Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland a Lethal and Utterly Corrupt Tag Team

I have written several articles on postings related to politics. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on these political events.

Comer claims Mayorkas and Garland participated in cover-up of Biden corruption

In an appearance on Fox News, Comer told host Laura Ingraham he obtained evidence that the two senior Biden administration figures had attempted to cover up the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt business dealings, interfering with the House’s investigation.

“We believe there is coordination between the Department of Justice and the cover-up. There are two crimes here: the actual Biden corruption and then the cover-up,” Comer said.

“And all along the way, there have been people coordinating, people representing Hunter Biden, who were paying Hunter Biden. People who were representing him in court. People who were in trouble just like Hunter Biden for crimes. And they were communicating back and forth with our federal government to cover up this crime and to make sure that they could spin the false narrative.”

The Kentucky Republican then gave specifics, accusing Garland and Mayorkas of interfering with the House’s investigation in an effort to cover up the affair.

“We know Merrick Garland has told the National Archives not to cooperate with us,” Comer said. “We know that someone told the IRS whistleblowers to stand down. We know that just this week there were Secret Service agents who were working with us on trying to identify the people who tipped off the Biden legal team that the IRS was fixing to knock on the door, and our sources at the Secret Service say that Mayorkas called them to tell them to stop cooperating with Comer and the Oversight Committee. So Mayorkas and Merrick Garland are part of the cover-up. These are the two arguably highest-ranking people in the Biden administration.”

Comer’s investigation has gained steam in recent months, with the House Oversight Committee increasing the severity of its allegations against the Biden administration as it gathers more evidence. The House Republican said he believes an impeachment of the president will be in order soon.

Jordan signals ongoing probes into Garland, Mayorkas on border

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) fired off letters Friday to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, signaling his intention to continue investigations into the Biden administration’s handling of the border.

“This letter serves as a formal request to preserve all existing and future records and materials related to the Biden-Harris Administration’s enforcement of federal immigration law,” Jordan wrote in letters to each.

The Justice Department (DOJ) pushed back on any insinuation it does not plan to keep all records.

“This Justice Department follows the law, including our legal obligations regarding the preservation of records, and we will continue to do so,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Hill.

DHS did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The letters rehash two years of requests made at each agency, highlighting different investigative threads pursued by the panel, from how immigration court judges overseen by the DOJ handle cases to details and data requested on numerous immigration policies carried out by the Department of Homeland Security.

The letters are just the latest sign from Jordan about what the committee will focus on once President-elect Trump reenters the White House, continuing oversight of the Biden administration as it has since the GOP overtook the House under President Biden.

Just days after the election, Jordan also sent a letter to special counsel Jack Smith likewise asking him to retain all records related to his two investigations into Trump.

Jordan has launched numerous investigations into Biden administration officials as well as the other two prosecutors beyond Smith who launched investigations into Trump.

But the GOP track record is mixed. A lengthy investigation into Mayorkas that spurred an impeachment vote in the House was dismissed by the Senate as it declined to hold a trial on the topic.

And the House never advanced for a vote its own impeachment investigation into Biden, releasing a report ahead of the Democratic convention that relied on numerous debunked claims while failing to demonstrate he took improper actions as a government official.

Still, a border investigation gives Republicans an avenue for continuing to attack Democrats on the border — a prime campaign issue for Trump throughout the election.

Trump critics also fear that congressional investigations will be a route to carry out revenge on those who have crossed ways with Trump.

Criminality of Biden-Garland’s Justice Department bigger than Watergate

OPINION:

The current reports of executive branch illegality make Watergate look like kindergarten mischief.

It is clear from the Durham Report and the work of House Republican hearings that the current scandals in the Biden White House — and senior bureaucracies at the Justice Department, IRS and elsewhere — are much deeper and more cancerous than Watergate ever was.

It may be hard to remember, but Watergate came about due to a weird, dumb, and fairly narrow set of criminal behaviors that mushroomed into 69 officials being indicted and 48 imprisoned.

I remember Watergate vividly, because I first ran for Congress in 1974 during that scandal.

President Richard Nixon had won the largest popular vote majority in modern history in 1972 (60.7% to 37.5%). He won every state and territory except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Two short years later, he became the first president to resign from office.

In an idiotic move, the Nixon presidential campaign sent five men to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Aside from being a crime, it was idiotic because Nixon was clearly going to win in a landslide. They did not need any information. But the Nixon reelection campaign had so much money, had hired so many people, and had become so drunk with power that it lost control of what it was doing.

