This week, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders named the co-chairs and members of their joint task forces, which will advise the Biden campaign on policy. The choices say a great deal about the leftward moves Biden will be making to keep his party base satisfied. Politico reports: 

The task forces’ membership consists of a stable of prominent Democratic leaders and public policy experts, but its most notable appointee is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York congresswoman and superstar of the party’s left wing who backed Sanders during the primary contest and has evinced skepticism toward Biden’s more moderate ideology.

Since Sanders’ exit from the White House race, however, Ocasio-Cortez has all but formally endorsed Biden while still pressuring him to pursue a distinctly liberal policy agenda.

Biden has already made clear that he would pursue the same foreign policies as his former boss, President Barack Obama. Jonathan Tobin, writing at National Review, reminds us that those policies didn’t work in the first place. His article is worth your time. 

This week also brought the news that former Vice President Biden was on the list of Obama officials who requested to "unmask" former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn. Tobias Hoonhout lays out the story nicely at National Review. 

David Harsanyi takes a higher-level view of the whole Trump-Russia investigation and stresses that despite the media spin, this is a story of serious corruption in the Obama administration. As he writes: 

It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.

What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.