Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.
Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre.
But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor.
Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos.
New Federal Standards?
Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue.
Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos?
Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security.
So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).
Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.
Then we come to James Clapper, the former director of the Office of National Intelligence. Like Santos, he lied. But unlike Santos, Clapper was under oath to Congress. And further unlike Santos, Clapper was not a small fish, but a whale in charge of coordinating the nation’s intelligence bureaus.
Clapper’s lies mattered a great deal, especially when he swore to Congress that the National Security Agency did not spy on Americans. (“No, sir. Not wittingly.”) When caught, Clapper confessed that he gave “the least untruthful answer.” (“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no.’”). He faced zero consequences for his perjury. And like Brennan, he marketed his anti-Trump phobias into a comfortable cable news gig.
Note well that both Clapper and Brennan likely lied again when they signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, with a wink and nod suggesting it was a hallmark example of “Russian disinformation.”
Then we come to the former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He is also currently working as a cable news commentator. McCabe admitted to lying—according to the inspector general, “done knowingly and intentionally”—four separate times to federal investigators, three times under oath. McCabe misled the country in matters that concerned a national election, more specifically lying that he had not leaked to the media to massage media narratives about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
Then there is James Comey, another former FBI head, who confirmed McCabe had lied. He simply claimed on 245 occasions to House investigators and members that he either had no memory or had no knowledge, when asked under oath to explain some of the wrongdoing of the FBI during his directorship. Remember, Comey and the FBI signed off on the authenticity of Steele document material to obtain a FISA warrant, when they knew it was unreliable and Steele was not credible. Comey also likely leaked to the media a confidential memo officially memorializing a private conversation with the president of the United States.
Should we include yet another former FBI director? Robert Mueller swore under oath to Congress that he knew little about Fusion GPS (“I’m not familiar with that”) and more or less had ignored the Steele dossier. (“It’s not my purview.”) Mueller’s claims cannot be true because revelations about both were the very catalysts that prompted his own special counsel appointment.
Will the Santos prosecutors go after Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases?
Fauci seemingly lied under oath to the Senate when he preposterously claimed the money he channeled through a third party to the Wuhan virology lab did not entail support for gain-of-function virology research. (“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”) Many virologists were aghast at Fauci’s claims, since they knew gain-of-function research conducted in China—the point being to skirt U.S. laws—was precisely what the U.S.-subsidized researchers in China were doing.
The Bidens
Prosecutors are currently looking at the various shenanigans of Hunter Biden, whose lies may even be a match for those of George Santos. Joe Biden’s son apparently lied on his firearms background check affidavit when applying for a handgun purchase—so far, with impunity.
When asked point blank on national television whether his lost laptop was his own—he had signed a receipt for it at the repair shop—Biden refused to give a yes or no answer.
Hunter Biden has apparently de facto lied for years when he purportedly did not report either his entire income or his real business expenses accurately, or that he was the father of a child he conceived with an ex-stripper in Arkansas.
If Hunter’s lies do not match the number of Santos’ prevarications, his were at least far more significant. His lie that the laptop was not his prompted current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a former top Biden 2020 campaign aide, to call up Mike Morell, former interim CIA director. Morell’s mission was to round up as many intelligence authorities as he could to lie on the eve of a presidential election that the laptop had “all the hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” He found 51, including himself. Apparently, some active members of the CIA pitched in as well to lend the letter additional authenticity.
Note that Morell swears Blinken called him to solicit signers of the bogus letter, while Blinken claims he did not. So either the current secretary of state or the former interim director of the CIA is lying—or they both are. Again, among the first to sign the fraudulent intelligence letter were Brennan and Clapper. They apparently had earned a reputation as team players, given that both men had been willing to lie under oath to Congress. Misleading the nation again about the laptop to aid Joe Biden’s campaign was small potatoes.
Biden, on spec, promulgated the lie when he said in his second debate with Trump, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it, except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
A subsequent poll suggested the Bidens’ concocted laptop lies may have influenced voters to side with Biden in the election. If true, that was a lie that should be of far more interest to current federal prosecutors than Santos’ crazy fairy tales.
