Tag: Merrick Garland

House Judiciary GOP Subpoena FBI’s Christopher Wray, AG Merrick Garland

Just the News

The House Judiciary Committee has issued subpoenas to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding they provide the committee with documents pertaining to FVI investigations of school board meetings.

In October of 2021, Garland issued a memo highlighting “violent threats” against school officials amid a rise in parental opposition to the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools. That memo, directing law enforcement to address the issue, attracted considerable scrutiny from conservatives who categorized it as part of the Biden administration’s alleged “weaponization” of federal agencies.

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Garland Appoints Special Counsel to Investigate Classified Biden Documents

Just the News

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president.

He said he initially appointed U.S. Attorney John Lausch, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, to conduct the initial investigation, but because Lausch is retiring, a different special counsel needed to be appointed.

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Belated Revelation Classified Documents Found in Private Biden Office Turns Legal, Political Tables

Just the News

When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Nov. 18 that he had named a special prosecutor to investigate former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents found at the Mar-a-Lago compound, the government harbored a fresh secret: The current president, Joe Biden, had a similar problem.

Just two weeks earlier, Biden’s lawyers disclosed to government lawyers on Nov. 2 — just six days before the midterm elections — that they had found sensitive government documents with classified markings inside an office that Biden used at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington after he left office as Barack Obama’s vice president.

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Commentary: Third Time’s a Charm for Merrick Garland

Admin

What do you suppose the chances are that Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s attorney general and chief enforcer, is a student of Søren Kierkegaard? Pretty slim, I’d wager. But his announcement yesterday that he was getting the old band back together and appointing yet another “special counsel” to investigate Donald Trump made me think that he should take a gander at Repetition, a book that Kierkegaard published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius.

The book is an arch, hothouse affair, full of Kierkegaard’s mocking and self-indulgent philosophical curlicues. But the MacGuffin of the book—whether one can really repeat the events of one’s life and, if so, what significance that repetition has—is something Garland might want to ponder for himself. I don’t think I will be spoiling things by revealing that Kierkegaard—or at least his pseudonymous narrator—concludes that, no, “there simply is no repetition” in life. 

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AG Merrick Garland Appoints Special Counsel to Oversee Trump Investigations

Virginia Star Staff

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that he is appointing a special counsel to oversee the federal criminal investigations into former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents.

This action comes days after Republicans—who plan to investigate the grossly political Justice Department—won the House of Representatives, and over a week after Joe Biden told reporters that his administration will make sure Trump “will not take power if he does run.”

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‘Rotted at Its Core’: House Judiciary GOP Releases Massive 1,000 Page Report on Alleged FBI Misconduct

Virginia Star Staff

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee on Friday released a 1,050-page report on alleged FBI misconduct, based primarily on the testimony of whistleblowers within the agency.

The report, titled “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About The Politicization of the FBI And The Justice Department,” began by stating that the FBI “is broken” under the leadership of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, Wray’s superior, while also blaming the “politicized bureaucracy” of the agency. It accused Garland and Wray of overseeing an agency that “altered and mischaracterized evidence to federal courts, circumvented safeguards, and exploited weaknesses in policies.”

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Mark Houck Attorney: Garland Must Explain to Family Why Their Father Was Arrested by Men with Guns

Virginia Star Staff

When Republicans question Attorney General Merrick Garland on the shocking arrest of a Catholic father, Mark Houck’s lawyer wants the Houck family to be in the front row.

Peter Breen, an attorney with The Thomas More Society representing Houck, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that the Justice Department sent “20-plus heavily armed federal agents with shields and long guns” to arrest Houck in late September “to intimidate pro-life people and people of faith.”

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Commentary: Dems Inexplicably Block Demand for FBI to Cough Up Ray Epps Documents

Admin

For those who do not know who Ray Epps is and why he matters—and this includes most Democrats and many journalists—U.S. Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) served up a handy reference guide last week. Gosar did this in the form of a resolution of inquiry (ROI) directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to hand over all documents relevant to the Epps case within 14 days. 

“Multiple videos show Ray Epps repeatedly urging crowds of people in Washington, D.C. on January 5 and January 6, 2021, to go to the United States Capitol and breach the building,“ Gosar explained. “Epps is the one person seen on video directing people towards the Capitol seconds before violence broke out, yet he has never been arrested or charged with any crime while more than 800 others have and countless more remained jailed.”

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Unpacking the Apparent Trump-Hillary Double Standard: For Her, the FBI Helped Obstruct Its Own Investigation

RealClearWire

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.

