Joe Biden Reminds Trump He’s a Has-Been Who Lost the Election

During the four anni horribiles that Donald Trump was in office, he and his lawyers regularly tried to hide behind the office of the presidency when it came to legal issues. Sued for defamation by a writer whose rape accusations he claimed were a lie while insulting her looks to boot? According to then attorney general William Barr, Trump was acting in his official capacity as POTUS at the time, and therefore should be defended by the Justice Department. Suspected of committing fraud relating to hush-money payments to a porn star and Playboy model? In that case, his personal attorneys made the bold claim that it was unconstitutional for presidents to be investigated for any crimes whatsoever while in office, including shooting a person on Fifth Avenue.

Now, of course, Trump is not president. Yet he still seems to believe the powers and the privileges of being president should apply to him, an assumption that the actual president has now, on two separate occasions, been forced to explain is about as laughable as the idea of Ivanka Trump being qualified to run the World Bank.

Per CNN:

President Joe Biden has once again refused to assert executive privilege over more documents that former President Donald Trump has sought to keep out of the hands of the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. According to a letter obtained by CNN, White House counsel Dana Remus informed National Archivist David Ferriero on Monday that Biden would not assert privilege over additional materials that Trump requested remain secret as a matter of executive privilege. “President Biden has considered the former President’s assertion, and I have engaged in consultations with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice,” Remus wrote. “President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to the documents provided to the White House on September 16, 2021, and September 23, 2021. Accordingly, President Biden does not uphold the former President’s assertion of privilege.”

As part of the House select committee’s sweeping investigation, the panel has sent requests for information to a number of federal agencies. The committee has specifically asked for “all documents and communications within the White House” on January 6, including call logs, schedules and meetings with top officials and outside advisers, including Rudy Giuliani.

After the White House refused to keep secret the initial batch of documents requested by the House committee, press secretary Jen Psaki explained that Biden had “determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives,” adding that the West Wing would “evaluate questions of privilege on a case-by-case basis, but the president has also been clear that he believes it to be of the utmost importance for both Congress and the American people to have a complete understanding of the events of that day to prevent them from happening again.”

For his part, Trump responded to Biden’s decision to allow Congress to find out exactly what he was up to on January 6 by suing Congress and the National Archives and claiming, via his lawyer, that Biden’s actions were all about “accommodat[ing] his partisan allies,” as opposed to believing in the importance of thorough investigation into one of the most shameful days in American history.

In related news, over the weekend Rolling Stone reported that planners of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol have informed congressional investigators that “multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the January 6 events that turned violent,” and that they participated in “dozens” of planning briefs with White House officials and members of Congress. So it would certainly seem pretty important for the House committee to be able to do its job, and find out which current and former politicians actively helped try to overturn democracy.

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Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg personally approved a Facebook exec throwing a party to celebrate Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court

Back in 2018, rank-and-file Facebook employees were supremely pissed to turn on their TVs and see Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy at the company, sitting in the room during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. While Kaplan was there in a personal capacity as a long time friend of the beer-aficionado and man accused of sexual assault, his presence sent the uncomfortable message that Facebook was on his side and against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (Kavanaugh, of course, has denied the allegations). Responding to the outrage, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a town hall that while Kaplan didn’t violate any company policies, he personally would not have attended the hearings; for her part, COO Sheryl Sandberg described Kaplan’s appearance as a mistake.

And yet! A week later, Kaplan threw a party at his house—attended by Kavanaugh—to celebrate everyone who’d worked on the nomination, and subsequently attended Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony. All of which, according to new disclosures, was a-OK with Sandberg.

Per Jezebel:

These actions were totally fine, Sandberg wrote [on an internal message board], because Kavanaugh was already confirmed at that point: “For the company, we see a distinction between attending a controversial public hearing about sexual assault on the one hand which we agree was a mistake, on the other hosting a gathering at your home and attending a swearing-in ceremony for a confirmed Justice and close personal friend.”

