A Few of Trump’s Controversial Cabinet and Agency Picks—Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson

So, what were the standards that Gaetz did not meet? Or rather were current critics prior critics when there was questionable conduct at the DOJ?

Do we remember Obama’s AGs Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch?

Eric Holder flagrantly described his supposedly autonomous relationship with President Obama obsequiously as Obama’s “wingman.” He refused a congressional subpoena of the sort that sent Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to jail and thus was held in contempt by Congress. To this day, we still do not know the full story about the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal and Holder’s knowledge of and role in it.

Holder’s successor Lynch, for her part, improperly outsourced her prosecutorial responsibility in the campaign year 2016 to FBI Director James Comey to investigate—and either exonerate or indict—a culpable candidate, Hillary Clinton.

In that regard, do we remember the strange rendezvous between Bill Clinton and Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix? Both claimed their stealthy meeting of two private jet aircraft (his private, hers governmental) was merely accidental (they only spoke about their “grandchildren”) and supposedly had nothing to do with the discussion of the Lynch’s DOJ’s decision to let off Bill’s spouse, then the Democratic nominee.

Had Lynch not been discovered, she would have never revealed that unethical staged meeting.

What about the next leftwing Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland?

He sicced the FBI on 1) parents at school board meetings who got on the wrong side of the teacher unions; 2) political enemies of his boss Joe Biden, resulting in FBI/SWAT raids on the likes of MAGA activists and supporters like Roger Stone and James O’Keefe, culminating in the swoop down on Mar-a-Lago. Once there, the FBI ransacked the Trump residence, to the degree of rifling through the former First Lady’s underwear drawer; 3) anti-abortion protesters whose legitimate demonstrations against abortion-on-demand clinics led to their arrests and more FBI raids on their homes.

In addition, Garland likely knew of, if not participated in, a complex lawfare effort to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Evidence?

On a single day in November 2022, Merrick Garland selected Jack Smith as a special federal prosecutor to go after Donald Trump as an insurrectionist and violator of classified documents (cf. in this case the exonerated culpability of his boss, Joe Biden). Garland also that same day signed off on the resignation of his third highest DOJ prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who mysteriously left his prized billet to go to work for Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg and the latter’s nonstop efforts to indict Trump on widely condemned politically weaponized charges. And as a trifecta, Garland likely also knew that day that the White House counsel’s office was then meeting secretly with Georgia prosecutor Nathan Wade (soon to be fired for unethical behavior), who was seeking to indict Trump in Fulton County.

Moreover, anyone who compares the federal charges dropped against some 14,000 rioters, looters, arsonists, and assaulters by local, state, and federal prosecutors during the Antifa/BLM 2020 riots with the draconian efforts to destroy the lives of protestors arrested on January 6, 2021, would conclude that Garland’s DOJ had ended the notion of American equal application of the law.

In sum, let senators be critical and assess all the Trump nominations. There was no doubt that there were legitimate reasons to doubt both the qualifications and the viability of Gaetz’s nomination. But please spare us their sanctimonious boilerplate of higher principles at work, given the lower partisan bars of qualification the Left has established over the past decades.