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Commentary: What We Know about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid (So Far)

Admin

“There’s so much we don’t know!” says any liberal losing an argument about the dramatic FBI raid last week on Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence and private club.

There are, indeed, some things that we do not know, but what we do know is already quite revealing. We know that the raid – which involved 30 FBI agents and three Justice Department lawyers – lasted over nine hours and was by day’s end reclassified as a “search” by all government agencies and the entire legacy media. We know that this supposed “search” was personally ordered not by FBI Director Christopher Wray, but by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a highly partisan Biden Administration appointee who has implied that parents objecting to critical race theory in public schools are domestic terrorists, and who refused to provide home security protection to Supreme Court justices in the majority of the recent ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

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Julie Kelly Commentary: It’s Inevitable, Trump Will Be Indicted

Virginia Star Staff

A few days after federal agents stormed Donald Trump’s castle in Palm Beach last week, Judge Beryl Howell berated a man from Georgia for his involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.

“Listening without question to political rhetoric that leads to serious offenses, criminal conduct, is not an excuse when you’re standing in a court of law,” Howell told Glen Simon, a Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds. “You’ve got to use your common sense and your own sense of who you are and how you’d like to conduct yourself as an American citizen before just blindly doing what a political figure says.”

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Trump Calls for Release of Full Affidavit Used for FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid

Virginia Star Staff

Former President Trump is calling for the full release of the affidavit submitted with the warrant allowing the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago estate – after the Justice Department asked the document to remain sealed.

“There is no way to justify the unannounced RAID of Mar-a-Lago, the home of the 45th President of the United States … by a very large number of gun toting FBI Agents, and the Department of ‘Justice’ but, in the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” Trump wrote late Monday evening on his platform Truth Social.

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FBI Likely Briefed White House Before Mar-a-Lago Raid, Ex-FBI Agents Say

Virginia Star Staff

The top levels of the Biden administration, including the White House and officials leading the Department of Justice (DOJ), were likely aware of the Mar-a-Lago raid and may have even moved the warrant forward, two retired FBI agents told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Former President Donald Trump announced Monday night that the FBI raided his Florida home, while the Department of Justice (DOJ) had an ongoing investigation into the possible mishandling of classified documents after 15 boxes of White House documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago, according to The Washington Post.

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Commentary: Adam Schiff Is Hiding Something

Admin

Jeffrey Rosen had a secret on January 6, 2021.

The then-acting attorney general—Rosen was appointed on December 24, 2020 to replace departing Attorney General William Barr—had assembled a team of elite and highly skilled government agents at Quantico, a nexus point between the FBI and U.S. military, the weekend before Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. At the same time he was rejecting President Donald Trump’s last-minute appeals to investigate election fraud, Rosen was managing a hush-hush operation in advance of planned rallies and protests in Washington on January 6.

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Armed California Man Arrested Near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Home Allegedly Told Police He Wanted to Kill Kavanaugh

Susan Berry, PhD

An armed California man arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home Wednesday allegedly told police officers he wanted to kill Kavanaugh in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in the Mississippi abortion law case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.

Fox News has reported the suspect has been identified as 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske of Simi Valley, California, and had been carrying a gun, knife, and pepper spray when arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland.

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Commentary: Joe Biden vs. We the People

Virginia Star Staff

The Biden Administration last June unveiled its “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” Despite its anodyne-sounding name, the “national strategy” was anything but anodyne. The pamphlet represented the logical culmination of the Left’s cynical use of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a means of ginning up large-scale, nationwide anti-Republican/anti-Trump voter sentiment.

The result, evinced again by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s disgraceful October 2021 memo directing the FBI to intrude on local school board meetings and crack down on anti-critical race theory parental revolts, has been a roiling cold war waged by the ruling class against us “deplorables” and our political “wrong-think.”

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Biden’s Department of Justice Announces New ‘Office of Environmental Justice’

Virginia Star Staff

On Thursday, two of Joe Biden’s Cabinet members announced plans to create a new division within the Department of Justice that will focus on fighting for “environmental justice.”

As reported by Fox News, the joint announcement was made by Attorney General Merrick Garland and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan. The new Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) will serve as a “central hub” for a “comprehensive environmental justice enforcement strategy,” and will soon lay out a “series of actions” that will be taken in order to ostensibly “secure environmental justice for all Americans.”

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Biden Administration Sues Missouri over Pro-Second Amendment Law

Virginia Star Staff

On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced its intention to sue the state of Missouri over a law passed last year that protects residents’ Second Amendment rights from federal government overreach.

