☕️ DULY PROCESSED ☙ Saturday, May 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Lost Biden interview audio resurfaces; Trump plots midterms; FBI HQ to decentralize; fluoride foes vindicated; tariffs baffle experts; SCOTUS slows Trump deportation blitz—but is it 3D chess?

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Somehow, we already find ourselves on the back side of May. Let’s press on with the Weekend Edition. In today’s jam-packed roundup: the weekend’s biggest story is the lost-lost audio of Biden’s classified documents interview, which popped up in an unexpected place; Trump midterm strategy; FBI Director makes major announcement about DC headquarters and promises decentralization; more conspiracy theories go mainstream as FDA, Florida embrace anti-fluoridation; experts crying in hysteria as national inflation rates defy doom predictions over Trump tariffs; and we dig into the Supreme Court’s latest quirky setback to Trump’s mass deportation plans.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, far-left Axios broke an exclusive story headlined, “Exclusive: Biden-Hur special counsel audio exposes memory lapses.”

The evidence that the Democrats defied Congressional subpoenas to conceal is now, suddenly and unexpectedly, out in the open. Axios obtained the audio of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur. The news platform reported that, amid long, uncomfortable pauses —punctuated by a dramatic grandfather clock ticking just like audible ellipses— Joe Biden struggled in whispery tones to recall when his son died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected or why he had classified documents he shouldn't have had.

In 2023, as Democrat hysteria over President Trump’s Classified Documents case reached suborbital heights, flying even higher than Katy Perry in a movie-set rocket, news of Joe Biden’s own documents scandal broke. Unlike President Trump, Biden had kept classified documents lying around in at least six addresses, and had held back vastly more illegally-kept papers than Trump. Biden had perhaps thousands of banker’s boxes, compared to Trump’s half-dozen.

Ultimately, Biden’s documents mega-gaffe would drain all the energy from the Trump case, leaving Democrats lamely trying to explain how the two cases were completely different. It was something to do with Biden “cooperating,” which of course he would, since he was trying to destroy Trump at the time using the exact same alleged crime.

“Cooperation” was always an incredibly dumb distinction, not least because it isn’t a legal distinction. Under the laws relating to classified documents, after-the-fact cooperation makes no difference. (Assuming the law is applied consistently. But I digress.) Anyway, haplessly trying to bolster Biden’s cooperation argument, they made the second-worst decision in political history. (The first being the decision for Biden to debate Trump.)

To create the appearance of fairness, AG Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as a special counsel to “investigate” Biden, which you would be forgiven for thinking was only a euphemism for “whitewash.” And then they made their horrible mistake. Specifically trying to create parity with Trump, who was interviewed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Biden also sat for a “voluntary interview” with Special Counsel Hur.

Biden’s “voluntary interview” resembled a deposition, except Biden wasn’t sworn under oath. And, if you listen to the whole thing —the aural equivalent of an OG root canal— you’ll hear Biden’s aides prompting him with answers whenever he struggled to coherently reply, and his lawyers covering for his lapses, who Axios called “caretakers of his memory.” Once, for example, Biden attorney Bob Bauer can be heard instructing Biden, "Your answer is that you don't know.”

That type of “call a friend” stuff is off limits in real depositions.

Anyway, Hur’s February 2024 report predictably concluded that, unlike Trump, Biden should not face criminal charges. But Hur didn’t rely on a cooperation defense—how could he? Nothing in the relevant statutes immunizes people who “cooperate” after they get caught. Instead, Hur said prosecuting Biden would be no use, catastrophically describing the sitting president as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, which ignited furious political firestorms and accusations of partisan motives.

It was ageism! Partisanship! Lies and slurs! Biden is sharp as a tack! Democrats decried Hur’s entire report as a gratuitous smear, while critics claimed it raised concerns about his fitness for office. The story transitioned into a Great Coverup.

The White House stalwartly refused to release the audio, citing it as protected under “law enforcement materials,” a vague, made-up designation lacking the force of privilege but which flummoxed congressional requests. As the clamor for the audio reached a crescendo, the White House released selected parts of the written transcript, trying to satisfy transparency demands without exposing Biden’s awful performance— his halting delivery, verbal meandering, brain freezes, and memory lapses that words on a printed page cannot capture.

As long as he remained in office, Merrick Garland defied House subpoenas for the original audio. But Grandma Garland waddled off the DOJ’s stage in December. And yesterday, somehow, Axios got hold of the full (lightly redacted) audio.

🔥 To be fair, the interview doesn’t prove Biden was completely incoherent. He was mostly engaged, and mostly understood the questions. His answers were a different story. But the first thing we learned is how little Biden actually testified. At the time, the lying media claimed Biden “volunteered” two days of testimony. What they didn’t tell us was that it was only five hours total, divided over two days.

