Biden has mastered the art of deflecting criticism of his corruption and incompetence by using black women as human shields. It began with Kamala Harris, who was grossly unready to serve in the White House, but whose nomination made a ticket headed by an old white hack seem transformational and whose continued presence makes it all but impossible to remove or bypass Biden from an office that he is equally unfit to occupy on ethical and moral grounds. DANIEL GREENFIELD
Biden’s Supreme Court Pick Shielded Top Clinton Aide Amid Email Scandal
President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee shielded one of Hillary Clinton’s top State Department aides from scrutiny about his use of a personal email account to conduct official business.
Then-U.S. district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2015 denied Gawker’s request for details about press aide Philippe Reines's stewardship of the account in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which sought emails Reines traded with 34 different media outlets. Jackson blocked Gawker’s request, calling it "extraordinary" and claiming there was no proof that Reines had acted in "bad faith" by using a personal email address.
Like Clinton, Reines often communicated with the press via a personal email account. That meant his communiqués were not preserved on State Department systems. When Gawker filed a FOIA request for Reines’s emails in September 2012, State Department officials were thus unable to turn up responsive records, prompting the lawsuit.
The State Department asked Reines to turn over whatever government records were in his possession around the time of the Gawker lawsuit, which he did via his lawyers in July 2015, two years after he left government service. Jackson therefore agreed to give the State Department additional time to sort through the "new" Reines records and turn them over to Gawker. Jackson supervised that process and lawyers for the parties kept her up to date on their progress via status hearings and reports.
Gawker put the screws to Reines, seeking affidavits that swore he had turned over all relevant documents and describing his methods for surrendering records to State.
"It is difficult to view the timeline of events surrounding the compilation of records responsive to Gawker’s FOIA request as anything short of a bureaucratic and managerial catastrophe," lawyers for Gawker wrote in a 2015 filing. "State has provided scant information regarding why it was not until 2015 that it finally sought to gather the records from Mr. Reines."
Jackson denied that request, calling it "extraordinary." She said that the State Department had no obligation under FOIA "to solicit or produce" documents in an ex-official’s sole possession. And there’s a crucial difference, she added, between producing requested documents—which is within the scope of FOIA—and the initial decision whether to retain said documents.
"An agency’s threshold determination regarding which records to retain in its files is entirely distinct from the agency’s subsequent search of maintained records pursuant to the FOIA—and these two duties should not be conflated," she wrote in an opinion denying Gawker’s request.
The decision was the only opinion Jackson handed down over the course of the dispute.
Jackson’s opinion parted ways with a colleague on the Washington federal trial court, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. In a separate lawsuit, Sullivan required Clinton herself and two of her top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, to submit affidavits along the lines Gawker sought. Gawker’s request mentioned Sullivan’s order and may have been based upon it.
Jackson said the Reines case was different because there was evidence that Clinton’s email system was designed to skirt FOIA altogether. In the Reines-Gawker fracas, she said there was a "total absence of any indicia of bad faith" on Reines’s part.
In fact, Reines explicitly wrote, "I want to avoid FOIA" on an email exchange from his personal account with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in February 2009, around the time he joined the State Department. That indicia of bad faith was not in the record before Jackson so far as the Washington Free Beacon could tell.
Reines’s colorful if bizarre exchanges with the Free Beacon over his spat with Gawker helped cost him a job on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The clash ended when Gawker abandoned the case in 2017.
Published under: Clinton Email Scandal, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Supreme Court
Biden’s Supreme Court Pick Faces Array of Ethics Questions
A conflict of interest could trigger recusal from landmark affirmative action case
Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will face ethics questions about her ties to left-wing public relations professionals, and a conflict of interest that could trigger her recusal from a landmark affirmative action case.
Jackson, whom President Joe Biden nominated Friday, has come under fire following a report that she retained PR gurus with deep ties in Democratic politics to assist with her prospective nomination. And Jackson's service on one of Harvard University's governing boards will prompt questions as to recusing herself from a lawsuit accusing the university of bias against Asians in admissions, which the High Court will hear this fall.
Republicans are still fine-tuning a response to Jackson's nomination. Beyond the ethics items, the nationwide spike in violent crime could play a major role in Republican maneuvering around her nomination. Jackson has deep experience in the criminal justice system as a former trial court judge and commissioner on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a panel that offers guidance on criminal penalties.
Just hours before Biden officially nominated Jackson, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) sent a letter to Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan pressing for details about Jackson's work with PR operatives Robert Raben and TJ Ducklo. Raben and Ducklo are Democratic loyalists who, according to a Feb. 16 Politico Report, helped ward off attacks on Jackson and connected reporters with the judge's allies during the selection process.
