It is one of the mysteries of the Justice Breyer ‘retirement’ fiasco: Who leaked the info before he was ready to announce it himself?
That mystery has been effectively solved, and it turns out the leak comes from a familiar culprit: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.
“President Joe Biden’s chief of staff leaked Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s plan to retire to ‘a limited group’ on Wednesday, a top Democrat told reporters,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin told reporters he received a ‘surprise’ call on Wednesday morning from White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who ‘said that President Biden wanted [Durbin] to know that Stephen Breyer was about to announce his retirement from the court’,” the Examiner continued.
Klain told Durbin to keep the news a ‘secret’ that Breyer planned to make an official announcement, but obviously the word somehow got out. Breyer was reportedly dismayed by the news. Shannon Bream initially reported that he was “upset,” but then modified that to say he was “surprised.”
A bit more clarity. I'm told Justice Breyer had firmly decided on his own to retire and that an announcement was due very soon. And while it appears someone jumped the gun on that, better to characterize him as surprised by events today than "upset".
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) January 26, 2022
Breyer made his retirement announcement on Thursday, which was a day after Klain’s call to the senator’s office. Watch:
Justice Breyer kept referring to the country as a grand “experiment” and referred to the Gettysburg address to claim that we are now in a “great Civil War.”
“But I’ll tell you what Lincoln thought, what Washington thought, and what people today still think,” Breyer said. “It’s an experiment. It’s an experiment. That’s what they said. And Joanna paid each of our grandchildren a certain amount of money to memorize the Gettysburg address.”
“And the reason — the reason that what we want them to pick up there and what I want those students to pick up, if I can remember the first two lines is that four score and seven years ago our fathers brought — created upon this here a new country,” he continued. “A country that was dedicated to liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal. Conceived in liberty. Those are his words. And dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He meant women too. And we are now engaged in a great Civil War. To determine whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. See, those are the words I want to see. An experiment.”
Several observers remarked that Breyer appeared to be comparably sharp next to Biden.
Stephen Breyer is four years older than Joe Biden and sounds way more sharp and articulate
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 27, 2022
Can we compare the cognitive abilities of Biden and Breyer that were just on display? It doesn't take an expert to know that Breyer is still a vibrant and thoughtful older man with a sharp mind while Biden has slipped into incoherence and a substantially declined mental state.
— Velvel Issac (@IssacVelvel) January 27, 2022
Biden has stirred a controversy after the Breyer retirement by insisting that the next Supreme Court nominee be a ‘black woman.’
This isn’t the first time a White House snafu can be traced back to Ron Klain. After the administration promised not to issue federal mandates, Klain essentially confessed the OSHA rule was the “ultimate work-around” with a retweet. Klain’s tweet was cited in the federal court ruling that put a stay on the vaccine mandate for large employers, which was recently upheld in the Supreme Court.
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.