That’s only about a half day of deposition time. Not two days of questioning. More media misinformation.

Axios has published several short clips. In one clip (4:24), Robert Hur asks Biden a simple question about where he stored classified documents. Biden then wandered off into the cognitive daisies, with a rambling, incoherent, four-minute non-answer that touched on wide-ranging topics like his son Beau’s death (Biden couldn’t recall in what year it happened), a book he wrote, comments on Obama’s choice of Hillary over him, all punctuated by several aides correcting him on the date of the 2016 election (Biden said 2017).

Here is the entire five-hour interview (5:10:00). If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, just read the Axios article for the lowlights.

Tellingly, Axios never said how it got the audio. Obviously, someone in the Administration fed it to them, ensuring it would be presented to Axios’ liberal readers. Bookmark that. We’ll return to it.

🔥 To Democrats’ dismay, the story is no longer about Biden. After all, Biden’s creeping dementia isn’t news, since the vegetative former president sealed the deal with his disastrous debate. The story is now about the coverup.

The Trump Team has unprecedented operational discipline. The audio release appears to have caught corporate media completely off guard. The New York Times ran a panicked story co-authored by Alex Thompson, one of the authors of the forthcoming book Original Sin. The Times’ headline said, “Audio Clip of Biden Special Counsel Interview Is Released, Showing Verbal Stumbles.” But positioned right over that story was a close companion, headlined “Democrats Who Championed Biden’s Re-election Bid Now Seek Atonement.”

The second story addressed the coverup. “As the Democratic Party faces record low approval ratings,” the Times reported, “many party strategists and officials believe it must rebuild trust in its brand beginning with confronting how the party handled the 2024 race.”

In other words, the Times is desperately trying to recapture a narrative it sees slipping into the ocean depths. Evidently, the Times has concluded this requires a limited hangout, and some kind of explanation for why Democrats covered up Biden’s obvious lack of ability to do the most important job on the planet.

Make no mistake— they get it. Democrats traded electability for incompetence. “The power of incumbency, Democratic officials argued, outweighed well-documented concerns from their voters about his fitness for the job,” reporters explained.

🔥 A pile-on is mounting. The Times’ article quoted Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who said, “Democrats must now openly admit that the former president was unfit for a second term and should not have run.” The story next quoted former Representative Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), who counseled Democrats hoping for a 2028 run to “cleanse yourself of any culpability you may have had when you stayed silent while so much was at stake.”

Sadly, when Cunningham referred to “so much at stake,” he probably meant losing the election rather than avoiding World War III. But still.

The Times’ emerging “confession tour” suggestion is fraught with risk. What should Democrats say? Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer leaned into ignorance. “I was busy working,” she told CNN. “I didn’t see the president frequently,” she lamely offered as an excuse.

Whitmer was a co-chair of Biden’s campaign.

If, on the other hand, they claim they were misled, it just raises more questions. “We were misled” is a classic passive-voice dodge. Who, precisely, misled them? If they say “White House aides,” that spurs inquiry into what else those aides might have been doing that only the brain-damaged chief executive should legally have done.

And if they blame “aides,” then the next natural question is: why did they ignore their own senses? It’s not like nobody was pointing out Biden’s many missteps and brain resets. It was practically unavoidable. Clips flooded social media, dismissed as “cheap fakes.” Trump had even nicknamed the Cabbage in Chief as “Sleepy Joe Biden.”

The top Democrats all had access to the man himself. They called him. They met with him. So, what gives?

We can expect Democrats, already squirming in public, to further shrink like salted snails. The Biden coverup problem is not going anywhere— not anytime soon, at least. It is, in fact, more like Tapper and Thompson’s Original Sin, a transgression that will stain the party’s brand until three generations of voters pass away.

🔥 Let us not overlook the evidence of a larger Trumpian strategy. The new Administration could have released the audio on day one (or maybe day two, after adding the bleepy redactions). But they waited till now. BlueSky nitwits smell a rat; the far-left commenters offered dozens of suggestions about what news the Trump team is really trying to bury. They are also desperately searching for crypto-Republicans on Axios’ editorial staff.

But it is hard to ignore the temporal confluence with Tapper’s new book, which releases in three days. The co-authors —CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Times columnist Alex Thompson— are watching their royalties swell like a rogue wave streaming over the seawall. The mysterious release of the Biden audio to liberal outlet Axios —unannounced by the Administration— seems more designed to focus attention on Original Sin and send corporate media running to Democrats for soundbites.

