Friday’s appointment of a “special counsel” to oversee the case of presidential son Hunter Biden was bizarre on its own. It also continues a years-long trend in which conservatives justly believe the Justice Department is outrageously biased leftward.
It is that second subject that bears more elucidation.
GARLAND CONTINUES HUNTED BIDEN COVER-UP WITH BOGUS SPECIAL COUNSEL
First, though, consider the strange new move at the Justice Department. Ignoring explicit features of the special counsel law, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to the post the same man, U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who already has fumbled (or perhaps tried to bury) the investigation for more than five years. Plenty of smart analysts in the past 24 hours have leveled complaints about the move; I particularly commend the one by former top federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, who called the selection a “joke” and believes the real goal is for Weiss to “continue killing the ‘ongoing investigation’ he is running.”
I add merely that there is a major self-contradiction inherent in this new Garland-Weiss arrangement. For months both Garland and Weiss have insisted that Garland already had “ultimate authority” to file charges against the presidential son in any jurisdiction, even as whistleblowers said Weiss had complained that U.S. attorneys in other federal jurisdictions had blocked him from doing so. If this isn’t a new way to sweep the case under the rug, then the only significant new power Weiss will have a special counsel is exactly that: to go outside of his ordinary Delaware jurisdiction to bring charges.
But if he already had such authority, as he and Garland claimed, why would he need special counsel status to gain such authority?
The whole thing smells like week-old fish.
Then again, the Justice Department, FBI, and other federal security agencies have exuded the stench of rotten fish for years. Beginning in Bill Clinton’s presidency, left-wing ideologues who originally were political appointees began “burrowing in” to the mid-level career ranks at the Justice Department, where during Republican administrations they deliberately gum up the works and where during Democratic administrations they act with partisan vengeance.
For those and other reasons, conservatives for years have complained that the department harasses Republican leaners unmercifully while repeatedly showing lenience to Democrats. One could struggle for hours to identify an example of liberals even having reason to assert unbalanced treatment against them. About the only high-profile Democrat in two decades who suffered prosecution on sketchy grounds was former vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, but his actions had been so unethical that not even Democrats spent much energy faulting prosecutors for trying to convict him.
Justice Department sins against conservatives have been legion. During the G.W. Bush administration, federal prosecutors dishonestly convicted vice presidential aide Scooter Libby on entirely spurious grounds, and came literally within a day of indicting political guru Karl Rove in the same case until Rove unearthed evidence conclusively proving his innocence, even though they already know neither Rove nor Libby had anything to do with the underlying offense. Federal prosecutors wrongfully convicted Republican U.S. Sen, Ted Stevens of Alaska in one of the most flagrant examples of willful misconduct in history. Without that conviction, there would not have been enough votes in the Senate to pass the bureaucratic nightmare known as Obamacare.
Federal authorities conducted a bogus conspiracy (colloquially known as “collusion”) case against President Donald Trump with regard to Russian interference in the 2016 election. They conducted an armed raid to arrest an obviously innocent pro-life activist even though he already had volunteered to surrender himself at federal offices. They separately targeted “traditionalist Catholics,” and ordinary parents who dared speak up at school board meetings, as if both groups are domestic terrorists. The IRS targeted and harassed conservative groups for protected political activity. And more.
Contrarily, federal law enforcement always seems to be lenient against liberals and Democrats. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept classified files on a home server and had them destroyed, but wasn’t punished. Leftist activist groups illegally threaten conservative Supreme Court justices not only with impunity, but with U.S marshals officially told to ignore the offenses while the attorney general lies about it. Urban rioters face almost no prosecution despite doing billions of dollars of damage. Pro-life centers suffer hundreds of attacks with almost nobody being prosecuted. Two violent New Black Panthers illegally intimidate voters at Philadelphia polls but the Obama Justice Department drops the already-won case against them.
And so interminably on, including the obvious and massive cover-up of Biden family scandals aplenty.
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If Justice Department errors or controversial decisions, both for prosecutorial zealotry and for unexpected leniency, were random, then both conservatives and liberals would find an approximately equal number of reasons to complain. Instead, all the complaining comes from conservatives, because all the errors and strange calls seem to disadvantage the Right while letting the Left off scot-free.
What this is, is corruption. One day, somehow, Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray and their henchman must be made to pay a legal price.
