Fun Times At Joe Biden's Beach House
Fun Times At Joe Biden's Beach House
Plus, why is Trump forfeiting his greatest administrative achievement?
First, no I’m not quite back yet! I was planning to be back on Monday — which amounts to about 4 months less paternity leave than Mayor Pete — the baby is just two weeks old and she’s doing just great. I’m literally about to drive her to her doctor’s appointment, after I pick the older sister up from school. Starting Monday we should be back to your regularly scheduled daily Transom — but there’s just too much going on to wait that long!
If there were any classified documents in Joe Biden’s Beach House, they’re long gone now.
The Justice Department found no documents with classified markings during a Wednesday search of President Biden’s beach house in Rehoboth, Del., Mr. Biden’s lawyer said, but took some materials and handwritten notes that appeared to relate to his tenure as vice president.
The search lasted from 8:30 a.m. to noon, said the lawyer, Bob Bauer.
The search—one of at least three that have taken place upon agreement with Mr. Biden’s lawyers—came as special counsel Robert Hur quietly began work on Wednesday investigating how and why classified documents remained on premises used by Mr. Biden. That inquiry is expected to take months.
The FBI action at the Rehoboth house was the latest development in an expanding inquiry that began after Mr. Biden’s attorneys reported finding classified material on Nov. 2 at an office he used at a Washington think tank. People familiar with the probe said at least a dozen documents were recovered there and turned over to the National Archives.
And about those National Archives:
A top House Republican says the top lawyer for the National Archives “wasn’t allowed” to weigh in on the discovery of classified documents in President Joe Biden’s possession — despite publicly commenting repeatedly on former President Donald Trump’s similar circumstance.
The National Archives has stayed largely quiet when it comes to Biden's classified document saga — a stark contrast to how it handled Trump's scandal. It set up an entire section on its website, “Press Statements in Response to Media Queries About Presidential Records,” in early 2022 dedicated to its numerous press releases on the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents saga. However, in the weeks after Biden's scandal burst into public view (and months after the National Archives first learned about it), the agency has yet to issue a single press release on it.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, conducted a transcribed interview with National Archives general counsel Gary Stern on Tuesday, and he revealed Stern says he had been blocked from putting out public press releases on the Biden classified documents saga, with Comer suggesting only the Justice Department or the White House could have blocked the National Archives.
Jacob Heilbrunn on the Rehoboth raid.
Search’s up at the Biden beach house. President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer explains, “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware.” A bevy of black SUVs and sedans swarmed around the Biden property, once the site of happy days where the Biden clan congregated, now the target of the FBI.
My heart goes out not to Biden, who was obviously lax in his handling of classified documents, but to the poor slobs in the FBI who have to tromp through his various homes in search of papers that he was supposed to have handed over to the National Archives in January 2017. It’s difficult to think of a more tedious task. They’re more likely to trip over one of Hunter’s old bongs than to discover anything of real significance, which is why the agents only took with them a few papers, none classified.
Trump Goes After “RINO Globalist” Ron
Also at The Spectator, I weigh in on the Trump-DeSantis feud:
Why would a candidate for the presidency purposefully undermine his greatest achievement in government — one that required the movement of heaven and earth, one that his opponents deemed impossible, but one that he ultimately delivered to the broad benefit of the American people? It seems ridiculous. Yet that is what Donald Trump seems to be doing, in his typically scattershot way. You have to ask: why?
Trump, via his TruthSocial account, has been posting at record pace criticizing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — whom he maintains he voted for — as a “globalist,” knocking DeSantis for favoring lockdowns (which he didn’t) and for pushing people to get vaccinated (which he did). In the process, Trump is essentially eliminating any political benefit he could realize as the head of Operation Warp Speed, the deregulatory effort through which pharmaceutical companies were able to provide incredible amounts of the Covid vaccine at record speed.
It wasn’t too long ago that Trump was happy to tout the vaccine as a great triumph and demand credit for it. The media at the time had doubted and criticized it as an overpromise, while Joe Biden wondered whether it was sufficient. Kamala Harris even claimed in the vice presidential debate that “if Donald Trump tells us I should take it, I’m not taking it.” (She did, in fact, take it.)
Rather than tout their accomplishments, Trump’s team seems determined to lean into the latent vaccine skepticism on the right. In so doing, they’re both elevating Ron DeSantis as the clearest threat — Trump has criticized him more than any of the potential 2024 candidates, and DeSantis hasn’t even announced he’s running — and flipping the script on what should be a major talking point in the former president’s favor.
The talking point is obvious: “The leftist media said I couldn’t do it, and I did it. They won’t give me the credit, but we’re proud of what we accomplished.” Instead, Trump’s team is actively pushing opposition research that shows Ron DeSantis doing the awful thing of — wait for it — pushing the wheelchair of an elderly woman to get the vaccine.
What Trump appears to be recognizing, and reacting to in his normal “I’m not a puppet, you’re the puppet” way, is that DeSantis has the better of him when it comes to actual lockdown policy and management of Covid. Where Trump retained his established bureaucratic management team under Anthony Fauci, which made one bad decision after another, DeSantis fired those who got in the way of his approach and engaged in partisan and fraudulent leaks to the press. And where Trump doubted reopening, DeSantis pushed forward with it.
