DOJ Searches Biden’s Home, Finds More Documents with Classified Markings 

The Justice Department conducted a search of President Joe Biden’s Wilmington home Friday and found even more documents with classified markings, according to Biden’s personal attorney on Saturday.

The latest trove includes six documents. The content of the classified materials is unknown.

The White House had previously claimed on January 14 the search for all classified documents was completed.

The trove is in addition to the about 25 classified documents unearthed by Biden’s personal attorneys in past weeks between the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s residence.

Critics have questioned why Biden’s personal attorneys were initially searching for Biden’s illegally stashed documents. The White House has failed to provide the initial reason or cause for the search.

Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, claimed Saturday that Biden offered to allow the Justice Department to conduct the search. 

The search began “at approximately 9:45 AM and concluded at around 10:30 PM and covered all working, living and storage spaces in the home,” Bauer said in a statement, noting “representatives of both the personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were present” for the search.

The White House Counsel’s Office, which is a distinction from Biden’s personal attorneys, issued a statement that “[n]either the President nor the First Lady were present during the search. The President’s lawyers and White House Counsel’s Office will continue to cooperate with DOJ and the Special Counsel.”

The investigation of wrongdoing was reportedly widened after the DOJ and Biden’s personal attorneys agreed to hide the scandal from the American people.

According to the Washington Post, not only did the White House and DOJ try to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents were already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents apparently illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center.

Click here to to read the full article at BreitbartCA

Does Eric Garcetti – like Kamala Harris – have an eye on the White House?

Photo courtesy of Eric Garcetti, Flickr.

California Sen. Kamala Harris’ splashy first year in Washington has made her a fixture on lists of potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates – and not as an interesting long shot but as someone with a strong chance.

While the California Legislature’s recent vote to move the state’s 2020 presidential primary from June to March was seen in the Golden State as yet another attempt to make America’s most populous, richest state more of a factor in deciding the presidential nomination, a Newsweekanalysis last month saw it as an attempt to boost Harris’ potential White House bid. The Newsweek headline: “Is Kamala Harris Now the 2020 Favorite to Take on Trump?”

In 2016, California had 548 delegates at the Democratic Convention – nearly one-quarter of the 2,382 needed for the nomination that year. The numbers are likely to be similar in 2020, potentially giving Harris a big boost in the nomination race after voting in Iowa, New Hampshire and a handful of other states possibly more inclined to back more familiar Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

But there appears to be a fair chance that the assumption Harris would be the clear choice in the Golden State faces a huge complication: the presence of another popular, fresh California politician in the Democratic nomination mix.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has hinted that he’s thinking about running for governor in 2018 as well as president in 2020. After his recent appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, a Los Angeles Times account said his coy responses to questions about his political future “did little to dampen what has become a rowdy parlor game among California politicos: speculating on just what Garcetti will do next.”

The idea that Los Angeles residents might be upset about a Garcetti presidential bid because it would take him away from his duties as mayor is undercut by a Loyola Marymount poll released last month. It showed 63 percent of the 914 Los Angeles County residents surveyed were “strongly supportive” or “somewhat supportive” of Garcetti seeking the White House.

A Politico analysis in May offered a look at why a Garcetti bid intrigues some in the upper ranks of the Democratic establishment. It described him as a handsome 46-year-old who “was just re-elected to a second term with 81 percent of the vote, and is half-Mexican (he speaks Spanish fluently) and half-Jewish (he’s an active member of a very progressive L.A. synagogue), a Rhodes scholar and former Navy intelligence reserve officer.”

Harris, who turned 53 Friday, also has an attractive personal story in a Democratic Party on the lookout for candidates who can inspire large turnouts among young and minority voters. She has a Jamaican-American father and Indian-American mother and has been a trailblazer throughout her political career.

Both have records with fodder for attack ads

But if either Garcetti or Harris seek the White House, rival Democrats will have no shortage of fodder for attack ads.

Garcetti was first elected mayor in 2013 and cruised to re-election earlier this year, facing no serious opposition. He is considered hard-working and an impressive policy wonk.

But Los Angeles has emerged as the epicenter of American poverty in recent years thanks to high housing costs and the departure of Fortune 500 firms and mid-sized businesses alike. A 2014 blue-ribbon report commissioned by the City Council depicted Los Angeles as “facing economic decline, weighed down by poverty, strangled by traffic and suffering from a crisis of leadership,” according to a Los Angeles Times account. Garcetti has not reversed this downward arc, leading to a Los Angeles magazine article in August lamenting how Silicon Valley had far eclipsed the Los Angeles region.

As for Harris, her record during six years as attorney general was more mixed than some national coverage assumes – and at times at odds with now-ascendant Bernie Sanders-style populism. While she achieved high-profile wins in going after corporate malfeasance  – starting with shady mortgage lenders  – she was not a leader in criminal-justice reform in an era in which the movement built up momentum in California with dramatic changes in sentencing and parole laws. Some editorial writers challenged her description of herself as a “bold leader.” Jacobin magazine, which has a devoted following among progressives, was much harsher, depicting her as having “two faces” on crime and siding with reactionary tough-on-crime policies repeatedly while attorney general. Other liberal voices strongly agree, as the New Republic reported in August.

As California AG, Harris also continued a long bipartisan tradition that appalls good-government advocates: writing slanted descriptions of ballot measures that are meant to help or hurt the proposals. In 2015, for example, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle editorial page blasted Harris for ballot language that effectively killed a pension reform campaign in its infancy.

This article was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

GOP Tax Reform Boosts Wages According to Boston University Researchers

TAX REFORM UPDATE!!

Researchers at Boston University Agree!

In a study published this morning analyzing the economic and revenue impacts of the Republican “Unified Framework” Tax Plan, researchers found:

  • The new Republican tax plan raises GDP by between 3 and 5 percent and real wages by between 4 and 7 percent.
  • This translates into roughly $3,500 annually, on average, per working American household.
  • The source of the increase in U.S. output and real wages is the UF plan’s reduction in the U.S. marginal effective corporate tax rate from 34.6 percent to 18.6 percent.
  • According to their model, the U.S. corporate income tax represents a hidden tax on U.S. workers.

Click here to go directly to the study

Corporate Tax Reform and Wages: Theory and Evidence

New analysis from the Council of Economic Advisers proves:

  • Reducing the statutory federal corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent would increase the average household income in the United States by, very conservatively, $4,000 annually.
  • The increases recur each year, and the estimated total value of corporate tax reform for the average U.S. household is therefore substantially higher than $4,000 à The most optimistic estimates from literature show wages could boost more than $9,000 for the average household.
    • A 15 percent corporate rate cut could increase average household incomes from $83,143 in 2016 to between $87,520 and $92,222.
    • Median household income — meaning earnings for more of a typical household — would rise from $59,039 to between $62,147 and $65,486.
  • Literature finds countries with low corporate tax rates have seen higher wage gains than countries with high corporate tax rates.

Click here to link to study in its entirety

CA’s Democratic Members of Congress Plead for Obama to Pardon “Dreamers”

As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

Led by members of the California delegation, dozens of House Democrats are again pleading with President Obama to pardon hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to whom he granted temporary deportation deferrals.

Last month, several members of Congress asked Obama to use his pardon authority to forgive the past and future civil immigration offenses of the nearly 750,000 people granted deportation deferrals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

The lawmakers say that even though the so-called Dreamers would be left in legal limbo without work permits or visas, they could more easily apply for legal status from within the U.S. without immigration offenses on their records.

A White House official immediately batted down the idea, saying a pardon wouldn’t give them legal status. …

Click here to read the full story