What Happened Today: February 8, 2023
Biden gives SOTU; Hersh reports sabotage; Headlines from Svoboda; Lee Smith on classified docs
The Big Story
President Joe Biden all but announced his bid for re-election in 2024 during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. With repeated calls for the United States to “finish the job”—a campaign-ready slogan for a second term—an unusually energetic Biden touted his economic wins, including lowered prescription drug costs and the creation of several jobs programs, that could become a decisive advantage against future Republican challengers. During an hours-long speech that drew catcalls and insults from Republicans more commonly heard in the British parliament than on the floor of Congress, the president pocketed a useful campaign video clip after his caricature of a proposal from Florida Sen. Rick Scott to sunset Medicare and Social Security drew loud rebukes from his opponents.
The speech came just as Biden’s approval ratings reached a near nadir for a second-year president, with recent polls saying Biden—at 80 the oldest-ever president—should step aside for a younger candidate. Moreover, most voters see the economy as the most significant issue of the day, and only 37% support how he’s handling the economy.
Picked by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to deliver the Republican response, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders eschewed the opportunity to present an alternative economic platform that spoke to the majority of Americans’ concerns in favor of a blistering admonishment of a Biden administration taken over by the “radical left” that’s “more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day.”
The culture-war retort from the former press secretary for then president Donald Trump gestured toward what’s shaping up to become a key line of attack for several leading Republicans poised to take on Trump in the primaries. Even after a midterm election in which Republican campaigns built to take on the woke establishment failed at the ballot box in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, and elsewhere, Trump has pivoted away from the theme of a stolen 2020 election and toward “race-based discrimination” in schools. Similarly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made his opposition to critical race theory and gender identity topics in classrooms a cornerstone of his political brand, just as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley wrote on Twitter that “CRT is un-American” soon after her plans for a campaign came to light.
Read More: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-response-biden-state-of-the-union/
In the Back Pages: Closing in on the Classified Coverup
The Rest
→ A landmark national security trial in Hong Kong is underway for the 16 pro-democracy activists who’ve spent the past two years in prison after pleading not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit subversion. The defendants were a part of a group of 47 activists arrested during a raid in January 2021 after they organized an unsanctioned primary to select candidates to challenge a city assembly election they saw as undemocratic and deferential to Beijing. Chinese officials have denied interfering in the city’s political process, even after imposing a controversial national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 that’s been criticized as a tool to chill dissent.
→ Texas utility customers previously boasted the worst energy bills after a historic winter storm led to price surges across 15 states in the South and Midwest in 2021. But now Oklahoma residents are leading the group of 15 states with the biggest premium on their monthly bills as they begin to see what will be years’ worth of surcharges after state officials rolled the costs incurred during the storm into bonds backed by the surcharges. Many Oklahomans are calling foul on the accounting maneuver for a lack of transparency about how the bonds were created, and there’s increased skepticism of the state’s reliance on just-in-time natural gas supplies that remain vulnerable to wild price swings caused by disruptive events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The United States spent nine months planning a sabotage mission to take out the Nord Stream pipelines built to carry cheap natural gas between Russia and Europe last September. At least, that’s the story from famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who published the bombshell claim in a 5,000-word piece on his Substack. Hersh has cited an unnamed source who apparently had “direct knowledge of the operational planning,” a mission carried out under “the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as Baltic Operations 22.” Hersh has been decorated as one of the great living investigative reporters, partly owed to his work uncovering the 1968 My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. But his overreliance on anonymous sources has called into question the veracity of some of his more recent reporting. On Wednesday, the White House called Hersh’s post “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Read More: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
→ Doctors and nurses are urging patients to come clean about recent cannabis use ahead of surgical procedures as new research shows regular cannabis users require more anesthesia compared to those who don’t indulge. Some surgeons have reported using two or three times the amount of anesthetic for regular cannabis users, and the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine has updated its guidelines for more thorough pre-surgery screenings, even as it remains unclear exactly why cannabis users require more anesthesia to reach sedation. Another study found that cannabis users require as much as 37% more opioids than non-users do to treat their pain after surgery, which they reported as being more severe compared to those who hadn’t been using.
→ Thread of the Day:
John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, seems to have rattled Texas Tech University enough to end its inclusion of faculty candidates’ DEI statements from the biology department’s hiring process. Sailer had obtained the department’s evaluations of candidates through an open records request and published an article in The Wall Street Journal on its decisions to penalize candidates who were insufficiently versed “in the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct.” Such criteria seem to prioritize candidates’ allegiance to various ideological viewpoints over their fitness to teach and research biology, and now Texas Tech appears to agree. “Recently, we learned of a department that required a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement in addition to the usual applicant materials as part of a faculty search,” the school wrote in a statement. “We immediately withdrew this practice and initiated a review of hiring procedures across all colleges and departments.”