The Right Flank Tests McCarthy on Debt Fight
If the possibility of compromise exists, it will likely take months to play out. Congress and the White House have roughly until this summer to come to an agreement on raising the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much the government can borrow, or risk a potentially catastrophic default on the national debt. Wednesday’s face-to-face was just the opening gambit.
McCarthy almost didn’t make that meeting. There was never any guarantee Republicans would send him to sit across from Biden. It took 15 ballots after all, and as many concessions, for McCarthy to put down a mutiny within his own party and win the speakership. Three weeks later, though, the newly-minted speaker expressed confidence, telling reporters that on this issue “Republicans are united.”
The fact that voters just divided control of Congress between a GOP House and Democrat Senate, McCarthy said was “a positive.” The debate that will follow, he said during a short press conference outside the White House, “is exactly how government in America is designed – you have to find compromise.” The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been wondering aloud whether McCarthy can survive his own party. The president called him a “decent man” the night before the meeting, before seeming to lament that “he made commitments that are just absolutely off the wall” to become speaker.
“We understand what the speaker is going through,” Karine Jean-Pierre added Wednesday. “He has a caucus that has put forward some pretty extreme ideas, some extreme options in front of the American people.” The White House press secretary was referring to McCarthy’s right flank, many of whom would gather across town later that evening for a celebration in their honor.
The conservative group Freedom Works toasted the 20 House Republicans who “fought to restore regular order in the House” by almost scuttling McCarthy’s speakership. According to audio obtained by RealClearPolitics, those members feel empowered. After the battle for speaker, however, they also sounded invested in his success.
“What we did was we created the tools to save the republic,” Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said of changes to House rules that they demanded of McCarthy in exchange for their support. “Now we’ve got to pick them up and use them.” To win the holdouts over, McCarthy offered members of the House Freedom Caucus seats on the powerful House Rules and Appropriations Committees. He also restored the motion to vacate, a rule that allows a single member to force a vote on ousting a sitting speaker.
Hulu Embraces False History
The New York Times' 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project's most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.
In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones' assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker's warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to "some of" the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project's goal of replacing 1776 with a "true founding" of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times' website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer's uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear… The scene is an authoritatively delivered pronouncement set to stunning cinematography, but it's also false history.
Corporate Advertising’s Anti-Kid Messaging
Jenna Stocker in The Spectator.
In recent weeks, two television commercials have stood out as embodying the message that kids are nothing more than chaos. One such ad for BinaxNOW, an Abbott Covid test kit, shows a man asking his wife if they still need a pregnancy test as they make room in their medicine cabinet for their new Covid test. As the camera zooms in on his wife, raucous kids are heard and a look of disdain crosses her face. The pregnancy test is promptly thrown in the trash.
The other ad from Visible by Verizon contrasts two sisters, one serenely scrolling through her phone in the quiet sanctity of her home, the other surrounded by bedlam as her kids all but light a dumpster on fire in the middle of the living room. The ad clearly conveys that you don’t need a family (and all the baggage) to get an affordable phone plan.
Neither ad highlights the products or the benefits, but the message that resonates is that kids add nothing to life but chronic fatigue, mess, and unhappiness. It makes you wonder if the creative minds behind these ads have kids of their own, and if they do, why they have such a deep-seated animosity towards them.
These trends, together with progressive HR departments providing expenses for employees to get abortions, show corporate America is taking its cue from Ehrlich’s original plea, urging people to stop having kids.
After decades of vilifying TV stay-at-home moms like June Cleaver and Donna Reed, making a mockery of the nuclear family with eye-rolling teens and portraying fathers as beer-swigging dunces, the message from media and corporations about kids and families is “Just don’t do it.” It’s no wonder couples are taking a pass on having children. They’re being bombarded with anti-kid messages, told overpopulation is killing Mother Earth, that having families is an antiquated and selfish ritual. Besides, isn’t it much more stylish and cosmopolitan to have one’s social calendar filled with carefree Saturday brunches and spontaneous jet-set vacays to Rome? Kids are a millstone around society’s neck.
Feature
Inside the Catholic Civil War.
Items of Interest
Why Ukraine hasn’t been a boon to U.S. defense companies.
U.S., Philippines reach new deal on military cooperation.
Domestic
Wall Street worries about debt ceiling battle.
House prepares to weigh Mayorkas impeachment.
Arizona Republicans worry about Lake v. Blake.
Pelosi endorses Adam Schiff for California Senate.
Miranda Devine laughs at new Hunter Biden legal strategy.
Hae Min Lee’s family is back in court.
2024
J.D. Vance: Trump has best foreign policy record.
Nikki Haley plans February 15th presidential announcement.
Media
Roger Kimball on Hamilton 68, the fake think tank that fueled Russiagate.
Oprah revives 1619 Project fabrications.
Comcast starts selling off BuzzFeed stock.
Gawker 2.0 shuts down, managing just one false scoop.
Tech
More Democrats urge Apple and Google to remove TikTok.
Ephemera
Tunison: Conspiracy theory culture comes to the NFL.
The Sims adds double mastectomy scars, chest binders to game.
Review: Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin”.
Interview with the director of Pamela Anderson documentary.
James Gunn blasts past DC leadership, defends Shazam’s Zachary Levi.
Marie Kondo has given up on tidying after having three kids.
Kara Kennedy: Eva Green and the downfall of the diva.
Podcast
Quote
“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”
― Paul Johnson