The real problem came when President Nixon and his team intervened to try to control the investigation. Ultimately, the president used the CIA, FBI and IRS to try to divert and cover up the involvement of the campaign with the Watergate burglars.

John Mitchell became the first attorney general to be sent to jail. He was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He was ultimately sentenced to 19 months in a minimum-security federal prison in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mitchell is an extremely important parallel to the current disaster, because Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be doing a lot more obstructing of justice than Mitchell ever dreamed of doing. Mr. Garland’s Justice Department reportedly instructed the IRS to disband the unit investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes. He has used the FBI to harass former President Donald Trump and a wide range of Republicans. And he has turned a blind eye to every report of foreign money going to the Biden family ($3 million in one Chinese transaction, a diamond sent to Hunter Biden, millions of dollars sent by the widow of the mayor of Moscow, etc.).

Mr. Garland has also done nothing with the clear references to “the big guy” in various Hunter Biden emails. He’s ignored the testimony of Hunter Biden’s associates that his father was actively supporting them as vice president. The list goes on.

If Nixon’s White House was trying, unsuccessfully, to manipulate the IRS, the FBI and the CIA, President Biden’s White House has become quite good at it. These institutions are now so corrupt that their senior leadership is instinctively willing to break the law, frame the innocent and obstruct justice in defense of their chosen leader. This includes lying to FISA Court judges, leaking falsehoods to the equally corrupt elite media, and isolating and punishing would-be whistleblowers.

Compare the shock of Democrats and Republicans in the Watergate era with the staunch unwillingness of virtually any Democrat to go after the Biden family scandals — or to be infuriated at the blatant abuses of power and obstructions of justice.

The Durham Report had an impact because it began to build a narrative of such institutional illegality and corruption that the hand of the House Republican investigators has been dramatically strengthened.

Over the next few months, we will learn more about just how sick the system has become, just how dishonest the elite corporate media are, and just how deep the need for reform is.

In Watergate, a narrow trail of idiotic criminal behavior and a cover-up led to 69 officials being indicted and 48 going to jail.

When the tide turns, and honest people are once again openly enraged and demanding action, we are going to learn just how much corruption there is.

At that point, we will realize that Watergate was a modest preliminary venture into lawbreaking, and the Biden-Garland-establishment system is filled with criminality on a grand scale.

Inside Impeachment’s Rise as a Weapon of Partisan Warfare

If the House follows through on this week’s committee recommendation and impeaches Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, it will be the first time in American history that a sitting cabinet officer has been impeached. But Mr. Mayorkas is not as lonely as all that.

Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against his boss, President Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, while threatening them against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

Indeed, threats of impeachment have become a favorite pastime for Republicans following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump, who has pressed his allies for payback for his own two impeachments while in office. The chances of Mr. Mayorkas, much less Mr. Biden, ever being convicted in the Senate, absent some shocking revelation, seem to be just about zero, and the others appear in no serious danger even of being formally accused by the House.

But impeachment, once seen as perhaps the most serious check on corruption and abuse of power developed by the founders, now looks in danger of becoming a constitutional dead letter, just another weapon in today’s bitter, tit-for-tat partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals made clear that a president could feel assured of keeping his office no matter how serious his transgressions, as long as his party stuck with him, and the impeachment-in-search-of-a-high-crime efforts of the Biden era have been written off as just more politics.

“Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious mechanism of executive branch accountability,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is of a piece with the decline of norms across Washington institutions and the ever-rising weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.”

The current impeachment drives in the House have been nettlesome to the Biden team and certainly to Mr. Mayorkas, who issued a defiant seven-page letter before the House Homeland Security Committee voted for articles of impeachment against him along party lines this week. But where impeachment consumed the White House under Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump, it is barely an afterthought in the Biden West Wing.

Not a single Democrat has expressed support for impeaching Mr. Biden or his advisers, unlike past impeachments when at least a handful of the incumbent’s party were open to it. Indeed, to the contrary, several Republicans have derided their party’s zeal for impeachment. Whatever his son Hunter did, they note, there is no evidence that Mr. Biden did anything wrong, and the Mayorkas impeachment centers on a policy dispute, not a criminal accusation.

Nor will that change if Mr. Trump beats Mr. Biden this fall and returns to office. It is hard to imagine that impeachment will serve as much of a restraint against any excesses in a second Trump presidency — already the only president ever to be impeached (and acquitted) twice, would Mr. Trump seriously be worried about being impeached a third time?

It is remarkable how quickly impeachment has been diminished as a serious constitutional instrument for reining in a rogue executive.

