Biden Clamps Down on Potentially Disastrous Special Counsel Recording

President Joe Biden invoked executive privilege Thursday to keep House Republicans from obtaining audio recordings of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

The move came at the request of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who warned that cooperating with the request could jeopardize future investigations and witnesses’ willingness to participate in them. In his letter to Biden, made public Thursday, Garland said that lawmakers’ efforts “are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that the production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”

White House counsel Ed Siskel also questioned the motivations of Republicans seeking the tapes when they already possess a lengthy report and full transcript of the interview.

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal—to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” Siskel wrote in a letter obtained by The Hill. “Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”

Hur’s 388-page report condemned the 81-year-old president as having a memory with “significant limitations.” Republicans have since seized on the analysis, developed after a year-long investigation and a two-day interview with Biden days after Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel, as an opportunity to attack the president as being mentally unfit for the job.

Democratic lawmakers joined the outrage at the request, including Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who called the effort to obtain the tapes—and Republicans’ failed impeachment effort of Biden—a “comedy of errors.”

“The Attorney General gave Republicans the information they asked for, and it’s delightfully absurd to suggest that listening to the President’s words instead of just reading them will suddenly reveal the mystery high crime and misdemeanor the Republicans have been unable to identify since 2023,” Raskin wrote in a statement shared with The New Republic. “Will this hopeless scavenger hunt ever end? Perhaps the Republicans should play the Beatles’ White Album backwards and the impeachable offense will emerge!”

The same day Biden and Trump agreed to participate in two presidential debates, Lara Trump appeared on Fox News’s Hannity to toss out a well-worn talking point from Team Trump, claiming the debates are rigged.

“It’s rigged so heavily in Joe Biden’s favor,” Lara Trump told viewers about the debate her father-in-law agreed to participate in. “But everything always is.”

The buzzword accusation comes more than a month before Trump and Biden’s first debate, which will be held on June 27 at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, and establishes a convenient pacifier for Trump fans if and when Trump repeats his 2020 performance and loses the debate to the less showmany but generally more coherent Biden.

Lara Trump folded the lazy accusation into recent polling data showing Trump leading in five battleground states as protests against Biden’s handling of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continue to dog him. According to surveys by The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump leads Biden in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, with Biden leading in Wisconsin.

The Republican National Committee, which Lara Trump began chairing in March, opted out of participating in Commission on Presidential Debates–led debates two years ago when it was chaired by Ronna McDaniel. The CPD had scheduled debates this year between the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees for October. On Wednesday, Biden announced he would not be participating in CPD-led debates, instead offering Trump dates that would account for early voting. Trump eagerly accepted.

Despite the uphill battle Trump faces appealing to normal people, Lara Trump tried to assure Fox viewers her father-in-law will be successful in the debate she’s already decried as rigged, saying: “So, if Joe Biden shows up on June 27 and doesn’t come up with an excuse like he has to wash his hair or something, I have full confidence that Donald Trump will outperform him.”

Ron DeSantis thinks that if the words “climate change” are removed from Florida state law, nobody has to worry about it.

The Florida governor signed legislation Wednesday that would eliminate climate change as a priority in the state’s energy policies and is set to go into effect July 1. The legislation also takes out most of the references to climate change in Florida law, bans offshore wind, and weakens regulations on natural gas pipelines.

“The legislation I signed today [will] keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state,” DeSantis told Florida’s Voice, an outlet friendly to the Florida governor. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”

What’s the point of such a bill? Florida faces many threats from a warming climate, including severe hurricanes, higher temperatures, and rising sea levels and flooding. In many cases, the bill is largely symbolic: The state doesn’t have any offshore wind thanks to its low wind speed and severe hurricanes. Instead, it seems to be just the latest example of DeSantis attempting to gain attention from Republicans nationally through embracing the culture wars.

Previously, DeSantis has passed anti-LGBTQ legislation as well as book bans, and he even banned lab-grown meat despite the industry still being in its infancy. All the while, his popularity has waned in Florida, particularly after he dropped out of the presidential race. This latest bill could put Florida residents at risk from increased weather disasters, while also putting more pressure on the state’s already struggling insurance industry. But DeSantis seems more concerned about his image beyond Florida, and is likely thinking ahead to 2028.

In an exclusive interview on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle, Republican Senator Mitt Romney offered some questionable retroactive political calculus for President Biden, saying he should have exerted his presidential pardon power and intervened in the civil and criminal cases against Donald Trump.

“[Biden] should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney said during the interview.

“Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought out indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,” he added. “Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned the little guy. And, number two, it’s not going to get resolved before the election. It’s not going to have an impact before the election. And, frankly, the country doesn’t want to have to go through prosecuting a former president.”

Biden only has pardon power over federal cases. The Trump Organization civil fraud case, the Georgia 2020 election interference case, and the currently ongoing hush-money trial are all being overseen by state and local prosecutors and would be ineligible for presidential pardon.

“It was a win-win for Donald Trump,” claimed Romney about the cases brought against Trump. Meanwhile, Trump has described his ongoing legal turmoil as “election interference” as the trials keep him away from the campaign trail and restrict what topics he can discuss in public.

Romney described Biden’s inaction on using his legislative sway to influence judicial investigations and cases an “enormous error.”

Polling from PBS in early May found a solid 20 percent of Americans aren’t paying attention to Trump’s hush-money trial at all, with another 21 percent flat certain he did nothing wrong. Forty-seven percent of Americans think Trump did something illegal, while another 30 percent believe he acted unethically but not against the law, according to the poll.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker might not be able to kick his way out of the controversy sparked by a college commencement speech he gave Saturday, telling the women in the crowd that they ought to return to the kitchen rather than join the workforce.

​​”For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment.… I want to speak directly to you briefly, because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker said at Benedictine College, a private Catholic university located in Atchison, Kansas. “How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross this stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are gonna get in your career?

“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said, emotionally adding that his success came at the expense of his wife, which made the crowd burst into applause.

But women online weren’t nearly as accepting of the antiquated perspective.

Others dug into Butker’s background—a man raised in a wealthy family thanks to his mother’s career as a medical physicist at the Emory University Department of Radiation Oncology.

You can watch Butker’s full speech here.

The chauvinistic messaging could even cause problems for another Chiefs player, team captain Travis Kelce, whose relationship with international pop superstar—and self-described feminist—Taylor Swift has launched him and the football team to national celebrity status.