President Joe Biden gave a brief address and took reporters' questions on Thursday evening, following the release of a report from special counsel Robert Hur on his handling of classified information in his private office and home — and when a Fox News reporter tried to ambush him about the special counsel's remarks on his age and mental acuity, he hit back with a cutting one-liner.
"How is your memory?" asked Peter Doocy.
"My memory is so bad, I let you speak!" the president replied.
Hur's report concluded that no charges were appropriate against Biden, and also outlined clear distinctions between this case and former President Donald Trump's hoarding of highly classified national defense information at Mar-a-Lago, including Trump's clear intent to conceal the documents from investigators and stonewall the National Archives.
But Hur also knocked the president for failing to recall some simple things, alleging that he struggled to remember what years he was vice president — and wrote one other reason charges weren't advisable was that he could put on an act of being a "well-meaning elderly man" who can't recall anything.
Biden dismissed this line speaking with reporters. "I'm well meaning and I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I put this country back on its feet. I don't need his recommendation."
They're coming after the old man in the Oval Office.
Alyssa Farrah Griffin, who served as former President Donald Trump's Communications Director, appeared on CNN to warn that she expects the GOP to unleash a torrent of no holds barred takedowns now that the special counsel investigating Biden's classified documents case reduced him down to an old fogey nearing senility.
"...he was exonerated, but we're not living in an era of goodwill in politics where we could expect the Republican side to take the high ground," Griffin said. "They're gonna play dirty here. They're gonna weaponize what we saw in this report about his age. And I'm not sure Biden is prepared to counter it as heavily as he needs to."
Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed to investigate Biden by Attorney General Merrick Garland, decided to avoid charging the president at the conclusion of the 15-month investigation mostly because he cooperated and that if a trial were take place, it would be hard to reach a conviction, in which he described Biden as a
"well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Shortly after he learned he had dodged criminal charges, Biden talked up his cooperation in a speech to Virginia Democrats.
"I did not throw up any roadblocks. I sought no delays,” Biden said, adding that Hur noted he returned the classified documents, while “Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.”
Griffin explained that the public is left to interpret Hur's decision as being cleared criminally, but not cleared physically nor mentally.
“We're more or less told that Joe Biden would not be mentally competent to sit for trial,” she said.
She added that she believes the decision (while coming up short of an indictment) becomes “a tremendous gift for Trump."
“Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have an age issue,” she said. “They've both had gaffes and questions about their mental acuity."
“But the perception of the two is the real issue here.”
She made mention of poll numbers favoring Trump’s stamina when pitted against Biden.
“Putting the indictments and the age aside, there is a different perception when it comes to Joe Biden. This just writing the Trump ads for himself.”
The Supreme Court looks poised to let former President Donald Trump back on the ballot after hearing a review of the Colorado decision banning him under the Fourteenth Amendment — but Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wants them to do it the right way.
New York University law professor and MSNBC legal commentator Melissa Murray explained to anchor Ari Melber that she wanted to put the actual purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment into their decision — and chided some of her colleagues for trying to take a lazy way out.
"Justice Jackson said if stopping insurrectionists in government is so important, then of course you would want to stop them from being the chief executive officer of the federal government, of running the whole government," said Melber, himself an attorney. "She sort of said, well, yes, but the historical emphasis at the time was on insurrectionist infiltration in the South at a local level. So it may be possible and not illogical that they didn't include the presidency."
"Right," said former Trump lawyer Jim Schultz. "Because there wasn't really this risk — because of the national election, there wasn't a risk of someone who had been in the Confederacy and becoming a president. There was more of a risk at the congressional and local level of that happening. She focused on that. I think that's the cleaner way out, if you will, for the Supreme Court. Rather than some of the other issues, whether giving it to Congress and they end up on January 6th, the idea that, and the argument was this doesn't apply to candidate Trump, it would apply to him taking office but not becoming a candidate for president. And it's a good argument. I think it's a strong argument, but if they rely on that, we're right back in trying to define what an insurrectionist is on January 6th if we have a new Congress."
"I think that's exactly right," said Murray. "Justice Jackson was offering the court a clear off ramp that wouldn't engender clear down-the-road contingencies. But I also think she was throwing a lot of shade at her colleagues. She was the only one on the court delving into the scope and substance of the historical events that animated the Fourteenth Amendment."