In crafting the Constitution, the framers opted to include an impeachment clause to prevent the despotism Americans had just freed themselves from in the Revolution. At first, they decided that presidents and other officers could be subject to impeachment by a majority in the House and conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate for “treason or bribery.”

George Mason thought that was too limited and proposed adding “maladministration” as an impeachable offense, meaning incompetence. But James Madison objected, deeming it too broad and arguing that it would make the president subject to the whims of the Senate. Mason backed down but then proposed as an alternative the phrase “or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It was elegant, but the framers did not define it precisely. Alexander Hamilton made clear that the phrase meant offenses that “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself” — in other words, not any old crime would be impeachable, but only those that were an offense against the people or the system.

It was meant to be rare and for decades it was. Only 21 times has the House voted to impeach a government official, and only eight times has the Senate convicted and removed them from office, all of them judges who otherwise had life tenure. The only other cabinet official targeted for impeachment, William Belknap, the war secretary under President Ulysses S. Grant accused of corruption, resigned tearfully minutes before the House took up his case in 1876, but lawmakers voted to impeach him anyway.

It was so rare that no president was impeached until 1868, when President Andrew Johnson came within one vote of being convicted in the Senate. It took another 130 years for there to be another presidential impeachment, the one against Mr. Clinton, who was also acquitted, and just 21 years passed between the second presidential impeachment and the third, involving Mr. Trump.

A little over a year passed between the third and the fourth, when Mr. Trump was impeached a second time. If the House goes ahead and impeaches Mr. Biden, there will have been three presidential impeachments in five years — more than in the previous 230 years of the republic combined.

But until recently, at least, impeachment also served as a useful deterrent. At least seven other presidents were targeted at one point with impeachment without it going anywhere. Some, like George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, have described contemplating the risk of impeachment before taking actions that might push the boundaries of their power.

Philip Bobbitt, a longtime Columbia Law School professor who in 2018 released an updated version of Charles L. Black’s classic “Impeachment: A Handbook,” agreed that impeachment had been devalued but argued that it could yet serve its purpose.

“It’s still in the holster,” he said. “Yes, it’s been degraded in this poll-driven way of raising money, but it’s not inconceivable that you’ll have a president who really will do something that is down the center stripe of the law. It’s not enough to say that impeachment is so changed now that it’s just one more tool of character assassination. It is that. But it’s not just that.”

Michael J. Gerhardt, an impeachment scholar at the University of North Carolina, said Republicans were using impeachment not for accountability but for political damage. “The pushes to impeach President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas are plainly attempts to make impeachment just another weapon in the partisan warfare of Washington,” he said.

“Nonetheless, impeachment still stings,” he added. Impeachment will still be a useful constitutional tool because of the scarlet letter that presidents perceive in being impeached, Mr. Gerhardt said, citing Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump. “Presidents care about their legacies, and impeachments taint them for all time.”

Indeed, it is that sting that may be driving Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to impeach Mr. Biden and his team as revenge for his own impeachments. “They did it to me,” he said in a radio interview last fall. “Had they not done it to me,” he added, “perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”

The proliferation of impeachment resolutions covers a gamut of supposed offenses, but as in the case of Mr. Mayorkas they mainly stem from Republican criticism of the way officials do their jobs. In Mr. Mayorkas’s case, Republicans fault him for releasing illegal immigrants pending court dates rather than detaining them, but Congress has not provided enough detention facilities to actually hold all of the migrants coming across the border.

Republicans, arguing that Mr. Mayorkas is not fulfilling the law, have contorted to define his flaws as a high crime, a contention that even some fellow Republicans have rejected, including Michael Chertoff, a secretary of homeland security under the second President Bush. In effect, that logic resembles more a parliamentary system in which lawmakers can vote no confidence in a minister.

Mr. Biden’s team has mocked Republicans over their appetite for impeachment. In a statement issued this week, the White House asked cheekily, “Is there anyone House Republicans won’t impeach?”

David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who has become one of the most vocal Trump critics, added his own suggestion. Noting the Republican uproar over the possibility that a famous singer might endorse Mr. Biden, he joked that the “countdown” had “begun to the House Republican impeachment of Taylor Swift.”

The corruption of Attorney General Merrick Garland

This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland took to the pages of the Washington Post to lash out at critics who are spreading what he considers “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.” His column, titled “Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end,” missed the point.

It is Garland himself who has become the problem. The solution is in Wilmington, Delaware, where 12 average citizens just showed a commitment to the rule of law that seems to be harder and harder for the attorney general to meet.