As reported by The Hill, the lawsuit was announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland, targeting Missouri’s House Bill 85 as an alleged violation of the “Supremacy Clause,” which “is preempted by federal law and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.” Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) will argue that the law harms cooperative efforts between the federal government, state governments, and local jurisdictions.

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Commentary: One Year Later, More Lingering Questions About January 6

Virginia Star Staff
Large group of people storming Washington D.C. in protest on January 6.

A bombshell report just published in Newsweek details an in-depth, secret operation conducted by the Justice Department before and during January 6. Contrary to the lamentations of FBI Director Christopher Wray that he wished his agency had had better resources to prevent the Capitol breach, hundreds of elite forces under Wray’s authority were on stand-by days just before the protest, and even on the ground as it happened.

The “shadowy commandos” stationed at Quantico, home of the FBI Academy, on January 2, 2021 included the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and SWAT teams. 

“On the morning of January 6, most of these forces staged closer to downtown Washington, particularly after intelligence was received indicating a possible threat to FBI headquarters building or the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” Newsweek investigative reporter William M. Arkin wrote. “FBI tactical teams arrived on Capitol Hill early in the day to assist in the collection of evidence at sites—including the Republican and Democrat party national headquarters—where explosive devices were found. FBI SWAT teams and snipers were deployed to secure nearby congressional office buildings. Other FBI agents provided selective security around the U.S. Capitol and protection to congressional members and staff.”

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Commentary: Capitol Surveillance Footage of January 6th Will Tell the Real Story

Virginia Star Staff

For months, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has tried every trick in the law books to conceal from Americans a massive trove of video evidence that captured all the activity at the Capitol complex on January 6. Federal judges have played along, approving hundreds of protective orders to keep video clips—particularly footage recorded by the Capitol Police’s extensive closed-circuit television system—out of the public eye.

Time, however, is running out for the government.

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Tea Party Patriots to Train Candidates for Local Elections

Cooper Moran

Tea Party Patriots will focus on training and helping elect “constitutionally conservative” candidates for local elections across the country.

The organization is partnering with American Majority to encourage residents to “step up and participate in government.”

“As we watch a full-fledged attack on our freedoms from the local level all the way to the federal level, we simply can’t depend on the current class of politicians to save us,” Jenny Beth Martin in a statement. “From local school boards allowing — and, in some cases, forcing — our children to learn about anti-American concepts to city councils, mayors, and governors forcing mandates on the population that are a direct violation of our rights as free people, the time for patriots to step up and participate in government is now.”

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Commentary: Virginia’s Governor Race a Referendum on Education Reform

Virginia Star Staff
Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin

Loudoun County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., represents the contentious zeitgeist bedeviling the body politic. As I reported elsewhere last year, the Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war in which concerned parents oppose leftist indoctrination posing as curriculum.

The latest salvo—launched in the heat of a dead-even gubernatorial race in Virginia, and in the wake of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s much-criticized memo suggesting that disgruntled parents opposing school boards pose a national security threat—is captured in a Washington Post column with the provocative headline “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.”

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Commentary: The Data Mining of America’s Kids Should Be a National Scandal

RealClearWire

As U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sat down for his first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, denying a conflict of interest in his decision to investigate parents for “domestic terrorism,” there is a mother in the quiet suburb of Annandale, N.J., who found his answers lacking. And she has questions she wants asked at Garland’s hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday.

On a recent Saturday night, Caroline Licwinko, a mother of three, a law school student and the coach to her daughter’s cheerleading squad, sat in front of her laptop and tapped three words into an internet search engine: “Panorama. Survey. Results.”

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Attorney General Garland Grilled by GOP Senators over Department of Justice Memo Targeting Parents at School Meetings

Virginia Star Staff

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.

Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.

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Consultants Are Raking in Millions Promoting Critical Race Theory in Schools, According to Conservative Advocacy Group

Virginia Star Staff

Diversity, equity and inclusion consultants are getting paid millions of dollars by public schools “to push divisive ideologies” to transform American schools “from institutions of education to places of woke indoctrination,” according to a conservative education advocacy group. 

Parents Defending Education (PDE) spent four months compiling data for its “Consultant Report Card” released Thursday, which investigates 543 public school districts and agencies across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

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Pennsylvania State Senators Legislating to Prevent Privatizing Election Administration

Bradley Vasoli
Kristin Phillips-Hill

Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to introduce a measure banning private organizations from funding election administration in the Keystone State.

The bill’s sponsors, state Sens. Lisa Baker (R-Dallas) and Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-Jacobus) have cited the role that the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) played in election operations in Philadelphia and other Democratic-leaning counties in 2020. CTCL has been funded significantly by Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

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Majority of Americans Oppose FBI Investigation of Parents at School Board Meetings, Survey Finds

The Center Square
Merrick Garland

The majority of Americans oppose the Biden administration’s plans to monitor and investigate outspoken parents at school boards meetings, new polling from Convention of States Action reveals.