"This is, on a court who seem to think that history and tradition is important, especially when withdrawing constitutional rights from women, is a put down from Justice Jackson to actually delve into the history animating the Fourteenth Amendment at a time when her colleagues were trying to get to a pragmatic way of doing it. They are selective and itinerant. They are outcome-driven. She might have been on board for the outcome but she was going to do the work."
With President Joe Biden getting a criminal hall pass, former President Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer in the federal classified documents case locked horns with CNN’s Jake Tapper over a critical detail: they may both be pack rats, but one president allegedly obstructed and the other didn’t.
“For just as Joe Biden should have returned the documents the moment he's telling his ghost writer, ‘Hey, I found the classified stuff downstairs!’ so, too, would Trump have had to do it,” said Timothy Parlatore, who defended the 45th president after a federal grand jury in Miami in June 2023 decided to indict him for stashing away classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and then rebuffing the government’s request to return them.
On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur decided to not bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden for knowingly keeping classified documents.
Parlatore claims Biden had the benefit of “seeing what Trump did” so he could avoid making the same moves.
Tapper pressed Parlatore about the fact that his former client stands accused of intentionally trying to keep the files and lying about them when formally approached by the feds.
But Parlatore says Trump was packing up in haste after losing a bid for s second term in what he called “a very chaotic time” whereas Biden “it appears intentionally took these things with him."
Tapper interjected, “Because he thought he could even though he was wrong.”
Then Parlatore acknowledged that each played different legal cards despite holding similar hands.
“And that's the difference is that he took them, whereas Donald Trump, it's more about what did he do once he found them,” said Parlatore.
Parlatore added that Jack Smith and his team have been “making significant distinctions with the alleged obstruction.”
Parlatore added “It's the allegation, it's not proven yet, but those allegations certainly do make it appear much more you know, damning on the one side.”
During oral argument before the Supreme Court, former President Donald Trump's attorney said something that could end up blowing up in Trump's face, Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias told MSNBC's Alicia Menendez on Thursday.
The Supreme Court was reviewing the decision by Colorado to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under the Insurrection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — and legal experts broadly believe the court is unlikely to uphold that decision. But that doesn't mean Trump will get a complete victory here, Elias said.
"I think it was going to be long odds from the get-go," said Elias. "But I don't think that that means that the argument itself was a total loss. I think there were some things that came out of it that actually may wind up having some long-term consequences, including, by the way, Donald Trump's lawyer saying that though January 6th was not an insurrection, the events were shameful, criminal, and violent. I think Donald Trump, in some other courtrooms, is going to be arguing that it was not criminal and violent."
"Can we zoom in on that for a second?" said Menendez. "That was clearly a very strategic choice, right, to make a series of concession in those arguments, in some ways allowed him to place 1/6 aside because he knew it was not firm ground for him to be having 1/6 front and center. Do you think it was considered the way in which those remarks would then complicate some of these other legal cases?"
"Look, I think that, you know, to credit the lawyer for Donald Trump who argued the case today, I think he gave ground to win the case in front of him," said Elias. "And you know, I can — I can understand that. He's got nine justices looking at him today and figures we'll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. That doesn't mean when that tomorrow doesn't come, right, tomorrow does come. But I think he made those concessions, whether it was playing this democracy card that may frankly come back to haunt him in some of the election cases that I and others litigate, or it is this violent point that, you know, Donald Trump is — has said it was a peaceful gathering."
"I think he thinks the way he wins the day today was to take the insurrection point off the table," he added. "And you know, he did. You know, there were almost no questions from the court after that about whether or not it was an insurrection."
The 91-year-old Colorado Republican who challenged former President Donald Trump's eligibility to be on the state's primary ballot referenced the existential threat to democracy and invoked Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler when explaining why she got involved in the case that came before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments on Thursday.
"You have to remember, as old as I am, I was born in the Great Depression," Norma Anderson, who previously led the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives, told NPR. "I lived through World War II. I remember Hitler."
"I remember my cousin was with [then-U.S. President Dwight] Eisenhower when they opened up the concentration camps," Anderson continued. "I mean, I understand protecting democracy."
Recalling when she watched on her home television as Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, she added, "They're trying to overthrow the government is what I was thinking."
Backed by the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Anderson in September joined five other GOP and Indepedent Colorado voters in filing a lawsuit to keep Trump off the state's ballot, citing the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars anyone who has taken an oath to support the Constitution "as an officer of the United States" and then "engaged in insurrection" from holding any civil or military office, unless two-thirds of each chamber of Congress votes to allow them to do so.