Since his appointment, Garland has repeated a mantra that he is apolitical and would never yield to the pressures of politics or the White House. When he was nominated, I believed that claim and enthusiastically supported Garland’s confirmation. He was, I thought, the perfect man for the job after his distinguished judicial service as a moderate judge.

I was wrong. Garland’s tenure as attorney general has shown a pronounced reluctance to take steps that would threaten President Biden. He slow-walked the appointment of a special counsel investigating any Biden, and then excluded from the counsel’s scope any investigation of the massive influence peddling operation by Hunter Biden, his uncle and others.

However, it is what has occurred in the last six months that has left some of us shaken, given our early faith in Garland.

I have long been a critic of Garland’s failure to order a special counsel to look into the extensive evidence of corruption surrounding the Bidens. As I stated in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, there is ample evidence that Biden lied repeatedly about his knowledge of this corruption and his interaction with these foreign clients.

However, a more worrisome concern is the lack of consistency in these investigations. First, Special Counsel Robert Hur found that Biden knowingly retained and mishandled classified material. However, he concluded that Biden’s age and diminished faculties would make him too sympathetic to a jury. It was less sympathetic than pathetic, given that this is the same man who is running for re-election to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. More importantly, Garland has not made obvious efforts to reach a consistent approach in the two cases by dropping charges based on the same crimes by Trump in Florida.

Second, Garland has allowed Special Counsel Jack Smith to maintain positions that seem diametrically at odds with past Justice Department policies. This includes Smith’s statement that he will try Trump up to (and even through) the next election. It also includes a sweeping gag order which would have eviscerated free speech protections by gagging Trump from criticizing the Justice Department. While Garland has said that he wants to give the special counsels their independence, it falls to him to protect the consistency and values of his department.

Garland’s most brazenly political act has been the laughable executive privilege claim used to withhold the audiotape of the Hur-Biden interviews. The Justice Department has not claimed that the transcript is privileged, but only that the audiotape of Biden’s comments is privileged. This is so logically disconnected that even CNN hosts have mocked it.

The Justice Department went further in court by adding conspiracy to absurdity as part of its unhinged theory. It asserted a type of “deepfake privilege” on the basis that the release of the audiotape could allow AI systems to create fake versions of the president’s words. It ignores that there are already ample public sources now to create such fake tapes and that, by withholding the real audiotape, the Justice Department only makes such fake copies more likely to arise and ensnare the unwary.

Most importantly, the arguments of a “he-who-must-not-be-heard” privilege or a deep-fake privilege are ridiculous. Garland knows that, as would any first-year law student. Yet, he is going along with a claim that is clearly designed to protect Biden from embarrassment before the next election. It is entirely political and absurd.

After stumbling through a half-hearted defense of the audiotape decision before he was held in contempt of Congress, Garland was faced with another clear test of principle. Three House committees (Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means) this month referred for prosecution cases of perjury against Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden. Despite what appear to be open-and-shut allegations that they lied to Congress, most everyone in Washington believes that Garland and the Justice Department will slow-walk and then scuttle the referrals to protect the Bidens.

This is the same Justice Department that seemed on a hair-trigger to prosecute Trump officials for perjury and contempt after referrals from Democrat-controlled committees.

The questions at issue were not “gotcha” traps, like showing up at Michael Flynn’s office to nail him on his description of a meeting with Russian diplomats. These were some of the most-discussed questions heading into Hunter Biden’s long-delayed appearance before the committees.

Hunter is accused of lying about his position at Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a corporate entity that moved millions of dollars from foreign individuals and entities to Hunter Biden. He also allegedly lied about the identity of the recipient of his controversial message to a Chinese businessman, in which he threatened that his father was sitting “right next to me” and would join him in retaliating against the Chinese if they did not send millions. They promptly wired the money as demanded.

Hunter’s answers appear to be demonstrably untrue. Yet, there is little faith that the Justice Department will allow the matter to be presented to a grand jury. If Garland’s pledge to remain apolitical were widely accepted, there would be little question about the prosecution of such compelling claims.

Garland now appears entirely adrift in his own department. While mouthing platitudes about being beyond politics, he continues to run interference for the Biden White House. He appears to be looking to close aides for such direction.

He should instead look to those 12 people in Wilmington, Delaware.

Despite facing overwhelming evidence of Hunter Biden’s guilt, his legal team pursued a jury-nullification strategy. Wilmington is Bidentown, the hometown for the president and his family. An array of Bidens, including the first lady, lined up behind Hunter during the trial, in case anyone forgot that fact.

Yet the jury convicted Hunter on all counts without any hesitation. Despite sympathy for a recovering drug addict in a town that has overwhelmingly supported the Bidens for decades, “nobody mentioned anything about political motivations” in the jury room, as one juror noted. “I was never thinking of President Joe Biden,” said another.

