No, President Joe Biden is not “personally directing” the prosecutions of Trump: Despite Fox News insinuations that every one of their enemies is constantly working together at all times, there is no evidence that the president is a hidden hand behind the scenes in the prosecutions of Donald Trump.
Sorry, Conservatives and Fox News: Joe Biden Is Staying Out Of It…
Who is responsible for the investigations and indictments against Donald Trump, according to Fox News and various supporters of the former president? The answer is clear: It’s “they.”
Who are “they”? Obviously, “they” represent a conspiracy of the Democratic Party, every prosecutor, the FBI, the CIA, and the entire news media. “They,” in fact, is a close cousin of “nothing to see here-ism.”
The latest manifestation of this was a Fox News segment Wednesday night, on the show of Fox primetime host and Tucker Carlson replacement Jesse Watters. The headline for the online story? “Evidence suggests Joe Biden is personally running the prosecutions of Donald Trump.”
Where does this come from? A story from the New York Post earlier in the week found that, based on White House visitor logs, a member of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office met at the White House in late March. Caroline Saba, then the deputy chief of staff for the White House Counsel’s Office, listed on the logs. The meeting came nine weeks before Trump was indicted by Smith in the documents case and per the Post, the meeting raises “serious concerns about coordinated legal efforts aimed at President Biden’s likely opponent in 2024.”
Watters, on Fox News, went farther.
“White House visitor logs just released suggests that Joe Biden is personally running the prosecutions of Donald Trump,” the host said, per a transcript. “White House visitor logs suggest that the raid itself may have been hatched inside the Biden White House, and the special counsel prosecution on Donald Trump is still being coordinated by the White House.”
“If this is so, which it is, that means that Biden and his Fascist Thugs knew and APPROVED of this Country dividing Form of Election Interference, despite their insisting that they ‘knew nothing,’” Trump himself said on Truth Social after the New York Post report.
The House Judiciary Committee has also demanded information about the meeting.
However, there is not a scintilla of evidence that any of that is true. Joe Biden was not in the March 31 meeting, nor has any reporting shown that he knew about the meeting, or “coordinated” anything with Smith’s office. No one from Joe Biden’s political or campaign team has been mentioned as in the meeting. No reporting has indicated that the meeting involved the Special Counsel’s office strategizing with the White House.
Special Counsel’s office spokesman Peter Carr called the March meeting a “case-related interview,” and “an interview of a career official who was also working at the White House during the Trump Administration.” Plus Bratt, in addition to his work on Smith’s staff, has retained his position as head of the national security section at the Department of Justice, so he would likely have plenty of reasons to visit the White House.
The Washington Post reported more on Tuesday about the March meeting. It stated that it was an interview with a White House staffer that involved the documents probe.
“The interview — of a career White House staffer who had worked for both the Trump and Biden administrations — was a standard part of the investigation, according to two people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the criminal probe,” The Post said. “The session focused on events that occurred during the Trump administration and, according to one of the two people, was about the handling of boxes while Trump was president.”
The Post story also said that Carolina Saba, then of the White House counsel’s office, was “simply the point of contact for Bratt and was listed on the White House visitor log because she coordinated the meeting.” It’s another example of news stories being based on Whtie House visitor logs during out to be unreliable- although Trump, during his presidency, broke with standard practice and did not release them.
There are other indications that the meeting was not nearly as nefarious as Fox News, the House Judiciary Committee and Trump have suggested.
“It is completely standard that when you are interviewing someone who works in the White House to do the interview at the White House,” David Aaron, described by the Washington Post as a former federal prosecutor who worked on national security cases, told the newspaper. “When you are interviewing someone who works at the NSA [National Security Agency], you go to NSA. It has nothing to do with a power move; it’s a courtesy.”
The Washington Post story also said that meetings Bratt had at the White House in 2021 — long prior to the launch of Smith’s probe — were “related to other matters Bratt dealt with as a Justice Department prosecutor working on national security cases.”
If the Washington Post’s reporting is true, it would show that the New York Post/Fox version of events — that the meeting was part of a conspiracy against Donald Trump — is wildly misleading if not maliciously false. And beyond that, it also doesn’t match other aspects of anti-Biden messaging.
“President Biden is simultaneously master-minding a vast global anti-Trump conspiracy while also unable to remember his own name, and if you don’t believe both those things, you’re not watching 6 hours of TV per day,” anti-Trump conservative David Frum said on X, the former Twitter, on Tuesday, in reaction to the Watters segment.
Also, as recently as the start of August, the line was that it was Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, who was secretly directing everything behind the scenes.
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