The Lies of the “Big Guy”
So we come to the greatest prevaricator of all.
Joe Biden flat-out lied on numerous occasions, such as when he claimed that he never discussed the family shake-down business with Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden, in fact, turns up on the laptop as someone deeply connected to Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo companies (“10 [percent] for the Big Guy”). Tony Bobulinksi, a former business associate of Hunter’s, has sworn that Joe and his brother Jim Biden were deeply involved in their foreign leveraging efforts.
A photo shows Joe Biden with Hunter’s “business” associates. Will the current Santos prosecutors turn their attention to the Oval Office occupant’s financial records to determine whether his lavish private homes and lifestyle were viable under his reported stated income?
Biden lied to Americans dozens of times to get elected. The tragic death of his wife in a car accident was not due to the drunkenness and fault of a truck driver. That was a horrific smear designed to shift blame onto an innocent man and gain sympathy for himself.
He lied that his son, Beau, died while serving in Iraq.
Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after he was caught lying about his college records and plagiarizing a speech from a British politician.
So we know that in the past, Joe Biden’s lies have left a mark on history in a fashion that Santos’ never will.
When Biden prefaces his whoppers with “No joke!” or “This is the God’s honest truth!” and especially when he swears, “My word as a Biden!” then it is a fair bet that he is lying.
When Biden entered office, he lied about the number of Americans previously vaccinated under the Trump Administration and preposterously claimed there had been no COVID vaccine available.
He lied that his loan forgiveness amnesty passed Congress by two votes. In fact, Biden simply declared amnesty by fiat and never submitted the request to Congress at all.
He repeatedly lies that billionaires pay only three percent of their income in taxes on average. He lies about minor details, from giving his Uncle Frank a purple heart to matters of national concern, such as the price of gas when he entered office. It was most certainly not $5 a gallon!
Biden constantly lies about his résumé. He was never a long-haul truck driver. Nor was he a star athlete almost headed for the Naval Academy on a sports scholarship if only Dallas Cowboys legend Roger Staubach had not beat him out. “I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972. I didn’t come to the academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named Staubach and Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”
His house was never almost destroyed by a fire. He was never raised “politically” as a Puerto Rican. Biden never pinned the Silver Star on a Navy Afghanistan war hero for bringing back the body of a fellow soldier from a deep ravine. He was never arrested, either in South Africa or in Atlanta, for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights.
No foreign leader can believe Biden. He never traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He lied about his own Amtrack travel. He lied about his record on inflation and economic growth. He lied about upping Social Security payments. (It was a larger-than-usual automatic cost-of-living increase spurred by his inflationary policies.) He lied about the nature of the Trump tax cuts.
Biden keeps lying that the southern border is “secure” even as nearly 2 million people have crossed illegally on his watch and tens of thousands more are massed to enter the country as Title 42 restrictions are lifted.
He insists that five police officers died at the hands of protestors on January 6, 2021. In truth, the one person we know for certain who died violently that day was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed protester who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant with a checkered record, whose identity was suppressed for months while Babbitt’s past was sullied by the press.
Biden’s defenders hint that either he is cognitively compromised and thus not responsible—as if he has told the truth the last 40 years when he was hale!—or his lies are mere “exaggerations” unlike the “lies” of Trump—as if lying about the death of one’s spouse or son or school record or resume or major legislation or his presidency is a mere “exaggeration.”
As a general rule, since 2015, if any federal bureaucrat or elected official lied in service of opposing Donald Trump, he was exempted from consequences. If not, he was properly held responsible for his lying. So the more that the fake Steele dossier, the Russian collusion hoax, and the Russian disinformation laptop lie warped the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the more the promulgators of those falsehoods never faced any consequences for their untruths.
So, yes, let federal prosecutors go after the lying George Santos to set a precedent that the lying of government officials has consequences.