Garland needs to show a modicum of that courage and principle as attorney general. He could start by dropping the farcical privilege claims over the audiotape and sending the referrals to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the same priority treatment afforded to Trump officials like Flynn.

As it stands, few believe that will happen, despite Garland’s repeated line about transcending politics. It is not the mantra that is in doubt, but the man.

The Continued Incompetence of Alejandro Mayorkas

Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.

Both chambers are officially out of session for their August recess. They return on September 9th.

We often discuss the chaos and disorder of our southern border – but what about our legal immigration programs? Turns out they’re not doing much better. That’s according to an internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) report obtained by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The report details massive fraud within the program known as Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV). Created in 2022 for Venezuelans, CHNV was expanded in January 2023 to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans and allows for entry into the United States under “humanitarian parole” of up to 30,000 nationals from each of those four countries per month. To qualify, aliens must only identify a “sponsor” in the United States.

Between October 2022 and March 2024, the program admitted nearly half a million individuals. The problem? As outlined by FAIR, the Department of Homeland Security “has been rubber stamping parole applications without verifying information provided by sponsors or parolees” on the I-34A, which is the paperwork filed by the parolee’s supposed sponsor. From the report:

According to the internal agency review, evidence of fraud includes the use of fake Social Security Numbers (SSNs), including SSNs of deceased individuals, and the use of false phone numbers. Many applications listed the same physical address. In fact, 100 addresses were listed on over 19,000 forms, and many parole applicants applied from a single property (including a mobile park home, warehouse, and storage unit). In addition, many applications were submitted by the same IP address. If this weren’t bad enough, the same exact answers to Form I-134A questions were provided on hundreds of applications – in some instances, the same answer was used by over 10,000 applicants.

As a result of these findings, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has reportedly suspended entry via the CHNV program. However, as FAIR notes, “it remains unclear if and how DHS is resolving the prevalence of fraud in the program.”

In hindsight, the impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by the House in February looks prescient, while the Senate’s dismissal of the effort looks irresponsible. Mayorkas is not only overseeing – arguably, allowing – a complete dysfunction at the southern border, but the legal immigration programs he’s running are riddled with fraud.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also overseen by Mayorkas, is letting migrants out of custody, including two illegal Jordanian migrants charged with trying to breach the Marine Corps Base Quantico in May. It’s also worth pointing out that Mayorkas, as head of DHS, also oversees the Secret Service, whose recent failures almost got a presidential candidate assassinated.

All of this puts the forthcoming congressional funding fight in renewed spotlight. As Rep. Chip Roy has repeatedly pointed out, the bedlam at the southern border is a policy choice. Just like the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the DEI and abortion initiatives in the military, and the government’s Big Tech censorship regime, the salaries and programs continue to be funded by Congress.

Will congressional Republicans finally stand up to the Senate and end this madness? They have options – either a showdown over funding these programs in a year long appropriations bill, or passing a short term Continuing Resolution which allows a new administration to lay out its own funding strategy.

Alejandro Mayorkas’ Corrupt Legacy

When Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas appeared on The Today Show on May 12th – the same day Title 42 ended – he was in for a rude reception. Anchor Savannah Guthrie asked about the record number of crossings and why the chaos was continuing. Mayorkas, as usual, blamed Congress.

She then asked about migrants being released into the country with no court date and no way to track them and that a Florida Judge had quickly blocked the plan. He attacked the Judge, saying it was harmful, but 23 States have now joined Florida to block it and an appeals court has now upheld Florida’s decision.

Guthrie then asked if Biden bore any responsibility when he said at a Democratic debate in 2019 that, “we’re a nation that says if you want to flee and you’re facing oppression, you should come.” Mayorkas then blamed smugglers and once again, the Congress.

As the number of migrants continue to surge across the border, there has been a continuing effort to impeach Mayorkas. The House Homeland Security Committee has begun hearings on Mayorkas that might lead to impeachment. At the first hearing, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said that Mayorkas’ agenda was to “find new ways to let more migrants into the U.S.,” and Former Acting Homeland Director Chad Wolf added that “it was by design.”

In reality, his career has long been marred by scandal and corruption. In 2015, the Homeland Security Inspector General found then Deputy Director Mayorkas had showed “favoritism and special access” involving visas and green cards when he was Director of Citizenship and Immigration from 2009 to 2013. Some of those receiving special treatment were then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid, then-Virginia Governor Terry McCauliffe and Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham.