"It would be unusual, if not unique, for a candidate to enlist political communicators to assume this role," Grassley's letter reads.
Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Srinivasan is chief judge of Jackson's court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
It's typical for judges jockeying for the Supreme Court to mobilize a volunteer network of ex-colleagues and former clerks to background reporters, lobby decision makers, and assist with nomination logistics. Those personnel, given their working relationship with the judge, are best positioned to speak to the judge's body of work, their personal characteristics, and their likely profile as a justice.
PR professionals from partisan Washington, D.C., outfits lack that kind of subject matter expertise and knowledge about the prospective nominee. As such, Republicans want to better understand what Raben and Ducklo were doing on Jackson's behalf, particularly if they seeded negative stories about her rivals in the press. One of Jackson's ex-law clerks edited Wikipedia entries for the judge's two main rivals early in the selection process, according to Politico. The edits meant to paint both contenders as more moderate than Jackson, seen as a progressive stalwart.
Grassley's letter also asks whether Raben and Ducklo coordinated with the D.C. Circuit's media relations office. Ducklo, a former White House press aide, resigned in February 2021 following reports that he threatened a female reporter.
Apart from the messaging dust up, Jackson will also face ethics and recusal questions related to a lawsuit that alleges that Harvard discriminates against Asian students in admissions. The High Court will hear that case later this year, and the plaintiffs are urging the justices to ban consideration of race in college admissions altogether.
Jackson serves on Harvard's Board of Overseers, one of the university's two governing boards. The board plays "an integral role in the governance of the university," through quality control, strategic advice, and external assessments of various departments, according to Harvard's website.
Recusal decisions are ultimately up to the justices themselves, who are not formally bound by an ethics code. Jackson may be able to distance herself from the controversy, such that she could participate, if she played no role in crafting or advising on admissions practices as an overseer. Recusal is also appropriate where there is reason to question a justice's partiality, but such arguments are often entangled with partisan agendas.
Solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, obtained special authorization from the White House counsel and a senior Justice Department official to participate in the Harvard case despite a conflict of interest. Prelogar is a former university employee, having taught a class at Harvard Law School on appellate advocacy. Ethics rules required Prelogar to recuse from the case absent a waiver, and an oversight group is pressing for more information about the administration's decision to grant one.
The Harvard lawsuit will also supply Republican lawmakers with ample questions for the judge. The plaintiffs, an anti-affirmative action group called Students for Fair Admissions, used Harvard's own internal data to show Asian applicants inexplicably score lower than all other racial groups on the university's subjective personal evaluation. The personal score is one of four domains the university weighs in the admissions process.
The plaintiffs say the scoring outcomes reveal a pervasive "model minority" bias against Asians at Harvard. They also note Harvard's office of institutional research flagged the personal scoring disparity almost a decade ago, but the admissions office made no changes to its policy.
Those facts and many others offer Republican senators numerous avenues to pursue, given Jackson's leadership role at Harvard.
Joe Biden SCOTUS Nominee Refuses to Use ‘Illegal Alien,’ Opts for ‘Noncitizen’
President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, apparently refuses to use the term “illegal alien” in her court opinions, opting instead for “noncitizen.”
In a handful of immigration-related cases that Jackson has ruled on U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, she has made a note to employ the term “noncitizen” or “undocumented non-citizens” rather than the terms “alien” or “illegal aliens” that are regularly used in court and in federal statutes.
For instance, in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, Jackson wrote a footnote in her ruling stating:
The Court uses the term “undocumented non-citizens” throughout this Memorandum Opinion to refer to persons born abroad—the federal immigration statutes call them “aliens”—who are deemed “inadmissible” under 8 U.S.C. §§ 1182(a)(6)(C) or 1182(a)(7) because they have not received authorization to come into, or remain, in the United States. [Emphasis added]
Likewise, in Kiakombua v. Wolf, Jackson notes that “this Memorandum Opinion employs the term ‘noncitizen’ in lieu of the term ‘alien’ to refer to ‘any person who is not a citizen or national of the United States.'”
Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit, is sworn in before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on pending judicial nominations, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool via AP)
Dan Stein, head of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said in a statement that Jackson’s “refusal at times to use the term ‘alien’ in the context of interpreting immigration law — a term of longstanding and legally correct usage — indicates a willingness to allow politics and political pressure to influence her judgment.”
“This is of concern to us, as we believe it is up to courts to use the language of the statutory law in decisions interpreting that law,” Stein said.
As Breitbart News reported, Jackson has a mixed record on immigration — twice striking down former President Donald Trump’s border controls but also upholding that federal agencies have broad authority to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border and ruling in favor of regulations to tighten up asylum rules.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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