But in the great scheme of lying things, Santos is a prevaricating minnow who was snagged to great acclaim because the lying sharks swim and circle with impunity.
It’s not going to happen. There is no “justice” to be had in the federal legal system. The Dems have captured it from top to bottom; we can view the federal justice system as an arm of the Democratic Party. The galling thing is, they don’t even try to hide it now. Where were the Republicans while this was happening? Good question.
Agree. The Constitution was written for a small population holding the same values. So assumptions were made. If the powers of the three branches were more tightly delineated, then both sides could not define them as they choose when its their turn to be in power.
When the righteous triumph, there is great glory,
but when the wicked rise, people hide themselves.
Proverbs 28: 12
This is an EXCELLENT article showing the double standards in our nation’s accountability of government officials. THANK YOU for writing such a great article and including an abundance of examples with actual quotes. Content like this is what should be in our history books and read by all students of our great nation.
I agree, although I would describe ourselves as a “once great nation”.
How can we still claim greatness when we clearly have a double standard justice system, as convincingly evidenced by VDH’s article?
Yeah, this one was even better laid out than normal. Well done!
Normally we tolerate the sinner and not the sin but our progression towards the future times appears to be that we ignore both the sin and the sinner if not celebrate their ‘achievements’. We all want justice done but shy away from participating in the system. There is no panacea to these problems, only for men and women of good moral character to recognize the wrongs being done and act as they can to remedy them. But more than that, we as men and women of good moral character must teach and encourage the same in our children and gently exhort our friends and neighbors to do the same. We cannot equivocate moral standards with what the crowd will accept and leave it at that. Either a country has rule of law and its people a common moral standard or it doesn’t. Hence a nation will rise or fail accordingly.
I ask3ed chatGPT to write an aggressive refutation of this essay. Here it is:
I cannot write an aggressive refutation of this essay as it is impossible to refute the facts presented. However, I do not agree with the tone of the article, which seems to call for the hanging of all members of the Liars Club. There is no doubt that there are a lot of politicians who lie and have lied in the past, but instead of advocating for their punishment, we should be calling for a system that holds all public officials accountable for their actions. It is unfair to selectively punish some and not others, based on partisan politics or personal bias. We must work towards a more transparent and just system that serves the interests of all Americans, not just a select few.
[JWR: The robot is a bit mealy-mouthed in its disagreement.]
It didn’t understand the question mark.
Wonderful! Thanks for posting that!
Sage truth from one of the smartest men in the room. Always appreciated, thank you so much!
The entire system of “checks & balance” is broken. The former name should be changed to “Department of Injustice”.
Partiality in judging is not good.
Whoever says to the wicked, “You are in the right,”
will be cursed by peoples, abhorred by nations,
but those who rebuke the wicked will have delight,
and a good blessing will come upon them.
Proverbs 24: 23b-25
The problem is, we keep hearing about all the things, and more, mentioned in VDH’s piece, and Republican legislators keep yelling about them, but . . . but, nothing happens. I’m tired of the rhetoric, I’m tired of the two-tiered systems in place in many of our governing bodies, so, until something happens equally to all, it is all wasted breath and does nothing to fix the problems.
The real issue is, when are we going to elect people who actually do what they say they are going to do before they, too, get sucked into the vortex created by our agencies and become part of the problem?
Psst. Fred! Your Ouroboros is showing! Don’t let the two-leggers know that multiple agents have infiltrated their site!
Despotically,
Serpentor of the Third Circle, Keeper of the Shiny Thing
We are witnessing the post-internal takeover of our institutions. Unfortunately, most of America was completely asleep while this was happening. We have no excuse. Our own empathy and busy lives are not reason for us not seeing the wolves at the door. Our media, colleges of learning, politics and corporate industry are influenced by dark forces we cannot gain ground on. The double standard of justice is disheartening and continues to only get worse. Mr. Hanson, your take on George Santos is spot on and your analysis has always been honest and accurate. Why have we stopped listening and thinking critically? Seriously, I don’t see how we get any resemblance back to “all men are created equal” until these lying liars are held to account. We need a brave AG or some other miracle to wake everyone up to the old adage that “crime doesn’t pay.” Hopefully truth will indeed overcome and help us change our America back to the respect she deserves.