Even worse, fifteen whistleblowers reported that Mayorkas’ loose standards caused people who committed fraud and money laundering to receive visas. The 99-page report eviscerated Mayorkas, saying he had caused “deep resentment” among the staff, who felt “uncomfortable and pressured” to comply with his wishes, and that Mayorkas had “lowered the morale” of the department.

Mayorkas had been avoiding the press after the report’s release in 2015, and when approached by ABC News, hid behind security and fled. The devastating report from the IG should have ended Mayorkas’ career.

But six years later, before his inaugural in January 2021, president-elect Biden nominated two crucial cabinet members: Xavier Beccera for Health and Human Services and Alejandro Mayorkas for Homeland Security, and both of their pasts made them uniquely unqualified to ever serve the public again in any capacity because they had helped a major cocaine trafficker be released from prison.

In Bill Clinton’s final days in the White House 20 years earlier, his office became a flea market and clearing house for terrorists, drug dealers, con artists and other of societies miscreants and criminals to receive clemencies and pardons, most notably fugitive billionaire and tax cheat Marc Rich.

Members of the Clinton family would cash in, including Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham, who would receive 240 thousand dollars from two carnival promoters who were convicted of bank fraud, and most notably, her brother Hugh-who would be paid as we shall see-over 400 thousand dollars for his unholy efforts. Hillary herself was involved months earlier with the notorious FALN terrorist pardons, in a blatant attempt to try and secure the substantial Puerto Rican vote in New York during her 2000 Senate campaign. But by 2001, pardon and clemency handouts were a no-holds barred circus. One of them became as noteworthy as the FALN and Rich pardons.

A few years earlier on December 20, 1993, a grand jury in Minneapolis issued a 34-count indictment against Carlos Vignali, Jr. and 29 others in the largest drug investigation in Minnesota history. Vignali, born in 1971, was the ringleader and the group had shipped hundreds of pounds of cocaine from California to Minnesota to be made into crack.

The evidence was overwhelming. On December 12, 1994, all but one of the defendants were convicted or pled guilty. Vignali was convicted of three counts of conspiracy and cocaine distribution and acquitted on a fourth count, and had been caught on audiotape, coming across as a boastful bully. Vignali remained uncooperative and unrepentant.

He was also a fledging rapper calling himself “C-Low” with Brownside, an Hispanic group formed by Eazy-E, and spent some of his proceeds at the tables in Las Vegas with his father, who had set up Carlos in an exclusive condo. The pre-sentencing report had recommended 12-15 years, and on July 17, 1995, Judge David Doty sentenced him to the latter.

His father, Carlos “Horacio” Vignali, Sr., born in 1946, was a wealthy L.A. area real estate owner and had hosted fundraisers and donated to several local political figures. Soon after the conviction of his son, he filed an appeal, and began contacting his political friends to write letters that falsely claimed that Carlos had no criminal record.

But a House Committee investigating the Clinton pardons in 2002 found that Vignali had two prior convictions and two arrests. In 1989, Vignali had been convicted and fined for fighting in a public place, and later for vandalism. He’d also been arrested for reckless driving and later for assaulting a girlfriend. Vignali had also admitted being involved with two different gangs.

After the appeal was unanimously defeated in appellate court, Horacio decided to try for executive clemency with the Clinton White House.

He contacted then-L.A. area Congressman Xavier Becerra, whom he had donated 16 thousand dollars to in three of Becerra’s campaigns. Even though neither of the Vignali’s had resided in his district, Becerra then called Alejandro Mayorkas, who was U.S. Attorney for Central California in Los Angeles, who claimed the sentence was too harsh.

Becerra then contacted Pardon Attorney Roger Adams at the Justice Department and Meredith Cabe at the White House (legal) Counsel Office. Cabe would later say he was pushing for clemency for Vignali, but Becerra later claimed he never explicitly supported clemency for Vignali but had wanted a “review” of the case.

On November 21, 2000, Becerra sent a letter to Bill Clinton, who had less than two months remaining in office. He falsely claimed that Vignali had no previous criminal record, was innocent, and how much it had affected his parents, whom he both knew.

Meanwhile, Mayorkas twice contacted Minnesota U.S. Attorney Todd Jones, who had originally tried Vignali. During the first contact, Jones warned Mayorkas that Vignali was “a major player,” and “don’t go there,” and that Vignali was “bad news.”

Mayorkas also twice contacted Andrew Dunne, who worked with Jones as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Mayorkas hoped that Jones’ office would actually lobby for clemency for Vignali, but Dunne flat out rejected it, and thought the calls were “highly unusual.”

