Robert K. Hur Appointed To Examine Biden’s Handling of Classified Documents Finding a few classified documents once in a locked closet once, may be a mistake. Finding new classified documents at Joe Biden’s home garage, a problem. So, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who is overly deliberate in all things, has appointed a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to examine Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time in the Obama administration. In legal and political terms, Garland’s move was quick and protective of the process – possibly just to stop the noise. Hur will have independence in investigating and…
Author: Terry Schwadron
Terry H. Schwadron
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York. As an editor, Terry created new approaches in newsrooms, built technological tools and digital media. He pursued efforts to recruit and train minority journalists and in scholarship programs. A resident of Harlem, he volunteers in community storytelling, arts in education programs, tutoring and is an active freelance trombone player.
Some Mistakes Are Mistakes, and Some Intentional Acts Are Crimes OK, we get it, Joe Biden was just as clumsy as his predecessor about full protection of government documents. Fortunately for him, Biden was not as much of a jerk about it as Donald Trump. By now, you must be aware of the narrative: On Nov. 2, Lawyers packing up Biden papers in a locked closet the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, an institute in downtown Washington that Joe Biden started after serving as vice president found 10 classified documents. The White House Counsel’s Office notified the…
We Now Have Direct Evidence That What We Are Exporting Is Anti-democratic Insurrection The copy-cat aspects of what we see from thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters overrunning Brazil’s federal government buildings to our Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt are impossible to ignore. The videos look the same, the rationale of baseless election protest is the same, the violent disregard for law is the same, even the boasted links between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are built on the same iconoclastic and selfish principles. As with our own version, it failed to change the election results. It’s an outrageous export of the…
Mixed Numbers. Mixed Messages. Just a few weeks ago, we were awash in Republican electoral insistence that the country was flooding with violent crime, that Democrats were pushing programs to defund urban police and that, along with leaving borders open to migrants, it was time to demand a new government. In several key districts – generally in suburbs rather than in the central cities where violent crime was being recorded – Republicans had success, helping to result in a slight Republican majority in the House With the turn of the year, we’re starting to see reports about actual crime statistics…
We Need a Problem Solver, Not a Political Symbol If anyone is making New Year’s resolutions, it ought to be Vice President Kamala Harris. The time has arrived for her to show governmental competence, policy influence, and the political weight and savvy that so far has eluded most of her public assessments. Between a pull to prove herself a leader earning respect on her own and the need to be ready if our oldest president should have to step aside, Harris, seemingly a sharp thinker and overall good person, needs to step it up. It takes little visible leadership if…
Immigration Has Become Too Hot and Too Complicated a Political Potato To Ignore Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden has acknowledged that there is a problem on the border. After no one in Congress took seriously his Day One call for an immigration law package, Joe Biden turned to other issues – over time winning several spending passages and falling short on several civil rights and social service efforts. In that time, border issues worsened: Migrants and cartels seeing opportunity as the U.S. moves away from restrictive Donald Trump administration policies, Mexico and Central American countries have grown lax…
Humiliation on Top of Humiliation Frustratingly or weirdly, the repetitive, unresolved votes for House speaker continues, heaping humiliation on Kevin McCarthy, who has wanted the job forever. More rounds of vote later, there still is no Speaker and the new session of Congress is blocked, despite a futile entreaty from Donald Trump against party “embarrassment” and a disputed adjournment to halt more losing votes. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” the saying attributed to Albert Einstein, was getting a new workout in the media. From the edge of the ring of struggle for…
It was a day that showed the Republicans’ inability to govern Even before the messy, public smackdown of Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House speaker unfolded, the prime takeaway was that a small group extreme Republican right-wingers won the day – and not only this skirmish. In effect, Republicans were voting for who could be the biggest, baddest bully to stand up to Joe Biden and Democrats, not for someone who could guide even a conservative course for legislation. That made it more akin to a Republican state primary for candidates rather than a general election about who should represent Americans.…
Do We Care About Candidate Quality? It is our job to learn from events, of course; the whole point of following the news is to fuel understanding. So, what have we learned by the overly narrow runoff election in Georgia in which more Democratic urban voters outnumbered the larger rural, Republican areas of the state to reelect Sen. Raphael Warnock over one-time football star Herschel Walker. The punsters were unrestrained by fact or research in reaching for useful lessons. There is room for debate on issues, but we should not be supporting candidates who are facing criminal charges for…
If the FBI Raid Shows the U.S. Becoming a Banana Republic, It’s Trump’s Banana Republic