of executive privilege may have been the pending
Supreme Court decision that likely would settle the matter in favor of the
exercise of executive privilege. Biden’s dramatic reverse spin and the investigating
committee’s deference to the current President's recent judgment that “releasing all the Trump administration
documents sought by the committee could compromise national security and
executive privilege” should be a cause of national, cross party celebration.
Then too, Trump,
denied his most effective platforms -- the presidential soapbox and presidential
action -- appears to be disappearing as a politically effective Democrat Party
foil. Recent polls suggest that anti-Trumpism has not and will not translate
easily into pro-Bidenism. Biden’s poll numbers suggest that possible voters –
most alarmingly Hispanics, unaffiliateds and moms attending board of education
re-education camps -- are less interested in personalities than effective
presidential policies.
Whether Abe Lincoln
said it or not – there are some doubters -- the apothegm “You can fool all the
people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool
all the people all the time” remains true for both voters and reporters, some
of whom, though none quite yet at the AP, do not take kindly to having their noses pulled by vote hungry partisan
politicians.
The New Year promises
to be one filed with winks, nods and the tragic consequences of treacherous political
decisions.
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