Last Call For Ridin' With Biden: Loan Arranger Edition

President Joe Biden continues to help average Americans struggling with debt, in this case, onerous student loans for those who can least afford paying them back.

President Biden will announce a decision on Wednesday about his plans for student loan debt relief, a highly anticipated moment that could affect about 45 million borrowers nationwide, according to people familiar with the matter.

Although details of the plan were still being finalized, White House aides have said Mr. Biden was weighing a targeted plan that would provide $10,000 of debt relief for borrowers who make below a certain level of income.

Mr. Biden also is expected to extend a pause on loan payments for all borrowers, a Trump-era program that has been in effect since the start of the pandemic

The federal government, the main lender for Americans who borrow to fund their higher education, holds $1.6 trillion in student debt. Mr. Biden has faced calls throughout his presidency to cancel a chunk of it, driven by borrowers and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He backed the idea of some relief on the campaign trail in 2020, saying: “I’m going to make sure that everybody in this generation gets $10,000 knocked off of their student debt as we try to get out of this godawful pandemic.”

But White House aides say the president has agonized over the decision, questioning whether cancellation should apply to students of both public and private universities and saying he does not want the relief to apply to those earning high incomes.

The decision will add fuel to debates raging in Washington — and within the Democratic Party — about economic fairness and the potential to exacerbate an inflation rate that has reached a 40-year high.

Mr. Biden had promised a decision by the end of the month, but he is expected to return to the White House on Wednesday from Delaware, where he is on vacation with his family.

“The president will have more to say on this before Aug. 31,” said Abdullah Hasan, a White House spokesman. “No one with a federally-held loan has had to pay a single dime in student loans since President Biden took office.”

Mr. Hasan also noted that the Biden administration has “already canceled about $32 billion in debt for more than 1.6 million Americans,” a reference to actions to revive and expand targeted relief programs that had all but stopped functioning during the Trump administration.

 

And while this would cancel as much as $450 billion in debt, I don't see how this will survive the Roberts Court. Not that it's actually unconstitutional, it's just that the Roberts Court will deem it so. Expect this to get tied up in the courts immediately before the executive order can take effect, only Congress has the power, etc.

This is a good plan, but don't expect Biden the Loan Arranger to be ridin' for long at all on this horse. Republicans are going to put a storm of lead into the ol' gal.

We'll see. If you get the chance to take advantage of the program before it's blocked by the GOP, do it.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

To recap, Donald Trump kept scores of classified, top secret, and TS/SCI documents that never should have been removed, that were stored improperly in his damn pool closet, that were actively sought by subpoena and by other means, and still kept illegally for months before last week's FBI search of the place.

 

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.

Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Justice Department officials in early June. At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.

 

Observations:

 

First, if you or I did even a fraction of this, we'd already be in prison.

 

Second, Trump may still have classified documents...or he's already sold them.

Third, everyone in Trump's team here who has interacted with those documents faces prison as well, and they're going to rat him out in order to save themselves.

Graham, Crackers, Con't

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has successfully stalled his impending subpoena from Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis over the county's election interference case against Donald Trump.

A federal appeals court gave Sen. Lindsey Graham a temporary win early Sunday, ruling that he doesn’t have to comply for now with a subpoena from an Atlanta grand jury demanding that he testify Tuesday about his role in an effort to pressure Georgia officials to change the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the subpoena at Graham’s request Sunday, after a federal district court judge in Atlanta turned down the South Carolina Republican’s bid to avoid testifying on the grounds that the local grand jury is intruding on legal protections he enjoys as a federal lawmaker.

The appeals court said in a two-page order that Graham’s attorneys and prosecutors for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis needed to flesh out arguments about whether Graham is entitled to have the federal courts place legal guardrails on the questioning Graham could face. The 11th Circuit panel’s order said that those arguments should be presented first to U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May, who issued a ruling last week rejecting the arguments Graham’s team raised under the Constitution’s speech or debate clause — which immunizes lawmakers from most legal consequences for actions relating to their lawmaking responsibilities.

Investigators have said they want to query Graham about two phone calls he had with Georgia election officials in late 2020, at the same time Trump was attempting to subvert his defeat. Graham has acknowledged discussing with the officials the state’s process for counting absentee ballots.

His attorneys have argued that those conversations pertained to his official duties as a senator, but May ruled there were indications that the exchanges went beyond “legislative fact-finding.”

“Senator Graham has unique personal knowledge about the substance and circumstances of the phone calls with Georgia election officials, as well as the logistics of setting them up and his actions afterward,” May wrote in her decision last Monday.

“And though other Georgia election officials were allegedly present on these calls and have made public statements about the substance of those conversations, Senator Graham has largely (and indeed publicly) disputed their characterizations of the nature of the calls and what was said and implied. Accordingly, Senator Graham’s potential testimony on these issues … are unique to Senator Graham.”

The appeals court called its Sunday morning action a “limited remand” and said the subpoena would essentially be put on hold while the possibility of constraints on the scope of questioning of Graham is hashed out at the district court.

It’s unclear whether the appeals court’s order will lead to further oral arguments in front of May or only to the filing of additional legal briefs, but the appeals court instructed her not to dawdle.

“The district court shall expedite the parties’ briefing in a manner that it deems appropriate,” the 11th Circuit’s order said.

Graham’s stay request was handled by a three-judge panel at the conservative-leaning, Atlanta-based appeals court: Judges Charles Wilson, Kevin Newsom and Britt Grant. Wilson is an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, while Newsom and Grant are both Trump appointees. It is likely they will hang on to the case when it returns to the appeals court, at least for any urgent proceedings.

 

While the ruling last week indicates that DA Willis's case is moving forward quickly towards the indictment phase, the reality is that there's little chance that the court will hear from Graham. I practically guarantee you that no matter what the 11th Circuit panel finally rules, there's five votes on the Roberts Court, possibly six, to say that Graham's efforts to lobby Georgia Republicans to empanel a fraudulent slate of electors and award the state to Donald Trump will be deemed "legislative fact-finding" and the subpoena quashed.

 

However Willis gets to her endgame, she's most likely not going to have any of Graham's sworn testimony to go with it.  However, Rudy Giuliani did testify last week. She may not need Graham's testimony to make her case before the grand jury.

We'll see.

 

You won't hear a word from him under oath in Atlanta.