The poll found 57% of those surveyed do not support the announcement while 19.8% are in favor. The rest are not sure.

“…One can plainly see that those who are aware that Merrick Garland made this announcement oppose him by large majorities, while there’s a group who marked ‘not sure’ because they don’t know about his announcement or don’t know enough about it,” said Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States Action.

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Commentary: A.G. Garland’s Use of Police Power Against Parents Could Be His Undoing

Virginia Star Staff

Destruction of the family has always been at the center of the collectivist project. In chapter two of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels point out that the destruction of private property will never be complete until the “abolition [Aufhebung] of the family” is accomplished. The dream is perennial among snarling misanthropists. A couple of years ago, an interview in The Nation with a radical feminist explained that if you “want to dismantle capitalism” then you have to “abolish the family.”

It is worth keeping that in mind as the little drama of Merrick Garland versus the parents of America unfolds. I wrote about the attorney general’s absurd but troubling memorandum shortly after it was released on October 4. As all the world knows (but only some precincts of the world admit), Garland threatened to mobilize the entire police power of the state against parents. Why?

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Commentary: Biden’s Attack on Public School Parents Cannot Stand

Admin

President Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland’s memo directing the FBI to investigate parents who speak out at school board meetings has shocked the nation.

The Biden administration has gone into full attack mode against the First Amendment right to petition the government as Attorney General Merrick Garland has declared that parents opposing Critical Race Theory before their local school boards should be treated as terrorists under the Patriot Act.

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The Department of Justice Asks Federal Judge to Block Texas Abortion Law

Admin

The Department of Justice asked a federal judge late Tuesday night to block Texas’ Heartbeat Act, which prohibits abortions after the baby’s heartbeat can be detected.

The DOJ called for a temporary restraining order or injunction against the new law, arguing that the Heartbeat Act intends “to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights.”

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COVID-19 Vaccination Strategy Latest Issue in Gubernatorial Race

Eric Burk

How to encourage more Virginians to get the COVID-19 vaccine is the latest battleground in the gubernatorial race. On Monday, Terry McAuliffe announced his “Virginia is for vaccine lovers” plan with a push for school divisions to require the vaccine and ensure health care providers follow federal guidance. His plan also includes business incentives, enhanced marketing, and a voluntary COVID-safety compliance certification.

“COVID is here. It’s not going away anytime soon, so we have to do everything that we possibly can to keep our children in school, build the strongest economy, and we’ve got to really get serious, and we’ve got to fight this deadly infection of COVID,” he said on a Tuesday press call.

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Gov. Abbott, Attorney General Merrick Face off over Feds Handling of COVID-Positive Migrants

The Center Square

A legal battle and war of words between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the federal government over COVID-positive migrants being released into Texas communities escalated over the weekend.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Texas Friday over an executive order Abbott issued restricting the transport of infected immigrants who entered the country illegally being released into the general population.

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Biden to Pick Merrick Garland for Attorney General

Virginia Star Staff

Joe Biden will nominate federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to serve as attorney general, according to Politico.

Biden’s decision comes after Democrats appear in striking distance of taking control of the Senate following runoff elections in Georgia on Tuesday. Raphael Warnock is projected to defeat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler. Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff is currently leading David Perdue, a Republican incumbent who holds the other seat in Georgia.

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Biden Is Reportedly Considering Andrew Cuomo for Attorney General

Virginia Star Staff

Joe Biden has added New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s name to his short list of candidates to serve as attorney general, according to reports.

Biden is considering three other potential nominees to lead the Department of Justice: Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland.

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Steve Bannon on The John Fredericks Show: How Democrats Plan to Steal the Election

Corinne Murdock

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon appeared on The John Fredericks Show (JFRS) to share how Democrats are undermining the election. The exchange is part of Bannon’s newest national tour, “Plot to Steal 2020.”
Bannon unveiled the tour in his first interview since his arrest. The War Room – Pandemic host claimed that the fraud charges against him are part of a bigger plan targeting Trump’s associates ahead of the election. 

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Democrats on Filling a SCOTUS Vacancy in 2016: ‘A Responsibility to Vote’

Virginia Star Staff

Several Democratic leaders favored a Senate confirmation vote for President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Merrick Garland in 2016.

Following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Obama nominated Garland, who had been the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block a confirmation vote for Garland until after the 2016 presidential election, The Washington Post reported.

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