Are the string-pullers ready to ease Joe Biden out? From Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com:
In a key bit of synchronicity, two events took place in close succession that show that the Biden plan to run for 2024 is on the ropes. The first was that the White House counsel’s office sent letters to major press outlets pressuring effectively directing them to treat the impeachment inquiry as a lie. Mind you, this media meddling comes after the Biden Administration lost its fight against a preliminary injunction, both at the trail court and appeals court level, against its campaign to influence social media platforms not to publish what it deemed to be “misinformation”. If you read Matt Taibbi’s Twitter files revelations, that campaign was light touch compared to this letter.
But the fact that it was Democratic Party fixture CNN that was first to public about the Biden Administration narrative control campaign was a sign that a weakened and desperate Administration had overplayed its hand. We’ll return to the letter later in the post because there are other ways in which it was extremely irregular.
But the big bombshell is the David Ignatius oped in the Washington Post telling Biden not to run again and even going so far as to tell Harris to step aside too. Tellingly, the article was not paywalled:
The significance is not that Ignatiius sticks the shiv in as nicely as possible, spending paragraphs signaling his regret at having to recommend against Biden 2024 despite Ignatius’ view that Biden “has been a successful and effective president.” It’s due to Igantius’ status as whisperer in chief for the surveillance-intelligence industrial complex. Remember, for instance, that Anthony Blinken gave an interview to Ignatius in January in which Blinken effectively committed the US to an open-ended war in Ukraine.
