Joe Biden

During an appearance on MSNBC on Saturday morning, a senior adviser to Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed he had high hopes for special counsel Robert Hur when he was chosen to investigate President Joe Biden and now admits it was a terrible mistake.

Speaking with the hosts on MSNBC's "The Weekend," ex-DOJ official Anthony Coley said the attorney general goofed by selecting Hur who appears to be auditioning for a job in a future Trump administration.

As he told the hosts, "I was at the Justice Department at the time of this appointment. I talked to Robert Hur myself as head of the Office of Human Affairs and we all had high hopes that Robert Hur would do what he was assigned to do and that is to call the balls and strikes as they are and to be apolitical."

ALSO READ: 11 ways Trump doesn’t become president

"In retrospect, and I say this as somebody who has a great deal of respect for the attorney general, in retrospect, the attorney general made the wrong choice in selecting Robert Hur to be the special counsel," he continued. "I think he should have, Garland should have appointed a special counsel who was perhaps at the end of a distinguished legal career and not someone who was midcareer Robert Hur in his early 50s."

"In my opinion, he wrote a report that was designed to safeguard his employment in a future Republican administration."

Watch below or at the link.

Former President Donald Trump officially locked up enough delegates to become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee after winning Tuesday's Republican primary in Georgia. However, he has yet to make any efforts to unite his party after dispatching his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley — his last remaining rival — on Super Tuesday.

In her concession speech, Haley refused to endorse Trump and said the former president would have to "earn" the votes of her supporters between March and November. Trump has so far not made any direct pleas to Haley voters, and continues to mock the former South Carolina governor on social media. In an interview with Politico, one unnamed "top Haley donor" said Trump ignores the sizable swath of GOP voters who were in Haley's corner at his own peril.

Faced with a massive shortfall in raising campaign cash compared to his presumptive opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump and his advisers have decided to cut back on his high-profile campaign rallies in an effort to not drain the coffers even more.

With filings showing President Joe Biden and the Democrats sitting on a war chest of $130 million going into February while the former president, while not releasing all of his numbers, did show a combined $40 million with RNC cash included, the New York Times reports the Trump and his election prospects are facing a "perilous" stage.

As the Times' Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher wrote, Trump has been holding donor meetings at Mar-a-Lago imploring supporters to increase their contributions.

The hosts of MSNBC's "The Weekend" had a good laugh on Saturday morning as Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins described the dysfunction of the House Republican caucus that is now reeling as their attempt to impeach President Joe Biden is dying a slow death.

With Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) no longer interested in putting impeachment to a vote in the House, Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) plans instead to make criminal referrals to the DOJ which are also expected to go nowhere.

Asked how House Republicans are dealing with the months of hearings that have fallen apart, Coppins stated that their mood is dark and getting darker.

ALSO READ: Marjorie Taylor Greene gets fresh scrutiny from regulators after election violation fine

Reacting to a letter the White House sent to Johnson essentially taunting the failure of the investigation, Coppins explained, " I think the White House smelled blood in the water, right? They saw Republicans were losing their will to continue with this."

"I mean, you talk to Republicans on the Hill and they know that this is over, right?" he continued. "A lot of them knew it was a farce from the beginning but they were going along and saying what we can we dredge up? It was a fishing expedition on how to hurt President Biden during an election year but their star witness has fallen apart."

"To say the least," a laughing Symone Sanders-Townsend interjected.

"The impeachment has fallen apart in pretty embarrassing fashion," Coppins added. "That's why you see people like Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) just kind of completely demoralized. By all accounts, the [GOP] House conference was especially demoralized and embarrassed. You see Republicans wanting to retire and leave. I think the White House saw that."

Watch below or at the link.

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain on Thursday made clear to a key U.S. Senate panel that working-class people nationwide are deeply frustrated with the "epidemic of lives dominated by work" and the fight for livable wages while executive compensation continues to climb.

"Are the employers gonna act? Will Congress act? How can working-class people take back their lives, and take back their time?" Fain asked during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on a 32-hour workweek. "And I know what people and many in this room will say. They'll say, 'People just don't want to work,' or, 'Working-class people are lazy.'"

In a quintessentially American tale of race and politics, the lowly menthol cigarette is playing a curiously large role in the U.S. presidential election this year.

A proposed ban from President Joe Biden's administration on the mint-flavored smokes has miffed some African Americans, a key Democratic Party base. To complicate matters, narratives linked to the tobacco lobby have ginned up fears that the ban could lead to over policing and racism.

Former President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (who was also a senior adviser in his White House) has been ramping up his overseas business dealings undeterred by the optics of doing so in the midst of his father-in-law's presidential campaign.

A Friday report in the New York Times scrutinized Kushner's real estate deals in Balkan countries of Albania and Serbia, in which he stands to reap significant financial benefits once they're completed. The Times reported that Kushner has been working with Richard Grenell, who was Trump's former acting Director of National Intelligence who also served as German ambassador and a special envoy to the Balkans.