The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified the Republican presidential front-runner from the state's primary ballot in December, agreeing with the voters that Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 loss that culminated in the Capitol attack during the certification of the election results amounted to engaging in insurrection.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last month, at the urging of both the Colorado voters and Trump. The court has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—plus Justice Clarence Thomas, whose activist wife Ginni Thomas was involved with the GOP's 2020 election interference effort. None of them recused.
"On the merits, this is an open-and-shut case," Take Back the Court Action Fund president Sarah Lipton-Lubet said in a Thursday statement about Trump v. Anderson. "The 14th Amendment plainly states that insurrectionists are barred from holding office."
"Of course, the Republicans on the Supreme Court have shown they have no problem ignoring the obvious meaning of laws that conflict with their party's political interests," she added. "Donald Trump anticipated a moment like this one when he installed his right-wing supermajority. He thinks that these are his justices, on the court to do his bidding. Soon, we'll see if—and to what degree—he's right."
Common Cause was among various groups that submitted an amicus brief to the high court in support of removing the twice-impeached former president from the ballot.
"American democracy has never meant unchecked mob rule," Colorado Common Cause executive director Aly Belknap said Thursday. "Donald Trump sent an armed mob to the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of an election."
"His ongoing incitement has led to an unprecedented rise in attacks and death threats against election workers, judges, and other public servants," Belknap asserted. "There must be consequences for political violence—the Supreme Court must hold the former president accountable to the people and to the Constitution."
The presidential primary season is already underway. Trump has won the GOP's Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary by significant margins, setting him up to face Democratic President Joe Biden in November, unless he is barred from the contest.
The case before the country's highest court is "of extraordinary importance to our democracy," Campaign Legal Center senior vice president Paul Smith stressed Thursday. "It is vital that, one way or another, the court returns a clear ruling as quickly as possible to avoid any potential confusion in the upcoming presidential election. However the court decides, election officials deserve time to properly prepare for the upcoming election, and voters deserve time to make an informed decision."
Several arguments made in the case offer the Supreme Court an opportunity to defer the dispute to a different branch of government, said Derek T. Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on election law.
"All of them are ways for the court to shift responsibility to another branch and to say, 'We're not going to deal with it now,'" Muller said. "And it leaves open questions for resolution, or maybe indeterminacy, in the weeks and months ahead."
During arguments, Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern said on social media that questions from Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Kavanaugh and Thomas "suggest to me that a consensus off-ramp is emerging: the notion that individual states cannot enforce Section 3's disqualification provision against federal candidates, or at least against the president."
"The problem is that Jonathan Mitchell's atrocious briefing and argument failed to put meat on the bones of this idea, so SCOTUS will have to improvise a justification," Stern added, referring to the Trump attorney who argued the case.
Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's three liberals, also expressed "deep skepticism that a single state should be able to decide who can 'be president,'" he noted. "In my view this argument is as good as over. A majority will hold that individual states can't enforce Section 3 against the president, at least without congressional approval."
Currently, Republicans have a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, while Democrats narrowly control the Senate, though the November elections could change that.
While voters and groups in several other states have launched similar legal battles to disqualify Trump, the only other successful one so far was in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, cited statute and the evidence of Trump's conduct to determine his name should not be on the ballot. Trump appealed the Maine disqualification, but a state judge in January deferred a decision in the case, citing the looming Supreme Court ruling.
"People from across the political spectrum and from all walks of life—from former members of Congress to constitutional scholars to everyday Americans—have come together in this exceptional and fragile moment in the history of American democracy to reinforce the Constitution's very purpose in safeguarding our democracy from insurrectionists," CREW president Noah Bookbinder said in a statement after the hearing.
Anderson, also weighing in post-arguments, said that "we stand here today not just as voters, but as defenders of the principles that define our democracy."
"Our fight to uphold the integrity of our electoral process is not about partisan politics; it's about preserving the very ideals for which our forefathers fought," she added. "Donald Trump's actions on January 6th stand in direct opposition to those sacred ideals and today, we stand before the Supreme Court seeking justice to ensure that no one, regardless of their party or popularity, is above accountability."
Donald Trump got a brutal fact check after once again blaming former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The former president spoke to reporters outside Mar-a-Lago as he prepared to make a campaign stop in Nevada, as his attorney presented arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge a Colorado ruling that declared him ineligible for the state's ballot, and CNN fact checker Daniel Dale examined his remarks.