Today’s headlines come from Svoboda, a Ukrainian-language newspaper founded in 1893 in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The President honors the memory of the Heroes of Krut, who died during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917 // The Battle of Bakhmut Continues // A memorial march was held in Kyiv // Drones attacked military facilities in Iran // Political prisoners detained in Russia are in serious condition // President Zelensky meets with the High Commissioner of the United Nations // The collapse of the Russian Empire is imminent // There is no forgiveness for executioners
→ A clash over a Wi-Fi password and access to internet in a remote section of the Amazon near the border of Venezuela and Brazil has left four members of the indigenous Yanomami community dead. In March, Venezuelan soldiers changed the password on a router the military had agreed to share with the local Yanomami. Though it remains unclear exactly how the conflict led to four dead, six others wounded, and two soldiers held hostage for days until negotiators could win their release, the clash over the password was fueled in part by a contentious and oftentimes violent history between the Yanomami and the military there.
→ Number of the Day: 38,390
That’s the number of points scored so far by LeBron James after he broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA all-time scoring record on Tuesday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Once considered unbreakable, Abdul-Jabbar’s record was set in 1984 thanks in large part to his singular sky hook that has yet to see a practitioner of equal execution. James dethroned the longtime Lakers captain with an offensive style that utilized raw strength in the paint and a potent jumper that kept up with radical shifts to the game over the past 20 years.
TODAY IN TABLET:
‘You People’ Is a Warning, You People by Liel Leibovitz
The new Netflix offering accurately portrays the yawning void at the heart of secular Jewish and African American identity
Allied Forces by Maggie Phillips
As evangelical support for Israel—once rock solid—erodes, one Christian group is promoting a different kind of allyship by showing up when antisemitic attacks occur
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Closing in on the Classified Coverup
A major Biden ally is also a top donor to the National Archives. Could private equity billionaire David Rubenstein hold the key to the White House documents scandal?
By Lee Smith
At the center of the Biden document coverup is the question of who blocked the National Archives and Records Administration from informing the U.S. public about the classified records found in the President’s office in early November. The Archives’ general counsel told members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that he couldn’t divulge that information, but GOP House leadership concluded that only Attorney General Merrick Garland or Biden himself could have given those orders.
But there’s a third powerful name in play, this one from outside of the government: David Rubenstein. Co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm the Carlyle Group, Rubenstein is one of the Archives most generous patrons. In 2013, the David M. Rubenstein Gallery at the National Archives was completed at a cost of $13.5 million. Rubenstein is also a major Biden ally. He has regularly hosted the Biden family at his Nantucket estate for Thanksgiving—in 2022, 2021, and 2014.
According to the chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee James Comer, the Archives’ “inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records held by former President Trump and President Biden raises questions about political bias at the agency." And, indeed, under recently retired chief archivist David Ferreiro, the Archives gladly joined forces with the Department of Justice-led anti-Trump campaign. As Trump’s lawyers were negotiating last winter with Archives officials over which documents constituted presidential records and which were personal, Ferreiro, his tenure winding down, struck his final blow for the resistance: He referred the former president to the DOJ for a criminal investigation that led to the FBI’s August raid of Trump’s Florida home.
For Americans wondering why, in contrast to its partisan activism last Summer, the National Archives has suddenly gone silent during the Biden affair, Rubenstein’s patronage may offer a clue. A spokesperson for Rubenstein said he played no role in this matter and a spokesperson from the National Archives responded that they have no comment.
Indeed, Biden’s friend Rubenstein appears to exercise considerable influence over the staffing of senior personnel at the agency. Before Ferreiro was appointed by Barack Obama in 2009 to lead the National Archives, he was the University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke University from 1996 to 2004, at the same time that Rubenstein was chair of the Duke board of Trustees. The nominee to replace Ferreiro at the Archives, Colleen Shogan, is also affiliated with Rubenstein. She is currently the Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Center.
The National Archives is supposed to be above the political fray, an institution dedicated to preserving historical records. And indeed history is one of Rubenstein’s passions. According to one profile focused on his funding of Washington, D.C. monuments and institutions, “Rubenstein has shaped the cultural landscape of the nation's capital perhaps more than any other private citizen in the past century.” It seems that Rubenstein’s historical mission is to turn U.S. institutions into platforms to promote contemporary Progressive ideas. He donated $20 million to refurbish parts of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in a makeover that recasts the founding father’s legacy as an object lesson in systemic racism. Ibram X. Kendi’s titles are available for purchase at the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center, and the permanent David M. Rubenstein exhibit at the National Archives, “Records of Rights,” focuses on America’s disenfranchisement and mistreatment of minorities.
