Obstruction Is a Republican’s Best Friend
Jordan heads new select subcommittee to subvert justice
In their never-ending quest to destroy democracy in America, Republicans in the House, with a meager four-seat majority, are forming a select subcommittee to address “the weaponization of government.”
The stated focus of the subcommittee will be to uncover evidence suggesting that political bias in government institutions (FBI, DOJ, for example) led to the unfair or illegal treatment of subjects.
Sadly, the committee will be led by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan. That means we can forget about getting to the truth. Jordan has a solid reputation as a truth denier. He and his Republican cronies are seeking something else.
Republicans are looking for dirt on anyone who participated in investigations involving the former, twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president. And they are hoping to use this select subcommittee to discredit or stop investigations involving Republicans in Congress who participated in the attempt to steal the 2020 election and put Trump back in office.
But now they have a problem. It has come to the attention of the New York Times that the only recent evidence of political bias in government institutions that has led to unfair (maybe illegal) activities on the part of investigators has been the political bias exhibited by former Trump administration appointees.
Trump officials were guilty of political bias
We already know that then-Attorney General William Barr wrote and made public a misleading summary of the Mueller Report — one so misleading that Mueller wrote to Barr to express his displeasure.
We know Trump tried to appoint Jeffrey Clark as acting AG solely to disseminate a letter Clark had written to state legislators in Georgia, which would have put the weight of the DOJ behind the Big Lie and taken Trump closer to his goal of a hostile takeover in the wake of his loss to Biden.
In addition, we know that AG Barr appointed a formerly well-respected prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate claims that the Mueller investigation was tainted by political bias — as if Mueller’s failure to exonerate Trump was due to anything other than Trump’s apparent culpability.
Could Barr and Durham have believed that digging deeper into Mueller’s evidence and learning more about Trump and his ties to outside influences would somehow lead to an exoneration of Trump?
Whatever Barr and Durham expected, it looked for a minute like they may have found it. Two years into the Durham probe, the DOJ opened a criminal investigation. As the Times put it when the news first broke:
It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted … Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation.
What we know now but didn’t know then
It has always been assumed that the criminal investigation prompted by the Durham probe was related to work done during the Mueller investigation. That assumption was incorrect.
We now know that the criminal activity Durham discovered did not point to any of the people involved in the Mueller investigation — the evidence pointed to Trump himself.
We know nothing about the evidence against Trump that Barr and Durham so carefully hid from the public. All we really know is what Durham did not find. He did not find evidence of a “witch-hunt” as Trump, Barr, and Durham seem to have been expecting. Rather, the Durham investigation itself is evidence of the “weaponization of government.”
In a convoluted twist of fate, the investigator who investigated the Mueller investigators is now allegedly guilty of the crime he was investigating the Mueller investigators for.
There is now increasing pressure on Durham to release more information about the evidence against Trump and why no charges were ever brought.
Will the new subcommittee look into political bias by Barr and Durham?
Given this turn of events, the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government has a real challenge ahead. They can remain focused on trying to make Democrats look bad by continuing to pretend every investigation pending against Republicans in Congress and Trump appointees (or even Trump himself) is politically motivated and waste millions trying to find evidence to support that claim, or they can address the overt political bias that led to the failure to pursue existing evidence of criminal activity on the part the Donald J. Trump.
Democrats are calling for the latter, but with a Republican majority in the House and with Jim Jordan running the show, it looks like we’ll need another election cycle to finally get to the bottom of this.