by Kyle Becker
The Democratic Party, having apparently solved all of America’s problems, are going back to the well at least one more time: It is announcing yet another partisan Trump “witch hunt.”
On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) announced that the House Democrats are going to open a formal investigation into the Department of Justice’s surveillance of Congress, journalists, and others:
“Recent reports suggest that, during the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice used criminal investigations as a pretext to spy on President Trump’s perceived political enemies,” Nadler’s letter read.
“It remains possible that these cases—which now include Members of Congress, members of the press, and President Trump’s own White House Counsel—are isolated incidents,” it continued. “Even if these reports are completely unrelated, they raise serious constitutional and separation of power concerns. Congress must make it extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for the Department to spy on the Congress or the news media. We should make it hard for prosecutors to hide behind secret gag orders for years at a time. We cannot rely on the Department alone to make these changes.”
“It is also possible that these cases are merely our first glimpse into a coordinated effort by the Trump Administration to target President Trump’s political opposition,” it added. “If so, we must learn the full extent of this gross abuse of power, root out the individuals responsible, and hold those individuals accountable for their actions.”
“Like many Americans, I desperately want to see Attorney General Garland succeed in his goal of repairing the damage done by his predecessors and return a sense of ‘normal’ to the Department of Justice,” Nadler claimed. “It is an important and worthy undertaking. It is not, however, something we can accomplish by simply turning the page on the Trump era. I am encouraged by the steps the Attorney General announced this morning, but we cannot wait for the Inspector General to share even his preliminary findings with DOJ, some months or years from now, before Congress contemplates a response.”
The letter refers to Department of Justice surveillance that took place under Attorney General William Barr and continued into the Biden administration.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Publisher Fred Ryan laid out a compelling case that the Biden administration lied to journalists’ faces about the rogue Department of Justice’s surveillance of the press.
“During the final days of the Trump administration, the attorney general used extraordinary measures to obtain subpoenas to secretly seize records of reporters at three leading U.S. news organizations,” Ryan said. “After this was reported last month, President Biden rightly decried this attack on the First Amendment, calling it ‘simply, simply wrong‘ and assuring Americans that it would not happen in his administration.”
“Unfortunately, new revelations suggest that the Biden Justice Department not only allowed these disturbing intrusions to continue — it intensified the government‘s attack on First Amendment rights before finally backing down in the face of reporting about its conduct,” Ryan claimed.
The WaPo publisher then revealed what he referred to as an “unprecedented assault” on press freedom.
“After Biden took office, the department continued to pursue subpoenas for reporters’ email logs issued to Google, which operates the New York Times’ email systems, and it obtained a gag order compelling a Times attorney to keep silent about the fact that federal authorities were seeking to seize his colleagues’ records,” he continued. “Later, when the Justice Department broadened the number of those permitted to know about the effort, it barred Times executives from discussing the legal battle with the Times newsroom, including the paper’s top editor.”
“This escalation, on Biden’s watch, represents an unprecedented assault on American news organizations and their efforts to inform the public about government wrongdoing,” he said.
The Washington Post publisher cannot verify if the Biden DOJ will actually stay true to its word and halt the practice, given that he just established that the administration is lying. Additionally, there must be a distinction between the Trump administration and the DOJ run by former Attorney General William Barr.
Barr might have appeared to the press as a loyal servant of the Trump presidency, as it argued several times, but behind the scenes he was undermining any accountability for the so-called “Deep State” by failing to bring Spygate actors to justice. Furthermore, there are reports by some former Trump officials that Barr actually had a hand in paving the way to the Biden administration.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s show in February and laid out the case that Barr had subverted the Trump agenda.
“Trump’s last Attorney General actually also turns out to be Joe Biden’s first Attorney General,” Navarro said. “Because here is what was happening. We had over 30 executive orders queued after election day, ready to go. But we kept running into all of these roadblocks and roadblocks and hurdles. It turns out that Bill Barr’s office of legal counsel was fast-tracking all of these Biden EOs.”
“And basically, it was a Deep State queue,” he added. “Now, this has implications, Maria. I will tell you about one that got away from us. And I will tell you about one that Biden did. The first one that Biden did was an abomination. We did a beautiful executive order… to prevent the Communist Chinese from selling bulk power equipment into our electricity grid.”
“So, we had this beautiful order,” he went on. “One of the orders that Bill Barr helped Joe Biden do was to basically unwind that.” Bartiromo exclaimed, “wow.” Not only does the Biden DOJ appear to be a continuation of the ineffectual Trump DOJ, the Biden presidency seems to be a continuation of the Obama presidency.
The Washington Post covered the Obama-era AP surveilance scandal in 2013, which was memory holed by many who still believe the presidency was ‘scandal free.’ Today’s Democratic Party is opening an investigation into the Trump presidency to deflect from its own illicit activities. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Author: Kyle Becker
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