What an Attorney General we finally, finally have! It has been such a long time.
I always had felt that, after two Trump terms, I would be delighted to vote for a Pence–Huckabee ticket. But, heck, put William Barr on any ticket — top or bottom — and I would vote for him.
He is strong and fierce, does not give an inch, does not get thrown off message, sticks to his guns, and sticks it to those who would take him down. If he had been President Trump’s first Attorney General, today not only would Hillary and the Clinton Foundation have been the prime subjects of the Russian Collusion Hoax, but they probably would have imprisoned Robert Mueller by now, too, for Russian collusion. What a force this Barr is!
I watched a few hours of the Tuesday “hearing” before the House Judiciary Committee, where one obnoxious Democrat after another — with the occasional rare exception of one or two Democrats who simply believe differently but do so honorably and elegantly — tried to grill Barr and take him down. Their time passed by, and they could not land a blow. They were disgusting in their nastiness, but that is the nature of House hearings.
Most Americans do not know this, but by law a congressional representative is permitted to say anything at a hearing, no matter how false, no matter how defamatory, and they cannot be sued for perjury or defamation. It is like when former Sen. Harry Reid stood in the U.S. Senate chamber during the height of the 2012 presidential race and falsely accused Mitt Romney of tax evasion. It was a lie, a slander — and Reid knew it. But Reid also knew that, as long as he spoke his slander within the Senate chamber, he never could be sued for the defamation. This unique protection is called the “Legislative Privilege,” rooted in the Speech and Debate Clause of the United States Constitution (Art. I, § 6, Cl. 1). By law, legislators may say absolutely anything they want, and by law they cannot be sued or prosecuted for any of it, as long as they say it within the chamber or otherwise as part of the legislative process. As an attorney of 26 years and a law professor of 16, who practices and teaches this, I know about the legislative privilege. But few other Americans do. So a Democrat can call Barr the most filthy names, make the most baseless accusations, compare him or the president to Hitler or Stalin or Castro (assuming that any Democrat dislikes Stalin or Castro), and they are scot-free.
Jim Jordan, G-d bless him, helped set an honest tone amid the Democrat lying and cheating by playing a remarkable 10-minute clip that displayed all the violence and mayhem, military-grade fire bombs and lasers, fire-throwers and mortars that the “peaceful protesters” have been lobbing at First Responders, police, and federal officers for weeks and even months in places like Portland and Seattle. Please go back to that hyperlink, sit yourself down in front of a decent-size computer monitor or television screen, and watch that 10-minute YouTube clip. Beginning with a montage of liars from CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and commercial mainstream media news fabricators all saying, one after another, that the “protests” uniformly have been “peaceful,” the Jim Jordan film then transitioned to more than eight minutes of startling video that looked like wartime in Afghanistan or Iraq. If one picture is worth a thousand words, those 10 minutes of film were an entire “hearing” unto themselves.
For the Democrats the hearing was “no holds barred.” No lie was off the table. No insult was beneath them. Under the guise of asking the Attorney General to answer questions, they rather used their allotted time to berate him, to berate President Trump, and to lie about the Antifa and other anarchist-driven riots that seek to undermine our Republic and to tear away our freedom. They were not asking questions, and they did not allow Barr to answer them or speak when he tried. Rather, they were like a parent on a tear against a child in big trouble, or a boss on a rampage about to fire his or her employee. They rambled and ranted, did not allow Barr to correct their falsehoods or innocent mistakes, did not allow him to answer their questions, and just tried to run him over with words. He soon figured out that he was not at a “hearing” but at an Inquisition made for CNN, and he reduced his efforts to clarify defamations and was too wise and dignified to respond to insults. He just let them blabber on, using alternating moments when Republicans had the floor and microphone, briefly to respond to the prior rant.
One of the most elegant points made all day was by Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, whose delicate insight undoubtedly was lost on most people. In response to the Leftists who control the media and the Democrats on the committee, who all maintain that the “protests” have been “peaceful” with just a little bit of disruptive behavior, he described a lovely day he experienced in his hometown, hours of lovely weather and calm, that suddenly was disrupted by a destructive tornado:
Ten years ago this summer in July, in my hometown, it was a beautiful day. People were golfing, kids were swimming, everybody was playing baseball. Just a perfect gorgeous sunny summer day in Dickinson, North Dakota. In the span of 8 minutes, a tornado came through and destroyed, caused unbelievable economic devastation. I don’t think anybody woke up the next morning and said it was a mostly peaceful day.
