Obama still had knowledged and approved of the CIA and FBI launching investigations of newly elected President Trump and many of the Trump Administration appointees based on fabricated information from the Obama Administration. Obama did not notify Trump, he only fanned the flames of Russia collusion and wrongdoing, misinformation that has cost people millions of dollars, their careers and in doing so, Obama knowingly and intentionally, maliciously, interfered with the orderly transition of power from one President to the next in violation of Federal Law.

Obama and those involved must be investigated, indicted, prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated.

Chuck Hagel

"[President] Biden's primary point of comparison wasn't really [Franklin D.] Roosevelt; it was [Barack] Obama. By the end of their Presidency, Biden was so in sync with his boss that the pair had what the journalist Jonathan Alter described as 'secret code.' When Obama tipped back his chair in meetings, Biden took that as a cue to ask provocative questions that Obama wanted answered but didn't want to raise himself for fear of shifting the tenor of a meeting. But Biden also chafed at the constraints of his job -- and if Obama sometimes rolled his eyes at him, he would roll his own right back. There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other. Biden told a friend that Obama didn't know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower."

-- Franklin Foer, on the unique dynamic of the relationship between then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama Administration, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), available now via Penguin Press.

There is only one president in my lifetime that I would let watch my drink and babysit my kids.

That man is Barack Obama.

Happy Flag Day! 

President Obama visits the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Cannon Ball Powwow on Flag Day, 2013. 

Series: Presidential Photographs, 1/20/2009 - 1/20/2017

Collection: Records of the White House Photo Office (Obama Administration), 1/20/2009 - 1/20/2017

Image description: President Obama, seated, shakes hands with a boy wearing orange, turquoise, and white powwow regalia including ankle bells and a roach style headdress. All around are other powwow attendees wearing Western clothing or powwow regalia. In the background are numerous American flags flying in the wind.

They say we're lucky as we have freedom of thought and no censorship. This old gruesome post wasn't even in the flagged posts box.

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

—Adolph Reed, writing about Barak Obama in The Village Voice, way back in 1996

The Justice Department told Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio on Monday that it will not provide most of the information he requested about the ongoing special counsel investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified material until that probe is complete, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.

In the letter, DOJ reiterates that it will uphold its longstanding practice of withholding information that could endanger or compromise ongoing investigations, specifically citing regulations in special counsel probes.

Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has demanded access to a host of documents related to the Biden special counsel investigation.

“Disclosures to Congress about active investigations risk jeopardizing those investigations and creating the appearance that Congress may be exerting improper political pressure or attempting to influence Department decisions in certain cases. Judgments about whether and how to pursue a matter are, and must remain, the exclusive responsibility of the Department,” the DOJ letter states.

DOJ also states in the letter that “disclosing non-public information about ongoing investigations could violate statutory requirements or court orders, reveal roadmaps for our investigations, and interfere with the Department’s ability to gather facts, interview witnesses and bring criminal prosecutions where warranted.”

House Republicans have made clear they plan to examine the Justice Department’s handling of politically sensitive probes, including its role in the ongoing special counsel investigations related to the handling of classified material by Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Jordan has asked the Department to produce documents related to the appointment of Robert Hur as special counsel in the Biden documents probe as well as the selection of Trump-appointed US Attorney John Lausch to lead the initial review of the case, in addition to a broad array of internal and external communications about the matter.

DOJ’s latest response raises the question of whether Jordan will now move to issue subpoenas for the documents in question, something he told CNN last week he would consider doing if the Department refused to hand them over.

“We’ll see, but we’re definitely looking at asking for documents via subpoena,” he said. “But we don’t know whether that will happen yet.”

Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye responded to Monday’s letter by saying, “It’s concerning, to say the least, that the Department is more interested in playing politics than cooperating.”

In a letter sent to Jordan earlier this month, the DOJ also signaled it’s unlikely to share information about ongoing criminal investigations with the new GOP-controlled House but noted it would respond to the Judiciary Committee chairman’s request related to the Biden special counsel probe separately.

Together, both letters provide an early sign of the hurdles Jordan is likely to face, particularly as he tries to investigate the Justice Department and the FBI. They also underscore how the appointment of a special counsel has further complicated matters for Republican lawmakers seeking to launch their own probes into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

House Republicans have been especially eager to dig into the Justice Department’s ongoing probes, even authorizing a Judiciary subcommittee tasked with investigating the purported “weaponization” of the federal government, including “ongoing criminal investigations.”

In Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” detective Hercule Poirot observes, “The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

That may be the best summary of the findings of special prosecutor John Durham in his 305-page report issued yesterday.  

Not only did the impossible happen, but they all did it: the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media.

In hindsight, it would appear impossible.

A political campaign hatches a plot to create a false claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Making this even more implausible is that the CIA and FBI know about the plot.

