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Documents Reveal Biden WH Worked With Archives on Trump Case


By Sandy Fitzgerald    |   Thursday, 02 May 2024 02:21 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-documents-nationalarchives/2024/05/02/id/1163276/

A trove of unsealed documents connected with the investigation into allegations that former President Donald Trump mishandled classified materials has revealed that several top Biden administration officials were working with the National Archives to help bring Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against him.

Lawyers representing Trump in the Florida case compiled court exhibits consisting of more than 300 pages of unredacted items, including emails and other correspondence showing that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su had been regularly communicating with National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) National Archive officials, as had the Department of Justice, reports Real Clear Investigations’ Julie Kelly. The correspondence also indicates that the Department of Justice had been communicating with NARA throughout most of 2021, even though it had claimed it became involved only after the Archives had sent in a criminal referral on Feb. 9, 2022. The referral was based on the Archives reporting that records with “classified markings” were included among the 15 boxes of materials Trump had turned in.

President Joe Biden, who denied involvement in the investigation, was not specifically named in the exhibits, which Trump’s attorneys filed in January.

The items were at first heavily redacted, but the team asked U.S. District Court judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over the case to remove many of the redactions.

Meanwhile, Smith claimed that releasing the materials would jeopardize his investigation, reveal potential witnesses, and potentially subject them to risks of harassment and intimidation.

Cannon, however, posted the mostly unredacted archives on April 22, and a comparison of the redacted and the unredacted materials showed the coordination between NARA and the DOJ, the White House, and the intelligence community.

The documents revealed that shortly after Trump left office in 2021, Biden’s Office of Records Management and the National Archives started making demands to the former president’s transition team and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff. Archives general counsel Gary Stern emailed Trump’s team in May 2021, the unredacted documents show, and asked the attorneys to account for almost 2 dozen original presidential records that were not transferred.

He did not specify any particular records except for “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office.”

One of the unsealed FBI reports indicated the Archives also wanted to get hold of a map that Trump had drawn on with a Sharpie during a 2018 briefing on the track of Hurricane Dorian.

David Ferriero, a national archivist appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, warned the Trump transition team in June 2021 that he was “running out of patience, and on Aug. 30 told Trump’s team that he assumed the boxes were destroyed and he would have to report the loss to lawmakers, the DOJ, and the White House.

Other documents showed evidence that White House lawyers were advising the archives, including a draft letter accompanying a Sept. 1, 2021 email where Stern said he had advised White House counsel about the documents.

The letter, from Ferriero to Attorney General Merrick Garland, said that presidential records “may have been unlawfully removed from U.S. government custody or possibly destroyed.”

Sandy Fitzgerald ✉

Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics. 

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Judge Delays First Hearing in Trump Documents Case


By Charlie McCarthy    |   Tuesday, 11 July 2023 03:27 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/judge-delays-donald-trump/2023/07/11/id/1126717/

The first hearing in former President Donald Trump’s criminal case involving classified documents has been pushed to July 18. A court order Monday established the new date after a dispute in which special counsel Jack Smith implied that Trump and co-defendant Walt Nauta were seeking an “unnecessary” delay by moving the date back from this coming Friday, the Washington Examiner reported on Tuesday. Nauta had submitted a request to delay the hearing due to his main attorney, Stanley Woodward, having prior obligations this week at a bench trial in Washington, D.C.

Earlier Tuesday, the Examiner reported that Trump wants the classified documents trial postponed until after the 2024 general election. Trump, currently the leading contender to win the Republican presidential nomination, and his aide, Nauta, are scheduled to go on trial in December.

The first hearing before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon may not be conducted in public due to the sensitivity surrounding the classified materials, the Examiner reported. It will likely be the first of many proceedings before the actual trial begins.

Smith disputed Nauta’s request to delay the first hearing. The special counsel wanted to know why Florida-based lawyer Sasha Dadan couldn’t handle the hearing instead of Woodward.

“An indefinite continuance is unnecessary, will inject additional delay in this case, and is contrary to the public interest,” Smith’s team wrote in its filing, the Examiner reported.

Nauta said he had “little notice” that prosecutors would bring charges in the Southern District of Florida, where he would be required to have an attorney licensed in the state.

The Examiner said the co-defendant also raised concerns about his defense team’s lack of security clearances. Nauta wrote that it was not reasonable to expect Dadan to assume a lead role on Friday.

A later filing on Monday showed that the defense team and the special counsel team agreed that July 18 would be the date of the first hearing.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 37 federal charges in connection to the classified documents case, including 31 counts of willful retention of classified documents under the Espionage Act.

Nauta pleaded not guilty to charges he helped the former president hide top secret documents that Trump took when he left the White House in 2021, Reuters reported.

