Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Has Followed Every Play in Its Weaponization Playbook

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Recently, the Left in general and Democrats in particular have been criticizing a lot of things that this administration has done. This came up with the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Todd Blanche, and people suggested that, though he may have been qualified, he had too close a relationship as a personal attorney, or he acted in a legal capacity with [President] Donald Trump, and therefore there would be an incestuous relationship between the [Justice Department] and the White House.

But who broke that standard? I think it was broken during the JFK administration. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic president, appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general. They conferred daily. If we were worried that that was an aberration, remember Eric Holder bragged that he was, quote, Obama’s wingman. So, the Democrats have had a long history of a close relationship between the DOJ and the White House.

We’ve been told that the Democratic Party is very angry because some local, i.e., state or county or municipal, prosecutors might take a look at Anthony Fauci and see if he had criminal exposure other than federal exposure. And people said, well, what business do these local prosecutors have looking at Anthony Fauci, who was a federal bureaucrat? And if he did anything wrong, it would be a federal offense. You can’t have freelancing prosecutors all over the United States going after—yes, you can. We established that principle with Donald Trump. 

Remember that Letitia James went after him for a real estate deal in which Deutsche Bank, the lender, had no problem with the loan as it was conducted. She was the attorney general of New York. Alvin Bragg could not get Donald Trump on anything other than to bootstrap a federal campaign violation that even federal prosecutors didn’t want to touch. He was just the municipal DA of Manhattan.

Fani Willis met her paramour, Nathan Wade, who was part of her legal team. He met in the White House with Joe Biden, and she was only a Fulton County prosecutor. So, long ago, we dispensed with the idea that regional or local or state or county prosecutors can’t go after a high-profile federal official, and there’s nobody more high-profile than the United States president.

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Victor Davis Hanson

Then we heard last week that they were worried that Donald Trump’s IRS may be too partisan. I think they destroyed that barrier as well. Do you remember Lois Lerner? She was pretty much conducting special audits of Tea Party groups and other conservative-affiliated groups to make sure they did not get nonprofit status, and that was going into the election year 2012.

Do we remember the New York Legislature when Donald Trump’s tax returns were released illegally by the federal IRS? The Legislature in New York piled on and said, we’ll pass a bill that says anybody this year, i.e., Trump, who is under federal audit and whose tax returns are subpoenaed by a congressional committee, once they saw them, we’re going to turn over his confidential state records as well. That was about as weaponizing the state and federal IRSs as you could imagine.

How about election denialism?

Hillary Clinton. You remember, anybody, the 2016 election? Hillary Clinton, she lost the Electoral College. She won the popular vote. What did she say almost immediately? That Donald Trump was not legitimately elected. In other words, he wasn’t our real president. Was she an outlier? No. Former President Jimmy Carter said that Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. He was an election denialist.

Stacey Abrams, you remember her? She ran for governor of Georgia and lost by 50,000 votes. She toured the country for two years and said she was the real governor of Georgia, she won that election. She was really an election denialist.

Do we remember in 2000, when George W. Bush beat Al Gore? Al Gore said that he really didn’t lose the key swing state of Florida. Later, The New York Times conducted an affiliated investigation of the county returns that Al Gore had sued to get a hold of. They looked at them, and guess what? George W. Bush did win Florida and, with Florida, won the election. Did that stop the Left? No.

They said that George W. Bush was selected. He was not elected. Do you remember that? Do you remember the 2004 election, when a large contingent of the Democratic House refused to honor the vote in Ohio and voted not to accept George Bush’s popular-vote victory in Ohio that put him over the top?

So, that bar was destroyed a long time ago, and it’s pretty low or nonexistent that you don’t deny an election result. That’s what the Left taught us, at least. 

We were told that the Supreme Court of the United States is too weaponized, too consistently conservative, voting in a bloc. There’s been a lot of studies. One of them showed that the six-justice majority votes anywhere from 60% to 64% in line with their conservative philosophy in cases that come up with an ideological theme to them.

And how about our three left-wing, Democratic judges? The same study found that they are a little bit more partisan. Up to 70% of ideological cases, they vote consistently with the Left.

In other words, if you believe in a weaponized Supreme Court, the greatest offenders are the three liberal justices, which you don’t hear.

We’re talking about a weaponized FBI a lot. Kash Patel has weaponized the FBI. I don’t think he has, but if he were to weaponize it, he would be tutored by James Comey. You remember James Comey? He, 245 times before a House Oversight Committee, said he couldn’t remember, or he didn’t know, or he had amnesia.

He inaugurated the bogus Operation Crossfire effort to promulgate the lie that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. That was during the campaign. Had that lie been widely publicized and widely believed, it would have affected the election. Donald Trump wouldn’t have won.

No sooner had Donald Trump been elected than, with Operation Two that was Oxford Comma, they tried to suggest the sitting president had Russian ties. That was a lie, too.

Andrew McCabe, his interim successor, lied four times under oath on ideological or political matters. His lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, forged a document and submitted it to a FISA court. That was an FBI lawyer. I could go on with Robert Mueller, the Mueller investigation, claiming under oath he didn’t know what the Steele dossier was, even though it prompted his very appointment. I would say the FBI was pretty weaponized and politicized by the time Kash Patel got there.

Finally, we hear that it’s very unfair to bring in Anthony Fauci before a congressional committee.

Why would you try to find something that was criminal in the activity of a federal bureaucrat? After all, he’s a member of government. Can he just say, I don’t want to come, or when he’s there, can he just answer a question? Why would he be forced, unless the questions were designed to embarrass him, to take the Fifth?

Well, we crossed that river a long time ago when Congress subpoenaed, for no real criminal activity, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, former White House aides. Both of them refused to participate. In other words, they refused to show up and plead the Fifth Amendment, like Anthony Fauci. 

And guess what? They arrested Peter Navarro on the street in shackles. Both of them served four-month sentences in jail. Congress had them jailed.

Then we come to domestic spying, where they said Donald Trump is spying on his enemies. He’s conducting a surveillance state. It’s not true, but if it were true, where did he get that idea?

Well, Barack Obama, remember, surveilled the phone data of Associated Press reporters. They also went after Fox News reporter James Rosen. I think they even subpoenaed the calls he made to his grandmother.

And then, of course, Jack Smith, he went to the National Archives to get the phone data of prominent senators and congressmen that he felt were ideological adversaries, maybe?

He not only got their phone data, but he got their actual text messages. 

What’s my point in all this? Long ago, the Democratic Party and the Left believed that any means necessary were justified for their noble ends of mandated equality, and we’ve seen president after president on the Left do that. And so it’s the height of irony, or maybe not irony, but projectionism.

So, I’ll leave you with the idea that anytime somebody on the left accuses the Trump administration of a misuse of government, it’s likely a reflection that they’ve already done that themselves.

Thank you very much. Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

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