Like other top Biden allies, Rubenstein has long been bullish on the Chinese Communist Party. “China has a very bright economic outlook,” Rubenstein told a Davos audience in 2022. “We will continue to invest there.” A 2019 Wall Street Journal report showed that Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group helped Beijing evade U.S. export controls to purchase satellites that help network People’s Liberation Army troops, boost CCP propaganda broadcasts, and allow Chinese authorities to put down protests in Xinjiang, where the Party has detained more than a million Muslims, mostly from the Turkic-speaking Uyghur population, in forced labor and re-education camps.
Last week, the FBI conducted another inspection of one of Biden’s residences, this time a seaside home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in an unsuccessful search for more classified documents. The president’s lawyers are at pains to emphasize that in contrast to the former president, whom Biden targeted for holding classified documents, the current commander-in-chief is cooperating with federal investigators. Despite the fact that both Biden and Donald Trump are under investigation for the same thing, it’s true that the two cases are different.
In Trump’s case, Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel because the White House wants to charge the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination. The job of the special counsel assigned to the Biden affair is, it seems, to bury it. That’s why the Justice Department is ignoring the demands of Republican-led congressional oversight committees that want to know the substance of the Biden documents. Since those records are now part of an ongoing investigation, it’s unlikely the American public will see them anytime soon, or ever. And yet the scandal continues to grow.
Thanks to the stonewalling from government officials, the public still knows very little about the nature of the original misdeed, but current and former Republican officials say the National Archives may be the origin point of the Biden affair. While the administration’s official account holds that the Biden documents were packed up and shipped to his homes and office when he left the Vice Presidency, congressional sources believe that he may have retrieved them from the Archives after he left office. Those sources call this the “Berger Scenario,” after Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, who was caught leaving the Archives with classified documents in 2003. One recent press account shows that Biden visited the Archives in early 2017. “When he was writing a book after leaving the Vice Presidency,” according to The Washington Post, “he made the trip to the National Archives to review relevant documents.”
Republicans are angry that yet another Biden scandal was hidden from US voters before an election, but there were signs something was brewing shortly after the classified documents were first identified by Biden’s lawyers at his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. just before the midterms. According to the Biden team’s account, the White House notified the Archives on November 2 and the Archives told the DOJ two days later. Less than two weeks after that, a November 14 article in The Washington Post explained that, according to “people familiar” with the Trump investigation, officials believed that Trump’s decision to hold on to documents after leaving office was motivated by ego, not profit. He just wanted to keep mementoes he’d collected during his time as leader of the free world.
It was a remarkable reversal after three months of media hysteria that reached a fever pitch when broadcast celebrities accused Trump of selling nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, a crime for which, suggested historian Michael Beschloss and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, he should be executed. But never mind, what Trump had done wasn’t actually all that bad — because, as the U.S. public would soon learn, Biden had done the same.
And when the news did drop, Party operatives brushed it off. The real problem, according to Biden boosters, is that the government classifies way too much material. That’s true, but it’s to be expected in the galactic capital of ass-covering, where long tenure is typically evidence of talent to escape accountability. Of course the federal government will avail its hirelings of every possible instrument to hide their screw-ups from those who pay their salaries—that is, the American public.
If Biden’s problem was just the U.S. classification system, the president’s team wouldn’t have hired top Democrat fixer Bob Bauer as Biden’s personal lawyer to pick up the pieces. The fact that Obama’s former general counsel is running the show is evidence that the scandal has the White House and senior Party officials worried.
Before Bob Bauer came on, Biden was represented by Covington and Burling, home to Obama’s first attorney general Eric Holder. Biden’s Covington cleaners included James Garland, Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff at DOJ and Robert Lenhard, a member of Obama’s transition team who later represented the super PAC supporting Obama’s re-election.
Also part of the Covington team was Dana Remus. She served in the Obama White House, and was later general counsel for the Obama Foundation. She also represented Michelle Obama, and Barack Obama officiated her 2018 wedding. Remus had been Biden’s White House counsel until July, and she joined Covington in October. Within a month she was representing Biden in the matter of the classified documents. Remus did not respond to Tablet’s questions concerning when she first became aware of the documents in Biden’s possession — whether it was while still at the White House, after she left the administration but before she started at Covington, or on or around the official November 2 start date of the crisis.
Rubinstein clearly has steared the National Archives in the woke direction and should testify in Congress together with the former president of the U of P , and David Cohen , a former Comcast VP and bundler for Biden all of whom received quid pro quo treatment with important positions for supporting Biden who in turn tookl 10% off the top from the CCP "anonymous donations" for the so called think tank
Why anyone listens to Seymour Hersh is beyond me. He's been a peddler of fantastic tall tales for decades, discredited over and over. The difference between now and then is that the media's ecosystem for fact-checking and verification is much weaker now -- if you peddle the "right" "news."