Mayorkas actually met the elder Vignali and had conversations about clemency for his son. Vignali also brought up executive clemency and asked if Mayorkas would call the White House.

Before Mayorkas made the second call to Jones, he called the Pardon Attorney’s Office and claimed that an unidentified female staffer said it was alright even if the case was not in his jurisdiction, and he claimed he only wanted to vouch for the defendant’s father.

Then Mayorkas made the second call to prosecutor Jones, telling him of his intent to call the White House. Jones once again told Mayorkas he opposed clemency. After the call, Jones was troubled by the lobbying of Mayorkas, because someone from another jurisdiction who had not prosecuted the case was trying to recommend clemency.

In spite of Jones second stern warning, Mayorkas called White House Counsel Bruce Lindsey, who was very close to the Clintons, and then received a return call from Meredith Cabe and Eric Angel, who worked with Lindsey on pardons. Mayorkas told them he was not that familiar with the case and knew his parents well, but afterward would claim he did not recommend clemency. Cabe would later say that Mayorkas had definitely supported clemency. So did Lindsey and White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.

Mayorkas had laid the groundwork for clemency, but there was another major player that Horacio Vignali had reached out to. He had known Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca since 1991. Vignali raised or had contributed a stunning total of over 200 thousand dollars to Baca’s campaigns.

Vignali asked Baca to write Clinton a letter, and he also told Baca that Hillary’s brother Hugh Rodham was helping Carlos receive clemency. Vignali had paid Hugh four thousand dollars, and then another 200 thousand if Carlos was pardoned. Baca at first refused to write a letter, but decided to write one that would praise Horacio and make no mention of Carlos. The senior Vignali didn’t think it would help, and Baca did not send it.

Baca then received a call from Hugh Rodham, but Baca later said he told Rodham he had reservations. Baca then received a call from Dawn Woolen, assistant to Lindsey, and she asked Baca what he thought of Horacio, and Baca spoke favorably. She then asked if Bill Clinton should pardon Carlos. Baca later claimed he didn’t know enough about the case and that it was up to Clinton. Woolen, however said that Baca supported a commutation but did not want to write it in a letter.

White House staff later claimed that Mayorkas and Baca had an impact, even though both men attempted to use the elder Vignali as a backdoor way to pardon Carlos.

Meanwhile, Bruce Lindsey was the point man at the White House for Horacio. He falsely told Lindsey that Vignali was innocent and had no previous criminal record. He mentioned Mayorkas and Baca supported clemency as well as the prosecutor, Todd Jones in Minnesota. However, Jones and his two assistant prosecutors, Andrew Dunne and Denise Reilly both strongly opposed clemency, as did Judge David Doty, who had sentenced Vignali.

But the White House staff, including Lindsey, Cabe and Angel, would soon find out the truth. Pardon Attorney Roger Adams issued a strong report denying clemency, noting Vignali was not a first-time offender, was the leader of the cocaine ring, and that the prosecutors and Judge Doty had strongly opposed any pardon. When his report was sent to the White House, it did not contain Deputy Attorney General Holder’s signature, which would have had much more influence. Adams signed the report opposing clemency for Vignali instead of Holder, thinking the Justice Department should be on record opposing a pardon.

Adams concluded his report writing that “…I recommend that you deny his (Vignali’s) petition.”

Even after learning the truth about Carlos Vignali’s history, the staff later claimed that they considered the support of Sheriff Baca and U.S. Attorney Mayorkas to be significant. And Hugh Rodham continued to contact the White House, including both Lindsey and Cabe. Lindsey, who would soon be president of the tainted Clinton Foundation, later said under oath that he thought the Vignali commutation was an “appropriate one.”

On January 20th, Clinton’s final day in office, he commuted Vignali’s sentence, who had served less than six years (and less than 40 percent) of his fifteen-year sentence. Most of the media coverage focused on the Marc Rich pardon. There was also controversy about Clinton pardoning two Weather Underground terrorists, including the infamous Susan Rosenberg with an assist from Congressman Jerrold Nadler.

On January 24th, Hugh Rodham received 200 thousand dollars from the senior Vignali for helping his son receive clemency. But on February 20, numerous media reports headlined that Hugh Rodham had been paid over 204 thousand dollars by Horacio Vignali and another 230 thousand by Glenn Braswell, who sold miracle medical cures and had been convicted of mail fraud, perjury and tax evasion and was still under investigation. Hillary, who had just been sworn in as a senator, claimed that she was “extremely disappointed,” and “knew nothing” about Hugh taking money for pardons.

