Tag: West Palm Beach

…meanwhile…

TUESDAY 1/24/23

Pence Gets Ahead of the Story – Show of hands. Who among ex-presidents and ex-veeps did not take classified documents home? An attorney for Mike Pence says a search instigated by the former vice president found “a small number” of documents in his Indiana home bearing classified markings, The Washington Post reports. Pence is a likely candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

WaPo’s story quotes a letter to the National Archives by Gregory Jacobs, a designated representative for Pence’s vice-presidential records, who said the FBI collected the classified documents from his home last Thursday, January 19. In the letter, Jacobs said he would deliver the documents to the National Archives on Monday, June 23. 

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Ex-FBI Agent Indicted – Former FBI spy hunter Charles McGonigal was indicted in a Manhattan federal court Monday of taking $225,000 to try to get Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska off a U.S. sanctions list, while he was investigating the close confidant of Vladimir Putin, The Washington Post reports. McGonigal, now 54, retired from the FBI in September 2018. He was indicted on charges of money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts from his alleged ties to Deripaska, whose indictment of sanction violations was unsealed last September.

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All the Best Golf Buddies – How well does Donald J. Trump know Philadelphia mob boss Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino? The former president’s 2024 presidential campaign won’t say in response to a photo that turned up in The Philadelphia Inquirer showing Trump and “Skinny Joey” giving the thumbs-up, along with an unidentified friend of Merlino. The newspaper published a “slightly blurry” photo from an unidentified source showing a hatless Merlino posing for the camera with Trump and the unidentified friend, both wearing red MAGA hats, early in January at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. 

One of the three, “Skinny Joey,” has served a decade in prison for a 2001 racketeering conviction and reportedly works as a maitre d’ in a Boca Raton Italian restaurant named for him, according to the Inquirer.

--TL

MONDAY 1/23/23

Gallego to Challenge Sinema in ’24 – Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has announced he will run against incumbent Sen. Krysten Sinema in 2024 (per The Guardian). Progressive Democrat Gallego, who has served his Phoenix-area district since 2015, had been hinting at the run at least since Sinema left the party to become an independent after Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) won a runoff last December for a full term resulting in a Democratic Party net gain of one Senate seat after the midterms.

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Zients to Replace Klain as Chief of Staff -- Jeff Zients, who led the Biden administration’s pandemic response until last April, will replace Ron Klain as the White House chief of staff, likely after the president’s February 7 State of the Union address, according to multiple news outlets. The White House has not confirmed the reports, which were backed by statements from unnamed sources.

Zients returned to the White House last autumn to help Klain prepare for staff turnover following the midterms, according to The Washington Post, which notes that few staff members have left the administration. Klain, who will be the first of Biden’s inner circle to leave, assigned Zients various projects to prepare him for the chief of staff job, sources told WaPo.

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This Week – The Senate is in session Monday through Friday. The House is in session Tuesday through Friday.

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ICYMI, More Confidential Docs – It’s not easy to keep track of the number of separate searches for confidential documents found in President Biden’s possession, but we’ll try. Last Friday, the FBI conducted a search of Biden’s sprawling Wilmington, Delaware home to find additional confidential documents dating back to his vice presidency (2009-2017), and even earlier, when he was senior senator from the state. NPR’s Morning Edition referred to this as the “drip, drip” of such documents discovered, and it marks the fourth time since November that classified documents have been found at one of Biden’s properties, CNBC says.

The Difference, Again … Between Biden’s mishandling of confidential government documents and ex-President Trump’s stash at Mar-a-Lago is that Trump appears to have absconded with a stash of papers from Biden’s inauguration day, and he continuously told the Justice Department and National Archives he had returned everything. This culminated in a search warrant allowing the FBI to comb through Mar-a-Lago some 18 months after Biden’s inauguration. The FBI’s 13-hour search of Biden’s home last Friday reportedly was “consensual.”

But: Revelations of the initial discovery, just before last November’s midterms but not revealed until CBS News reported on the confidential papers earlier this month has exposed Biden to criticism from Republicans and right-wing media, while at least partially deflating the case against Trump. --Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Donald Trump and the Art of the Flush

By Stephen Macaulay

As you may recall from the early days of the pandemic, there was a monumental difficulty in acquiring toilet paper. It was just one of those things that people suddenly realized that were there to be a dearth of, things would not come out particularly well in the end. And because of that realization, the amount of available toilet paper was nearly non-existent.

One thing that continued to be available — more or less, with the emphasis on the latter — was facial tissue. The stuff you use to blow your nose with.

While the configuration of the two — toilet paper and tissues — is different, the material seems to be reasonably the same.

So people, not surprisingly, thought that if they couldn’t get their grip on Charmin, they could use the box of Kleenex.

Turned out that that was a bad move. Warnings came out that while toilet paper is formulated to be dissolved in water, that’s not the case for seemingly similar paper products. The latter would lead to clogs in sewers and septic systems.

One wonders how busy Emergency Plumbing of West Palm Beach is.

Maggie Haberman gave Axios two photographs that show the toilet in the White House residence during the Trump residency: Two pictures of torn up paper — as in copier paper, not something with a flimsiness to it — with Trump’s handwriting visible.

According to Haberman, Trump has a penchant for ripping and flushing.

So the FBI searches Mar-A-Logo.

There is a federal law, the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which, among other things, according to the National Archives:

  • Establishes that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office.

Hmm . . . seems that Trump has taken a whole lot of documents when he left Washington. Back in January the National Archives and Records Administration got 15 boxes of White House records from Mar-a-Lago.

Presumably there were more.

There is a federal law. If he didn’t “automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist,” isn’t that, ipso facto, a crime?

Maybe it is much simpler.

Possibly the Justice Department was worried about the plumbing situation in Palm Beach.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news