President Joe Biden is being blasted for hypocrisy after launching a massive purge of the Justice Department.
Biden this week demanded the resignation of nearly every U.S. attorney appointed by former President Donald Trump, a sweeping house-cleaning that critics say will create an agency to serve his own personal and political agenda.
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And — funnily enough — the biggest critic of all may have been Biden himself!
Back in 2007, then-Senator Biden slammed the administration of President George W. Bush for axing several U.S. attorneys all at once.
He also called on then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.
RealClearPolitics found an interview in which Biden told Chris Wallace on Fox News that Gonzales had become a “creature of the president, not the attorney for the people as well as representing the president.”
He claimed Bush and Gonzales had placed U.S. attorneys in key spots “who were the employees of the White House and the Justice Department who were loyal directly to Gonzales and to the political people in the White House.”
Biden called the move “highly, highly unusual” and, in separate comments, accused Gonzales of replacing the attorneys for “crass political reasons.”
At the time Gonzales – who eventually resigned over the move – had fired eight U.S. attorneys.
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Biden has now gone above and beyond that… times seven!
The president’s resignation demand is directed to the 56 Senate-confirmed attorneys appointed by Trump. Only two were spared: Delaware US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes, as well as Connecticut US attorney John Durham.
CNN reported that Durham is expected to resign from his position in Connecticut, but remain in the special counsel role he was appointed to by then-Attorney General William Barr, where he has been investigating the shady origins of the Trump-Russia probe.
In general, U.S. attorneys – as well as the attorney general – serve at the pleasure of the president, and it’s not uncommon to replace many of 93 positions when a new administration comes into office.
In 1993, then-President Bill Clinton replaced all but one.
Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, raised zero objections.
Compared to that, then-President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions seemed positively restrained when they gave 45 U.S. attorneys the boot.
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“An incoming president and attorney general will understandably want to have a person in place who will pursue the law enforcement priorities of the new administration,” Gonzales wrote in a 2017 editorial for The Hill, defending Trump’s moves. “These priorities reflect the policies that the new president promised the American people during the presidential campaign.”
The issue in this case is Biden himself, who is on the record saying something quite different with his 2007 criticism of Gonzalez.
And more recently, he and Vice President Kamala Harris both pledged to take a more hands-off role when it comes to the Justice Department.
“We will not tell the Justice Department how to do its job,” Harris said in December during a joint interview with Biden for CNN.
Decisions by the agency should be made “based on facts, should be based on the law, should not be influenced by politics,” she said, adding for emphasis: “Period.”
Biden added his own exclamation point: “I guarantee you that that’s how it will be run.”
Now, however, it looks like he’s making decisions based not on the facts and the law, but instead his own agenda.
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And while a president certainly CAN hire and fire his own U.S. attorneys at will, axing all of them at once suggests his Justice Department moves aren’t about justice.
They’re about his liberal agenda.
They’re all about Joe.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.