Bill Clinton claimed “neither Hillary or I had any knowledge” of the payments, and that Hugh should return any money, but Rodham’s attorney later said that Hugh had not returned more than 150 thousand and had no intent to return anything more. Clinton himself has never explained why he chose to pardon Vignali, a major and unrepentant drug trafficker, to serve less than half of his 15-year sentence.

Even though Pardon Attorney Roger Adams made the White House aware of the facts of the Vignali case, no one ever contacted Minnesota law enforcement, the federal prosecutors there, or Judge David Doty. Todd Jones, the U.S. Attorney and the chief prosecutor, told Roger Adams he was against the pardon because “it was a no-brainer,” and he “did not believe there was any way he was going to be granted (a pardon) in this case.”

Jones’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Denise Reilly told me that she had opposed a pardon, and that it was “bought with money.” Judge Doty sent a letter to the Justice Department opposing clemency because of Vignali’s role in the conspiracy and his lack of remorse.

Gerry Wehr, a retired investigator of the Vignali case in Minnesota, is still outraged. He told me Mayorkas “is either incompetent or a liar,” and Becerra and Mayorkas “were only following the democratic party’s wishes.” His colleague Jeff Burchette, who spent 18 years as a narcotics investigator and also worked the Vignali case, is still furious, telling me that Mayorkas should never have been Homeland Security Director because “he’s so full of “s–t,” and that Becerra should never have been HHS Secretary because he and Mayorkas are both “f–ing clowns.”

Hugh Rodham and Horacio Vignali refused to speak to investigators or go under oath. In 2017, Los Angeles County Sheriff Baca was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI because of the abuse of county inmates, including beatings and even rape and trying to cover it up. Other officers were also convicted, and Baca was released from prison in 2022 after serving two years of a three-year sentence.

After Biden nominated Mayorkas and Becerra for their cabinet posts in 2020, they were narrowly confirmed by the Senate on mostly party line votes. Since Mayorkas became Homeland Security Director, the flow of fentanyl, human trafficking and migrants crossing the border remains out of control, even though Mayorkas insists that it is not. His plan to let illegals cross the border without a court date continues to be blocked, and now Mayorkas is refusing to make public the number of migrants on the terror watch list that were stopped at the border.

And the actions of Mayorkas and Baca as well as Xavier Becerra in 2001 gave the Clinton White House an excuse to pardon drug kingpin Carlos Vignali and should have ended all of their careers. Duncan DeVille, who was Assistant U.S. Attorney under Mayorkas, tendered his resignation to him citing his involvement with the Vignali case.

In 2002, a year after Carlos Vignali had received clemency, it was discovered that the DEA and other investigators had found that Horacio Vignali was also involved in the drug trade, even at times with his son. Mayorkas and Baca absurdly claimed that they would not have gotten involved if they’d only known at the time.

Also, for Mayorkas, being slammed by the Inspector General in 2015 for inappropriate behavior in dispensing visas and green cards should have sent him into permanent exile.

And Judge Doty said the Vignali pardon was outrageous. He recently told me he was disappointed with Mayorkas then and now. In 2005, Doty told LA Weekly in referring to the Vignali clemency that, “the whole thing stunk,” and that it had “money and corruption and fraud written all over it.” Specifically referring to Mayorkas, he said, “what the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles did was beyond the pale.”

Sadly, the legacy of Alejandro Mayorkas is tainted with dishonesty and corruption that has permanently left a soiled mark.

Conclusion

I have done my best to find information on the corruption of Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland. Apparently I am one of the few people who think that they are a team. But I know one thing this country will be much better off when both of them are out of office. Garland weaponized the DOJ and Mayorkas ruined the Department of Homeland Security and the border. These two individuals were at the center of the Biden government’s plan to destroy our country.

Resources

washingtonexaminer.com, “Comer claims Mayorkas and Garland participated in cover-up of Biden corruption.” By Brady Knox; thehill.com, “Jordan signals ongoing probes into Garland, Mayorkas on border.” By Rebecca Beitsch; washingtontimes.com, “Criminality of Biden-Garland’s Justice Department bigger than Watergate.” By Newt Gingrich; nytimes.com, “Inside Impeachment’s Rise as a Weapon of Partisan Warfare.” By Peter Baker; thehill.com, “The corruption of Attorney General Merrick Garland.” By Jonathan Turley; cpi.org, “The Continued Incompetence of Alejandro Mayorkas.”; frontpagemag.com, “Alejandro Mayorkas’ Corrupt Legacy.” By Ron Kolb;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland a Lethal and Utterly Corrupt Tag Team

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