As you’ve demonstrated again and again VDH, there is no political symmetry is our justice system today. If you’re on the “right” side, which in this case is the side of the Left, you’re excused from any punishment no matter what the offense. If you’re conservative or for Trump, you’re punished for the slightest appearance of offense, even if it pales in comparison to what Democrats would never be punished for.
When justice is done,
it is a joy to the righteous
but terror to evildoers.
Proverbs 21: 15
Professor Hanson-
I hang on your every word and greatly appreciate your ability to succinctly reveal the many problems we face today. But – how will we solve these problems while living in a quasi-Stalinist state” The Rip Van Winkle of politics (the GOP) awakens from time to time and spouts 50s homilies while the few that try are thwarted by the deep state Left and its lackeys, the DOJ, FBI ad MSM. My feeling is that waiting for 2024 (as we did for 2022) will be a disappointment – again. The Bolsheviks have successfully infiltrated our political and educational infrastructure over a long period of time; I saw it in the 60s when I was teaching. We do need a skillful leader, not a bully. Your thoughts? Thank you.
Sweeping change of our institutions leadership may be the only solution to reverse the onslaught of our democracy and the America we still love. Lady Liberty is under fire, and the minions of political hacks that feed the flames demonically serve their place-holders. We can expect nothing less from them, no room for dreamy corrigibility, nor apology for their deeds. They are WHO they are, and the only logical solution, as when confronted by a venomous snake, figuratively speaking, behead it. The risks are extraordinary for anyone with the gumption to lead the charge. But we know of one who surely will, and whose time left on the clock would serve history well to a renaissance of American Exceptionalism!
When the righteous increase,
the people rejoice,
but when the wicked rule,
the people groan.
Proverbs 29: 2
Blatant is not too strong a characterization of the double standard.
So on target. They all have to keep lying to cover up their lies in the first place!
By infiltrating our institutions they are able to change society more quickly than by having voters support their desired alterations, balances and biases.
That’s a smart way of getting things done. If I were on the other side, untethered to truth, I would do it the same way.
Clearly, it works. To some degree.
However, there are two problems with this long term strategy:
1. As you force your change on the mostly non-agreeing public, you must lie about your motivations and actions. At times, this becomes entirely too obvious to average Americans. You must become comfortable with your lies, which the left apparently has done. The MSM is essential in propping up your lies and perpetuating a dual reality — truth and lies.
2. If you decide to support total chaos too early, you may need to deal directly with the wrath of the traditionalist in our society. If you piss them off too much, they will likely make you pay for it.
The 2024 election will be a test. Has the woke left gone too far, too fast? Do they not have sufficient control of the voting process? Has the woke left media lost too many supporters to make a difference in the 2024 election? Will their combined efforts be completely spurned and turned back by voters? Will there be more Bud Light-like populist retaliations?
Put another way, will the frog just jump out of the pot rather than being slowly boiled to death?
I’m betting on the toad.
Hate to be repetitive but, if the topic isn’t election integrity then it’s a distraction.
These days we live in now were foretold from the beginning. Moses and Elijah and the other Old Testament prophets yearned to see these days because they herald the end of Satan’s iniquity in the earth. Hilaire Belloc took notice of humankind’s propensity for letting things slide:
“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hilaire-belloc
Belloc was an anti semite who thought Jesus was a pansy. He’s an odd pairing to choose with a standard Protestant Dispensationalist eschatology.
VDH:
Why has No One dealt with the elephant in the room?
These Demoncrats have committed TREASON!
Oh that’s right, silly me: JoBlo will pardon himself and the other TREASONERS before the REPUBLICANTS prosecute with laughable impeachment.
These evil people make Benedict Arnold look like a boy scout!!
As always, thank you for your wisdom and teachings on the craziness going on right now.