I like to think that Trump’s post this morning is somehow related:

President Trump and his team appear to have no intention of losing Congress in next year’s midterms. And after seeing Trump’s scorched-earth tariff plan, imagine what similar kind of comprehensive strategy they might be deploying to completely destroy the Democrat brand. That is what I believe is happening.

The Democrats are getting further and further behind.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that the next 18 months sees a steady series of increasingly damning disclosures about Biden’s lack of a real presidency plus the mounting evidence of 2020’s stolen election?

Remember, just like they gained access to the Biden Audio, the Trump Team now has access to all that information, too. They have receipts.

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Yesterday, ABC affiliate WJLA-7 ran a story headlined, “FBI Director Kash Patel plans to relocate 1,500 agents, leave DC's Hoover Building: Report.” It’s more like an evacuation.

CLIP: FBI Dir. Kash Patel announces closing the Hoover Building on Fox (0:52).

“This FBI is leaving the Hoover Building,” Patel flatly told Maria Bartiroma on Fox yesterday.

Before becoming FBI Director, Kash Patel said he wanted to turn the Hoover Building into a “museum of the deep state.” Yesterday, he took the first big step. He said that the aging headquarters building was “unsafe for our workforce,” and so he will relocate some 1,500 FBI agents to various field offices across the country— where the crimes are.

Promise, kept. Kash is decentralizing the deep state. Have fun on the reservation!

The move is not at all controversial. The General Services Agency has long descibed the Hoover Building as “obsolete.” Last year, Congress approved $200 million for a renovation project, but de-obscoleting estimates came back at $4.5 billion.

Apart from vague complaints from DC’s bizarre mayor Muriel Bowser that law enforcement should be located in Capital City (a sentiment shared, I’m sure, by Hunger Games officials), WJLA quoted only one other (random) person who objected, whining about local businesses losing foot traffic. As if losing hot dog customers is a national crisis.

But it’s a dumb complaint anyway. If Patel turns the Hoover Building into a museum, local lunch spots will have even more customers. Ditto if the government tears it down and builds something else there. So the complaints are just typical liberal hysteria.

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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An entire era of conspiracy theories are quickly becoming conspiracy fact. Thursday, the Associated Press reported, “DeSantis signs a bill making Florida the 2nd state to ban fluoride from its water system.” It’s done! And the Florida ban takes effect in July, just over a month from now. I expect my horrible county to fight it, but the lawsuit practically writes itself.

Fluoride pushback is sweeping the country. According to an NPR story, five more states have pending anti-fluoride bills: Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and South Carolina. More anti-fluoride bills either failed or stalled in committee in North Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, Montana and New Hampshire. Other states like Hawaii, New Jersey, and Oregon already have fluoridation rates languishing in the low double digits.

Low-fluoride states like Hawaii don’t have epidemics of cavities, a fact the fake news media never mentions.

Not to be outdone, the federal government is also moving against the stupefying chemical, which, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has noted, is a by-product of industrial hazardous waste. The FDA announced a ban on all “ingestible fluoride products” —tablets, lozenges, and drops— for children. Dentists prescribe these products to parents who live in fluoride-free areas. The New York Times ran the story this week under the misleading headline, “The F.D.A. Says Fluoride Pills May Harm Children’s Health. Researchers Disagree.”

Haha, researchers disagree. Good one. The Times “forgot” about a peer-reviewed JAMA study released this year. The Gray Lady even ran a story about it in January, headlined “Study Links High Fluoride Exposure to Lower I.Q. in Children.” That January story also correctly reported that a federal court found fluoride was potentially dangerous: “Last September, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen regulations for fluoride in drinking water because of research suggesting that high levels might pose a risk to the intellectual development of children.”

But the Times’ fluoride article this week conveniently omitted its own January article. It mentioned neither Judge Chen’s verdict, nor the gold-standard JAMA study it had just reported only three months earlier. I concede that Times reporters are competing with President Autopen for lowest IQ scores —maybe the result of too much childhood fluoridation— but seriously. It literally only took me five seconds of googling, and I don’t even work there.

Perhaps a better question is: why is corporate media covering for big fluoride?

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Whoopsies! Sorry, experts. This week, Politico ran a story headlined, “Tariffs have little impact on prices, defying forecasts.” Unexpectedly!

On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that prices only rose at an annualized rate of 2.3 percent, the smallest increase since 2020— before the pandemic. And that was in spite of tariffs. It’s almost like Trump’s tariffs have had the opposite effect the experts sagely predicted.

An honest media would call the experts to account, and require them to explain why they were wrong. But Politico’s story lavishly applied the passive voice (“prices were expected to climb”), obscuring who was wrong, generously giving unreliable experts a pass. Oh well.

