Crooked Media - What A Day: Merrick the reddish

Congress and the Biden administration suddenly face demands to answer a big question with a seemingly short answer: Which of Donald Trump’s enemies didn’t the Justice Department target.

• The latest revelation is the most shocking yet: Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, DOJ subpoenaed Apple for the communication records of House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, member Eric Swalwell, their aides, and even family members, nominally as part of an investigation into who leaked information about Trump-associate ties to Russia. That investigation turned up nothing and languished until Sessions’s successor, Bill Barr, revived it. (Barr, world’s trustworthiest person, says he didn’t know of any subpoenas targeting members of Congress.)
   
• The dozen-or-so known targets add an intra-branch dimension to a broader scandal: Trump officials have been exposed to have used law enforcement power to surveil people Trump had targeted for political attacks—with the ultimate goal in some cases of indicting them. Trump’s DOJ also targeted at least three Washington Post reporters, four New York Times reporters, and a CNN reporter, pursuant to investigations of leaks Trump found politically embarrassing. The Trump administration would later argue in court that congressional-oversight subpoenas of the executive branch violate the separation of powers.
   
• Fallout has been swift. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin have called on Sessions and Barr to testify under oath, and threatened to subpoena them. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said current DOJ personnel who participated in this action should resign. Schiff insisted the DOJ's internal watchdog investigate the scandal, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco agreed.

Inexplicably, though, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seemed poised to act until the news broke.

• Schiff and other committee members say the Justice Department under Merrick Garland has refused to provide timely answers to questions about whether the Trump leak investigation was partisan (that is, only targeted Democrats) and whether it was properly predicated (rather than simply cooked up because Trump demanded it). Yet while Schiff’s call for an inspector general investigation has been answered, neither his committee nor the House Judiciary Committee has announced an oversight investigation, and the Senate's investigation will require Republican cooperation to subpoena anyone. 
   
• DOJ’s refusal to share this information with Congress feeds rapidly growing frustration with Garland’s time at DOJ. In his brief tenure, the Biden administration has embraced a number of positions the Trump DOJ concocted to conceal his corruption. Most recently, DOJ has appealed a lower-court judgment that would force the executive branch to hand Congress documents related to Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel lease. As the Washington Post put it, “Biden’s team has steadfastly defended some of the protections the Trump administration put in place to conceal Trump’s financial interests.”

This Pride Month, Lovett or Leave It host Jon Lovett returns to the stage for an exclusive Pride performance called  “Out of the Closets, Into the Streets.” On June 24, join Lovett and a lineup of your favorite LGBTQ+ acts as they bring the celebration right to you! ”Out of the Closets, Into the Streets” will be streamed live on June 24 at 4 p.m. Pacific time. Join the fun on Crooked Media’s YouTube and Twitch pages.

In better Merrick Garland news, DOJ will quickly double the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s enforcement staff to protect the franchise. Garland announced the significant resource boost in a high-profile address at DOJ headquarters, where he also said DOJ would review new GOP state-level voter-suppression laws and sham ballot audits, and called on Congress to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. "There are many things that are open to debate in America, but the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them," he said. "The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow." In a not-so-subtle hint ahead of Garland’s remarks, the Democratic Party’s top voting rights litigator, Marc Elias listed six states that have already passed new suppression laws, and which he has sued: Iowa, Georgia, Montana, Florida, Arkansas, and Kansas.

• The FDA has ordered Johnson & Johnson to discard 80 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine produced at a notorious Baltimore production facility, which may have contaminated them.
   
• High-profile Democrats including Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have rejected a new, detail-light bipartisan Senate infrastructure agreement because it contains no climate provisions.
   
• Kurt Volker, a key witness in the 2019 Ukraine investigation, seemingly perjured himself when he told the impeachment inquiry, “at no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden”—a claim contradicted by audio of a call he joined during which Rudy Giuliani urged Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden.
   
• Facebook happily accepts ad money from right-wing groups pretending to be left-wing groups urging voters to support the Green Party.
   
• Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) wants to know why the Air Force hasn’t discharged a notorious white nationalist, despite orders from civilian leadership to address extremism in the military.
   
• The Oregon House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to expel Republican Rep. Mike Nearman, who aided and abetted an armed right-wing invasion of the state capitol. 
   
• The Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami was a COVID-19 superspreading event because participants didn’t realize vaccines (brace yourselves) blockchain of transmission (thank you). 
   
• A museum in Croatia that showcases hundreds of taxidermied frogs dressed up as students, circus performers, ballroom dancers, and other weird human types became unprofitable during the pandemic and had to be sold. 
   
• In an unlikely twist, Crooked Media endorses every word of this message from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

Here’s what we meant earlier by “Trump’s increasing sense of free rein to sabotage election law in the country.” A new, profoundly disturbing Reuters report details the ways Trump’s supporters have gone about terrorizing election officials across the country, particularly in Georgia. Amid a flood of death threats, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA) and his wife Tricia had to cancel weekly visits from their grandchildren. Around the same time, police accosted members of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia group casing their home. The intimidation tactics risk driving career election officials out of their jobs, creating a vacuum that Republicans may try to fill with Trump loyalists. On the night of the Georgia runoff election, an SUV tailed Vanessa Montgomery, who served as a polling manager in Taylorsville, GA, for 25 minutes, until a 911 dispatcher guided her to a parking lot where police were waiting to assure her safety and the integrity of the ballots she was driving to an election office in Bartow County. Trump and his Republican allies could diminish this threat dramatically, but their election lies have only grown more brazen.

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The Pulitzer Prizes awarded a rare special citation to Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed the murder of George Floyd and reignited a global movement against police brutality.
 

Leaders of the wealthy G-7 nations announced they will donate one-billion coronavirus vaccines to low-income countries. 
 

The United Mine Workers of America, a major backer of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has endorsed the For the People Act. 
 

Sarah is back next week.