"He also said this was an insurrection caused by Nancy Pelosi," Dale said. "That is an insane statement, that is beyond fact check false – that is completely deranged. This was a mob of pro-Trump supporters called to town, urged to be wild by Trump himself. Nancy Pelosi tried to protect the Capitol, tried to summon National Guard troops. Completely bonkers nonsense."
"He also said there were no guns, something we've heard again and again from him," Dale added. "There were, in fact, guns. We may never get a complete list of how many guns were there because most of the rioters were permitted to go home without arrest that day, but some people were arrested with guns."
Dale listed Mark Mazz of Indiana, who got 60 months in prison for carrying two loaded guns on Capitol grounds and assaulting law enforcement officers, Guy Reffitt of Texas, who got 87 months for bringing a handgun to the attack, Christopher Alberts of Maryland, who got seven years in prison for carrying a concealed weapon and leading a charge against police, and Jerod Thomas Bargar of Missouri, who's awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to weapons and other charges in the attack.
"This idea that it has taken hold in parts of the right, fueled by Trump, that there were no guns that day is completely not true," Dale said.
A CNN panel burst into laughter on Thursday after anchor Jake Tapper cut off Donald Trump's rambling speech.
Following Supreme Court oral arguments in a Colorado ballot access case, Trump held a press conference outside his Mar-a-Lago resort.
"We're not a respected country anymore," Trump said. "We're left out all over the world. They're laughing at us. And they hate what's happening. They hate seeing it. They love our country."
As Trump veered into a rant on the war on Gaza, Tapper cut him off.
"I think we've gotten all the legal analysis we're going to get out of President Trump," Tapper said, prompting laughter from the panel.
"He wants to talk about himself," panelist George Conway noted. "He doesn't want to talk about the Supreme Court and say, 'Oh, the Supreme Court did a nice job today.' He just wants to talk about what's on his mind and himself."
Correspondent Jamie Gangel suggested Trump had not listened to the Supreme Court's oral arguments.
"So, could I just say someone didn't tell him that this sounded like good news for him today?" Gangel observed. "I mean, it wasn't just the rambling sort of campaign speech, but if he had simply listened to the analysis afterwards, he would know that it sounds like he's in good shape."
Donald Trump's defense rests on the idea that the framers of the 14th Amendment "made an extraordinary mistake" by excluding presidents from the insurrection clause, according to the lawyer representing Colorado voters in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Denver attorney Jason Murray, who successfully petitioned Colorado's top court to disqualifyTrump from the state's ballot, argued the case be fore the nation's Supreme Court, where he rejected the former president's arguments in his opening statement.
"We are here because, for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation's Capitol came under violent assault," Murray said. "For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. By engaging in insurrection against the Constitution, President Trump disqualified himself from public office."
"As we heard earlier, President Trump's main argument is that this court should create a special exemption to Section 3 that would apply to him and to him alone," Murray continued. "He says Section 3 disqualifies all oath-breaking insurrectionists, except a former president who never before held other state or federal office. There is no possible rationale for such an exemption, and the court should reject the claim that the framers made an extraordinary mistake. Section 3 uses deliberately broad language to cover all positions of federal power requiring an oath to the Constitution. My friend [Trump attorney Jonathan Mitchell] relies on a claimed difference between an office under and an officer of the United States. But this case does not come down to mere prepositions."
"President Trump's other arguments for reversal ignore the constitutional role of the states in running presidential elections," Murray concluded. "Under Article 2 and the 10th Amendment, states have the power to ensure that their citizens' electoral votes are not wasted on a candidate who is constitutionally barred from holding office. States are allowed to safeguard their ballots by excluding those who are under age, foreign-born, running for a third presidential term or, as here, those who have engaged in insurrection against the Constitution in violation of their oath."
A Republican senator was sent scurrying away from his own news interview outside the Supreme Court Thursday when an anti-Donald Trump protester decided to explain, quite loudly, her understanding of the word “insurrection.”
The angry protester slapped back at Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) after he spoke out in support of Trump — whose eligibility to appear on presidential ballots was being argued before the nation's highest court — and tried to compare the riots on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to migrants who daily cross the southern border.
“Why wouldn’t we call 10 million people crossing the border illegally an insurrection?” Marshall demanded. “Why wouldn’t we call the situation when we take away your freedoms of speech, your freedoms of religion, your freedoms to bear arms, why wouldn’t we call that an insurrection as well?”
This argument against the 14th Amendment insurrectionist ban challenge to the former president's candidacy did not sit well with the woman standing behind Marshall with a “Remove Trump” sign.