Unsurprisingly, many Facebook employees did not agree and noted that rank-and-file workers would be fired for much less—the problem being, essentially, that Facebook was hypocritically giving Kaplan the kind of pass for being a powerful white man that Congress had given Kavanaugh. Sandberg also said that “we can be a workplace where everyone – survivors, people with conservative and liberal political views, and people who don’t want to discuss social issues – feel safe and empowered to do their work.” The post received 577 comments, which span 73 pages of the document.

Notable comments include: “Wait, how is attending the hearing a mistake, but attending a public swearing-in ceremony is not? Aren’t they both unnecessarily injecting Facebook into a contentious national debate?”; “Isn’t Joel our head government person? How is fb’s top government person [showing] up at a government hearing or confirmation a ‘personal’ thing? We’re all asked to focus on impact and to measure, so what is wrong about the company asking what the impact of these actions are? If a fb engineer wrote code for a friend’s business that had a negative impact on Facebook that engineer would (and should) be held accountable by Facebook”; and our personal favorite, “I’ve never read something from leadership that rung so hollow…Why do you draw a false dichotomy between a crushing symbolic moment and supporting a friend? I’ve had friends with serious problems and the way I support them is by helping them be a better person – not throwing them a kegger when they make bail.”

GOP candidate for Virginia governor assures parents he’ll ban Toni Morrison books from schools

Next Tuesday, Virginians will go to the polls to elect their next governor. On the ballot are Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who, among other things, wants to introduce mask and vaccine mandates, and Republican Glenn Youngkin, who is against mandates. Another difference between the two? McAuliffe doesn’t think parents should be telling schools what they can and cannot teach, while a new ad from Youngkin suggests he’ll ban books by Toni Morrison because one mother claimed it gave her son nightmares. Yes:

A new ad for the Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign features a woman who sought to have the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s classic 1987 novel, “Beloved,” removed from her son’s school curriculum because it gave him nightmares. “As a parent, it’s tough to catch everything,” Laura Murphy, identified as a Fairfax County mother, says in the ad. “So when my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine. I met with lawmakers. They couldn’t believe what I was showing them. Their faces turned bright red with embarrassment.”

Murphy does not mention in the ad, however, that her son was a high-school senior at the time and that the book in question, assigned as part of his Advanced Placement English curriculum, was “Beloved,” the novel about slavery in America that won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

In addition to “Beloved,” Republicans are currently trying to dictate what can and cannot be taught in schools, and, naturally, much of what falls in the “can’t” category are materials that do not cast white people in the best of lights. Across the country, conservatives want to ban “critical race theory” from the classroom, while in Texas, a Dallas school district has told teachers if they have a book on the Holocaust, the must also provide a book with an “opposing perspective.”

Elsewhere!

Democrats Target ‘Buy, Borrow, Die’ With Billionaire Tax Plan (Bloomberg)

FDA advisers back Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for ages 5 to 11, saying benefits outweigh risks (Washington Post)

The NYPD Is the Latest Police Force to Fight Vaccine Mandates (Intelligencer)

How Facebook shapes your feed: The evolution of what gets top billing and what gets obscured (Washington Post)

Biden Inches Closer to Naming Next Federal Reserve Chair, Other Picks (Bloomberg)

DeVos Family Doubled Theranos Investment After Visiting Holmes, Jurors Hear (WSJ)

A Scottish Judge Could Expose Donald Trump’s Shady Golf Finances (The Daily Beast)

3-D Printed Houses Are Sprouting Near Austin (WSJ)

Woman sues Kellogg over lack of strawberries in Pop-Tarts, seeks $5 million (Washington Post)

Hiker lost for 24 hours ignored calls from rescuers because of unknown number (NYP)

— Mike Pence Is Already Cashing In on His Potential 2024 Run
— Katie Porter and Her Whiteboard Are Just Getting Started
— Trump’s New Social Media Company Is His Biggest Scam Yet
— Former Bush Guy Matthew Dowd Is Trying to Turn Texas Blue
— Joe Manchin Is About to Make Life Worse for His Own Constituents
— David Zaslav Is Angling to Become America’s King of Content
— Colin Powell’s Death Has Officially Been Hijacked by Anti-vaxxers
— Rigged State Governments Are Steadily Undermining Democracy
— From the Archive: Rupert Murdoch’s Tumultuous Third Marriage
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