As detailed in the report, President Barack Obama and his national security team were briefed on how “a trusted foreign source” revealed “a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”

 ... Russia collusion conspiracy was invented by Clinton operatives....

Entrenched Washington Politicians Blame Trump for Everything Wrong with the Government, despite the fact that Trump had 4 years in elected office.

Unacceptable. We, as a nation, must hold our elected officials to a higher standard!

This political prosecution of Trump in New York, Georgia, Washington and Miami is a violation of the principles that America stands!

SUPPORT TRUMP!

Robert Gates

Would you say Biden has been a better president (so far) than Obama?

That's an interesting question. Obama had a really tough first three years. He inherited two raging wars that were not going well at all and an even worse economic crisis than the pandemic's aftermath. Sometimes, I think people forgot how scary the Great Recession got between 2008 and 2010. All Presidents are forced to hit the ground running on Inauguration Day, but the Obama Administration had a five-alarm economic fire to put out from the moment he took the oath. It required expending a ton of political capital just to get things steady and heading in the right direction. And then the Democrats got slaughtered in the 2010 midterm elections.

So almost all of Obama's first term was spent climbing out of a deep hole and despite the fact that he had some major legislative accomplishments from pretty early on in his Presidency, he really didn't start finding his footing until 2011. I was highly critical of the Obama Administration's communications strategy during his first term because he had some massive legislative victories (the Recovery Act, repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, the 2010 tax reform bill, Dodd-Frank, S-CHIP, and, obviously, the Affordable Care Act), but they fumbled some of the rollouts and did a lousy job promoting the impact of those accomplishments and their successes in implementing TARP. That started to improve after the 2010 midterms and as Obama became more comfortable in the White House. Remember, when he was elected President in 2008, he had only had three years of experience in Washington as a junior Senator -- and, quite frankly, he spent a lot of that time building a Presidential campaign and running for the Presidency. No one is ever completely ready to be President on day one, but Obama needed a lot more on-the-job training about Washington politics than, say, George H.W. Bush or Biden. After President Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and started diving into the 2012 reelection campaign cycle, he was on a roll. He also seemed to do a better job arguing his points when he had the foil of an opposing party in control of a Congressional chamber after the 2010 midterms. But it was rough for most of that first term, even though it seems like he was chalking up legislative victories at first glance.

Biden had the advantage of eight years as an influential Vice President and nearly 40 years as a powerful U.S. Senator. There are few Presidents in all of American history who had more Washington experience than Joe Biden did on Inauguration Day. He also was succeeding the worst President in history; someone who had bungled the biggest health crisis in modern memory, been impeached twice and had just incited an insurrection that attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to overturn an election. It's not that he had an easier task -- not by any means -- but Biden would have really needed to fuck up right out of the gate in order to have done worse than his predecessor.

The Biden Administration has clearly had its struggles, as well, but I think his team was far better prepared to tackle those problems than Obama's was during Obama's first term. Of course, most of the Biden Administration had worked in Obama's Administration, so they knew what they were doing by that point, and they communicated far more effectively. I think the biggest individual legislative victories and policy accomplishments of Obama's first term were probably bigger than any of Biden's individual achievements, but Biden's may have been more immediately impactful to more people, if that makes any sense. I also think that the fact that President Biden’s party performed so well in his first midterm election will also be remembered as a big victory because that just doesn't usually happen historically, and future historians will see it as even more impressive in contrast with the political climate in which it occurred.

After all of that, I recognize that I still didn't really answer your question! I honestly don't know. It always requires time to be able to properly judge Presidencies, especially when comparing them to others, so it's just too difficult for me to give a clear answer while we're still in the middle of Biden's first term. And I believe a President's job performance has to be rated on more than just legislative achievements, so other aspects of the job should be factored in. Did they inspire change? Did they provide moral leadership? How did they respond to the crises unique to their specific times? Did they have a certain vision or an agenda and how much of that mission did they accomplish? How did they meet international challenges and did they provide the global leadership that the rest of the world has sought from American Presidents since World War II? Did they fulfill their oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution? Was the country in a better place on the day their term ended than the day they were sworn in? It requires much deeper thought and a closer examination of how the Presidents led the country within the context of the times they presided over. I understand that I ended up asking more questions than answering, but it's just never quite as simple as looking at a scoreboard of legislative victories and policy failures.

Sexy Biden

Does anyone else remember the Lab Rats / Mighty Med Era of Disney XD shows? I have a vague memory of being super into those specific shows for a while and was just bullied at Applebees for it.

Eid Mubarak! 

President Obama greets a family at an Eid Al-Fitr reception in 2016. 

Series: Presidential Photographs, 1/20/2009 - 1/20/2017

Collection: Records of the White House Photo Office (Obama Administration), 1/20/2009 - 1/20/2017

Image description: President Obama smells a rose given to him by a toddler who is held in her mother’s arms at the front of a group of people.