⚖️⚖️⚖️

Yesterday, the Times ran a story it called a “sharp blow” to the Trump Administration, headlined, “Supreme Court Retains Temporary Block on Using Alien Enemies Act to Deport Venezuelans.” It described the setback as an unmitigated disaster for mass deportation, but as usual, that was far from the actual story.

To be fair, President Trump also made the most of it on social media:

The UK Independent called it a “massive blow to Trump.” BlueSky nitwits took victory laps.

But the decision was both more and less than the hot takes insist. The order’s most important sentence said, “To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18, and we grant temporary injunctive relief to preserve our jurisdiction while the question of what notice is due is adjudicated.”

⚖️ To recap, the Trump Administration tried to deport a group of hardened Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, which only applies during wars and invasions. The AEA is designed to facilitate mass deportation without extensive judicial process. Due process practically precludes removing illegals in large groups, as President Trump correctly observed in his post.

Even many conservatives have expressed angst over deportation due process. But, as I have repeatedly asked, without receiving any meaningful answer: how is it even possible to quickly conduct mass deportations but also give every single illegal a taxpayer-funded lawyer, a court case, a judge, hearings, and appeals all the way to the Supreme Court? How long should it take to remove 20 million illegal aliens? (ChatGPT estimated that under current rules it would take 40 years.)

Put another way: is this an emergency or not?

To be clear: the Supreme Court is practically daring Trump to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for illegal aliens. If he does —and I think he will— the Supreme Court will immediately declare it unconstitutional, forcing Trump to take a page from President Lincoln’s playbook and defy them. Or at least, that’s the media spin.

There could be other ways to skin the cat, like Haitians do in Illinois. First, and least likely, Republicans could win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate next year and authorize Trump to suspend the writ. Short of that, Senate Republicans could partially “nuke” the filibuster again, which only requires 51 votes. In 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for all presidential appointments except for Supreme Court justices. In 2017, Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court nominations.

Assuming they’d play ball, the Republican-majority Senate could do it again now, carving out a third narrow exception to the filibuster rules. So don’t count out a Supreme Court-proof way to suspend the writ.

👨‍⚖️ That said, there were a few silver linings in the Court’s storm cloud. First, the Court never said Trump can’t remove illegals using other laws under the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA). Nor did it rule on the case’s merits. The Court’s “blockbuster” decision didn’t really decide anything.

Instead, SCOTUS shot the case back down to the Fifth Circuit, to render a verdict on three key questions: (1) Can Trump legally use the Alien Enemies Act to deport these types of bad actors? (2) Can illegals be merged into a class action, which has never been done before? And, (3) If so, how much due process and notice does an Alien Enemy deserve under a state of emergency?

The Fifth is the most conservative court of appeals in the country. Those guys (and gals) are much smarter lawyers than I am. Maybe the Fifth Circuit can find a third way to defuse the pending Constitutional Crisis,™ but I can’t see any obvious answer. I’d be happy if the Fifth just clearly described the paradox created by the emergency’s need for mass deportation which is being hamstrung by individualized due process rights.

If they did, it might make the Supremes quit dancing around the issue, and just say whether or not the Constitution allows mass removal of hostile foreign nationals during an emergency.

You could argue the Supreme Court is just buying time. In other words, it punted, letting the Fifth Circuit do all the heavy lifting, knowing full well the case will rebound there as soon as that happens. The Court is trying to thread a teeny tiny needle. In effect, the Court’s message was: we’re not saying Trump can’t use the AEA — just that he has to give people a thin chance to file for habeas before putting them on a plane.

If that is what the Court is up to, it won’t —can’t— work. If, even under the AEA, deportees deserve access to courts (i.e., habeas), the Court is making mass removal functionally impossible under any realistic judicial timeline. Maybe it is just too much to expect the Supreme Court to waive due process. Because, after all, due process is the judicial branch’s bread and butter, and they want their morning toast buttered on both sides.

To reiterate, perhaps it’s best to see yesterday’s decision as an invitation for Trump to suspend the writ: If the executive really believes this is an invasion-level emergency, he can make the case to Congress and suspend the writ. Don’t expect us to do it for him.

If Trump is considering recruiting Congress to help suspend the writ —two branches against one— he must first make it politically possible. He must try everything else first, exhausting all other avenues, so that Congress can throw up its hands in frustration, blame errant judges, and say what else can we do?

President Trump’s Truth Social response to the decision practically paves the driveway to the writ of habeas corpus. His Administration officials have recently telegraphed considering suspending it. There is no doubt in my mind they are trying to figure out how to make it work, if, that is, they don’t already have a plan.

I suspect there is a plan. This isn’t over by a long shot.

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C shall return on Monday morning with a fresh roundup of essential news and commentary.

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