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GOPers Order Blinken to Turn Over All Communications with Hunter Biden After Emails Show He Lied to Congress


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MAY 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/02/gopers-order-blinken-to-turn-over-all-communications-with-hunter-biden-after-emails-show-he-lied-to-congress/

Blinken at a U.S.-Philippines Dialogue conference

Following revelations that he allegedly lied under oath to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls from Senate Republicans to turn over communication records related to Hunter Biden and his shady business engagements.

On Monday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Blinken demanding that he turn over any and all records “referring or relating to Hunter Biden, his business dealings, or his family’s business dealings” by May 15. The request comes as part of Senate Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.

In the letter, Johnson and Grassley document a series of emails revealing how Blinken seemingly lied under oath about his prior communications with Hunter. While testifying before Congress on Dec. 22, 2020, Blinken was asked if he had any means of correspondence —including phone calls, emails, or texts — with Hunter Biden during his time as President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, to which Blinken replied, “No.”

Emails from Hunter’s laptop, however, appear to contradict Blinken’s December 2020 testimony. As documented in the Johnson-Grassley letter, Hunter emailed Blinken at his personal email address on May 22, 2015, asking if the then-deputy secretary of state was available to meet.

“I know you are impossibly busy but would like to get your advice on a couple of things,” Hunter wrote, to which Blinken replied, “Absolutely.”

Blinken sent another email to Hunter a few months later on July 22, indicating the two met in person.

“Great to… see you and catch up,” Blinken wrote. “You will love this: after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me :’He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife.”

The Johnson-Grassley letter also raises questions regarding Blinken’s knowledge of Hunter’s role as a Burisma Holdings board member. Burisma Holdings is a Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter $50,000 a month despite the president’s son having no prior energy experience. Joe Biden has claimed that while vice president, he threatened to withdraw U.S. aid if then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “didn’t fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time.”

Despite Blinken claiming to have no knowledge of Hunter’s Burisma ties during his December 2020 testimony, emails from Hunter’s laptop reveal that Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, “corresponded directly with Hunter Biden (from her personal email address) in an apparent attempt to connect [Blinken] with representatives of Burisma’s U.S. lobbying firm, Blue Star Strategies.”

In what appears to be an email chain dated July 14, 2016, Hunter informed Ryan that “S” and “K” — who appear to be Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, Blue Star Strategies’ Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer — told him “they called the State Department and left a message.” In her email to Hunter, Ryan appeared to reference Blinken, writing “He didn’t get the msg” and “He said if we can get him their numbers he can call them late afternoon DC time tmrw.”

While this specific email exchange doesn’t name Blinken, Johnson and Grassley noted that State Department documents obtained during their inquiry “make it clear that [Blinken was] concurrently trying to connect with representatives from Blue Star Strategies.”

“It seems highly unlikely that you had no idea of Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma while your wife was apparently coordinating with Hunter Biden to potentially connect you with Burisma’s U.S. representatives,” Johnson and Grassley wrote. “Because your testimony is inaccurate, Congress and the public must rely on your records as the source for information about your dealings with Hunter Biden.”

These revelations follow testimony from an ex-CIA official, who claimed that Blinken, during his time as a Biden campaign adviser, was the catalyst for the creation of a debunked letter from former intelligence officials that falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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DOJ is About to Rerelease Files on Christopher Steele Minus the Redactions


Posted by Steven Ahle | 

URL of the original posting site: https://steadfastandloyal.com/politics/doj-is-about-to-rerelease-files-on-christopher-steele-minus-the-redactions/

The Democrats who are already freaking out because of the failure of their impeachment hearings and today’s release of the IG report just got some more bad news. The DOJ will be releasing documents on Christopher Steele, without the massive number of redactions. Steele says that the DOJ has informed him that they would be releasing his files with none of the blackouts.

The New York Times is reporting that the decision to release the 400 pages of documents was made by AG Bill Barr, to whom President Trump gave the authorization to declassify any and all documents he thinks should be made public. No doubt those documents will show how many people warned the FBI that Steele was not credible.

Almost every word in the Steele dossier is a lie including “a” and “the.” Not one item has been proven to be true. There have been disclosures that even Bruce Ohr and british intelligence warned the FBI about Steele. Everybody can’t be wrong. And for the first time, the Deep State could not stop the truth from coming out.

From Fox News

Steele is poised to be a notable figure in the Horowitz report because he provided opposition research into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia which was funded by Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

Much of the Steele dossier has been proven discredited or unsubstantiated, including the dossier’s claims that the Trump campaign was paying hackers in the United States out of a nonexistent Russian consulate in Miami, and that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to conspire with Russians.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller also was unable to substantiate the dossier’s claims that Carter Page, who worked on the Trump campaign, had received a large payment relating to the sale of a share of Rosneft, a Russian oil giant, or that a lurid blackmail tape involving the president existed.

Horowitz’s report, as described by people familiar with its findings, is expected to conclude there was an adequate basis for opening one of the most politically sensitive investigations in FBI history and one that Trump has denounced as a witch hunt. It began in secret during Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was ultimately taken over by Mueller .

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