As part of its vociferous defense of Donald Trump over his (second) indictment, the Media Research Center wants you to think he’s being targeted by a politically motivated Justice Department. Tim Graham pushed this take in a June 12 post:
The PBS Friday night journalist roundtable show Washington Week sounded like State-Run TV as guest host Laura Barron-Lopez touted the “revealing and damning” Trump indictment by Biden’s Justice Department. It was the only topic for the half-hour. She methodically repeated the White House spin as her own take:
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, GUEST HOST: And the Justice Department has been extremely careful to show how independent they are. This is a special counsel investigation, which even adds other level of independence from the Justice Department. The Justice Department is saying, we`re not talking to the White House about this. What has President Biden said so far?
Keep in mind that one way Biden can prevent public comment on the Justice Department is by avoiding the press, and the press can avoid the entire question of the Department’s independence by treating the idea as blatantly obvious, beyond question as LBL does here.
When a commentator pointed out that, unlike Biden, Donald Trump repeatedly agitated for his DOJ to go after his political enemies, Graham huffed:
President Obama also had a habit of claiming “we learned it from you guys” on scandal matters. Everyone should factor in a very different media under Trump, constantly suggesting every Trump attorney general was extremely partisan and in Trump’s back pocket. They protect and repeat Biden. They savaged Trump. So media behavior affects White House behavior.
Note that Graham doesn’t even bother to argue Trump’s DOJ was independent — he knows it wasn’t — so he played Obama (yes, Obama) whataboutism to distract from that.
Jeffrey Lord’s June 17 column took a similar tack in whining about a New York Times piece highlighting Trump’s promise to sic the DOJ on Biden should he be re-elected president, complaining that the “central thesis” of the article “s that the Department of Justice has ‘independence'”:
On the one hand, there is the Times this last week with its fairy tale claiming the Department of Justice is “independent.” This the same week that, for the first time in American history, the DOJ has just indicted an American president who not so coincidentally happens to be running against the president they work for.
Yet there is no acknowledgement by the Times of what any sentient observer is aware, as amazingly was the Washington Post a handful of days after Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017. Which is to say the Justice Department that is prosecuting Trump is filled to overflowing with left-wing career bureaucrats who are on record as hating Trump. Who, per the Post in 2017, were going out of their way to resist him when he became president. Contrary to the Times fairy tale, the DOJ is decidedly not “independent.” It is a cesspool of a bureaucracy corrupted by left-wing employees.
But now there’s a problem for the media and their Democrat allies. Having weaponized and defended the Justice Department to try and intimidate and silence Trump, they have launched a growing movement from Republicans to massively reform the federal government, including cutting the DOJ down to size.
Lor did not explain why he assumes any legal critic of Trump is a”left-winger,” or why that legal criticism of Trump has no merit if it comes from someone like that.
Neither Graham nor Lord offered evidence that Biden’s DOJ is not independent beyond it indicting Trump. But isn’t the DOJ supposed to indict criminals? Why do they think Trump should be held to a different standard of justice because he’s a Republican?