“To try and like confuse people by trying to say the stuff on the border is an insurrection, it makes you sound like an idiot,” the woman declares, as Marshall scurried to pick up a paper he left on his podium. “When you're a white man in this country you have so much power, you don't even have to be educated, you can just say s---.”
The woman’s speech began with a question — “What kind of education have you had sir?” — that she sought to rectify with a lesson on recent history.
“When you have tens of thousand of people attack the... Capitol, people are killed because of that, beaten?” the woman said. “That was an insurrection.”
Four people died on Jan. 6.
Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was shot trying to enter the House Chamber; Kevin Greeson died of a heart attack, Rosanne Boyland died of an accidental overdose and Benjamin Philips died of a stroke, it was later determined.
Police officers who died in the weeks that followed include Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was attacked by a mob, and Officers Jeffrey Smith and Howard S. Liebengood, who both died by suicide.
“Trump called it,” the woman told Marshall. “You know it."
"But what's happening with that war and the numbers that you're speaking of is a true, unbelievable tragedy on a massive proportion," Greene told right-wing podcast host Steve Bannon on Thursday. "And to think that our tax dollars were spent on basically just grinding down an entire generation of Ukrainian men, no wonder they don't want to serve."
Greene insisted that "America deserves answers" about the war.
"And I have to praise Tucker Carlson for going to Russia and being willing to interview Vladimir Putin just to get the truth out, just to get the story out, and let the American people decide for themselves," she said.
The lawmaker acknowledged that Putin might not tell the truth.
"It doesn't mean we have to believe everything he says, but we should be able to hear from him," she insisted.
Former President Donald Trump blamed people in Colorado who "really hate" him as the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments on a case that could remove him from the state's ballot.
Trump spoke on Thursday before the nation's high court was set to hear oral arguments in a case that could see him disqualified from the ballot because he allegedly participated in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
"We have sort of a rogue person working in Colorado that, you know, wants to take the election on by that person's self. And it's very inappropriate," Trump told radio host John Fredericks. "Very few people go to the other side, unless they truly hate me."
"They want to have, you know, the Supreme Court rule or vote to take me out of the race," he continued. "It's a terrible thing. I think it's terrible, but it's important that a very powerful decision be made on this."
Trump cited his poll numbers as proof he should be allowed to remain on the ballot.
"Leading by these massive numbers, and then you say, oh, well, that person can't run," he opined. "That would be so bad for democracy. That would be so bad for our country, and I can't imagine that would happen."
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday schooled an MSNBC panelist who tried to argue too much attention is being paid to the Supreme Court hearing on Donald Trump's court battle to appear on the 2024 general election ballots.
Writer Anand Giridharadas suggested voters pinning their hopes on Trump's eligibility being denied under 14th Amendment's insurrectionist ban would be better off focusing on campaign efforts outside the courtroom.
"I think there has been, since 2015, a fantasy of getting rid of Trump through kind of investigations and inquests and criminal proceedings and this and that," Giridharadas said. "It is now nine years on and none of those have actually shown the ability to protect American democracy from him."
Giridharadas argued that voters should stop waiting for institutions "to save us" from another Trump presidency and warned his various court cases could serve as a distraction.
"We turn on the news and we're always talking about these investigations," Giridharadas said. "What we're not talking about is organizing that's happening in communities to actually try to build a coalition to defeat American fascism and the Big Lie. I think we are lulled into being like passive consumers of legal cases winding on, over which we have no control, instead of doing the thing over which we have immense control."
Given a chance to respond, Psaki argued that the Supreme Court arguments served as more than a distraction to Americans whose voices have historically been suppressed.
"It's important to remember the origin of the 14th Amendment; and Sherrilyn Ifill [president of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund] wrote a brief where they outlined this as a reminder that it was to protect the voices of those who are often suppressed, including the African-American community," said Psaki.
"It's important to talk about these cases, because it's important to remind voters out there in the country what Donald Trump tried to do which was to suppress exactly those kinds of voters."
Psaki concluded that the judicial system should rise above the politics Giridharadas would have Americans focus on, and ultimately ignore it.
"So the job of any legal system, the judicial system, is actually not to contemplate the politics, not that anyone here is suggesting that, it's to ignore that and apply the law," she said. "If you look at Donald Trump's argument, what they're arguing is that the insurrection didn't even happen, that he didn't participate in it, that it was three hours long and not that many people were armed and, therefore, it didn't happen. That's ludicrous on its face."