A tornado makes an initially calm day into one that always will be remembered for its violence and destruction. And two hours of mortar fire, lasers aimed at the eyes of people who protect us, efforts to burn down a United States Courthouse, balloons filled with human solid excrement, bottles of frozen water, hockey sticks, firecrackers, and such are not a mere epilogue to a “peaceful protest” but rather a dastardly and despicable insurrection that needs to be quelled, quashed, and squashed.
These riots erupt as the latest chapter in a vicious effort for three years by Democrats to tear down the freely elected government of the United States. They have attacked the Electoral College, the president’s legitimacy to hold office, harassed him for his taxes, dug up a corrupt lawyer he employed, a stripper and her criminal attorney, even the one disgruntled niece they could find who got cut out of the family’s big money. They lied to a FISA court, unmasked his incoming National Security Adviser who simply was doing his job, and spent nearly $32 million on a Mueller Investigation into Russian Collusion that locked up a guy with an ostrich jacket who cheated on taxes and sent a SWAT team with a CNN crew to arrest a 66-year-old guy at the crack of dawn with 29 federal agents and 17 vehicles. They tried to use the 25th Amendment to take him down, ran empty impeachment hearings that tied up Washington when the coronavirus was unfolding, and cherry-picked Obama judges along the West Coast to issue nationwide injunctions against his every presidential initiative. Mort Sahl once said, “I may be paranoiac, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” And so it has been with the proof that they publicly call themselves “the Resistance.” Not since the Civil War, the war among the states, has a seriously rooted segment of American society billed itself as “the Resistance.”
So these riots manifestly are the next angle to bring down Trump, after all the other tries have failed. It is a great time for rioting, tearing down monuments of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, even of abolitionists who died fighting slavery, even a monument in Los Angeles of Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden who gave his life opposing Hitler. For anarchists who would destroy America, this is their perfect storm, when
Well, you finish that sentence. It is the perfect storm to riot and destroy a country, its culture, its civilization. And they even can get three easy college credits in the fall by signing up for “Independent Study” with a Bill Ayers/Bernadine Dohrn-type professor, who has tenure and never can be fired, and then writing an essay titled, “What I Did This Summer.”
If the Department of Justice will not enforce the law in the face of such Insurrection and Resistance, then who will? Until now, we have had a miserable decade in which one Attorney General after another either has failed us at the Department of Justice, has himself or herself been a core part of the corruption, or at best has been AWOL — away without leave. The best of them this past decade, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from his job almost before he began. He was the right man at the wrong time. A courtly, refined, dignified Southern gentleman, he was perfect for another time, perhaps the early or mid-1800s, maybe even during an era of goodwill in the Roaring Twenties. Yet, alas, he was ever the wrong man for an era of deception, lying, and shamelessly vicious “Resistance” at all costs against an elected president.
His predecessors, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were so much worse. Lynch’s legacy at Justice was her infamous tarmac meeting, where she met privately with Bill Clinton on the west side of Phoenix Sky Harbor airport between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. on June 27, 2016, even as her Justice Department was supposed to be investigating Hillary’s spoliated emails and corruption. When exposed with her corruption, Lynch defended by saying that, oh, she merely had met with Bill Clinton to discuss their grandchildren and golf. Yeah, and when I want to discuss the Yankees and Mets, I travel to see Jimmy Carter at an airport tarmac in North Dakota. Or I go to an airport tarmac in Wyoming to see George W. Bush whenever I want to discuss my nieces Jennifer Rochel and Orli, who live in Israel. Grandchildren and golf. Bereft of the fair way, Loretta Lynch left behind that legacy of corruption and deceit that were par for the course in the Obama administration.
And Eric Holder? He’s the one who publicly tells audiences to physically kick their opponents. He’s the mastermind at Justice who came up with the idea of passing along deadly firearms to Mexican drug cartels so we can follow them. Fast and Furious. And then that inept Attorney General, Obama’s self-described “wing man,” lost sight of the weapons until one was used to murder an American border security agent, Brian Terry. Of more than 2,000 guns that Holder sent the drug cartels, only 710 were recovered. He ultimately backed down on prosecuting the New Black Panther Party for its voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Two members of the Party had stood outside a polling station during the election in paramilitary uniforms, one carrying a nightstick. This was the same Holder who called us a “nation of cowards.”
As one looks back on a decade of Sessions, Lynch, and Holder, one emerges with even greater admiration of Attorney General Barr for the way he masterfully presented himself through a no-holds barred House session where Democrats were intent on politically lynching him and the president. Barr made his case powerfully, and Jim Jordan amplified it with that extraordinary film montage.