Five years ago, the Justice Department indicted two Republican members of Congress, Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, for insider trading. President Trump publicly berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for putting two Republican-held seats at risk:
Trump went on to fire Sessions and eventually pardon his two allies.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced an indictment of New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez. Here’s what Biden said in response: nothing. No attacks on the attorney general, no complaints about hurting Democrats or insisting The Real Crimes Are On The Other Side. Likewise, Biden has stood aside as the department has brought criminal charges against his son without threatening the AG or interfering with the investigation.
This may seem totally banal. And indeed, in the pre-Trump era, Biden’s behavior would have been normal and unworthy of comment. Yet it has become an article of faith on the right that Biden has corrupted the Justice Department. This belief is shared not only by Trump’s loyalists, but also by mainstream conservatives.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Trump’s indictment for taking classified documents and then hiding them from the government a witch hunt directed by the president. (“Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility … Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.”)
No amount of direct evidence to the contrary has managed to dislodge this belief. After the Journal’s news pages (which, unlike the editorial side, observe journalistic norms) reported last week that the Justice Department and the White House have a distant and unfriendly relationship, a New York Post editorial twisted the story into evidence that Biden was attempting to corrupt the Department but failing:
President Biden is looking remarkably Trumpian when it comes to handling the US attorney general: Now as under the last guy, an AG who seems to show any independence from the White House’s political desires can expect a frontal assault.
Witness the bevy of nameless White House aides hinting in a Wall Street Journal article that the relationship between Biden and Merrick Garland has moved “into resignation and distrust,” a true “deep freeze.”
So a report demonstrating the Justice Department is acting independently of the White House, and taking steps the White House does not approve of, somehow becomes evidence the White House is engaging in a “frontal assault”! If they are cooperating, it’s a scandal, and if they are not cooperating — which is precisely what a “deep freeze” constitutes — it is a “frontal assault.”
Of course, this phrase stretches the meaning of both the words frontal and assault beyond the breaking point, but its purpose is to find some way to deny that Biden is respecting norms of prosecutorial independence.
What Trump actually did was first to select an attorney general on the basis of presumed loyalty (Jeff Sessions, a partisan Republican and the first Senator to endorse him). Then he publicly and privately leaned on Sessions to go easy on Trump’s friends while harassing his foes.
Then he fired Sessions for failing to pay the requisite obeisance, and replaced him with an even more pliant figure in Bill Barr, who auditioned for the role by writing a memo denouncing the Mueller investigation.
And after Trump once again publicly and privately leaned on Barr to go easy on his friends while harassing his foes, Barr appointed a special prosecutor to uncover a nonexistent deep-state conspiracy against the president. Then Trump finally drove Barr away with his demands to help him overturn the election results and sought to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, who actively participated in the attempted autogolpe.
What Biden did was to appoint an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who had a legal rather than a political background and was widely respected by both parties, and proceed to studiously refrain from influencing his decisions. It is the literal opposite of Trump’s behavior.
Throughout the Trump era, the institutional Republican Party has sometimes split on Trump’s behavior. But it has remained united in depicting the behavior of Trump’s adversaries as corrupt and unfair. Republicans have not required proof to assert that Barack Obama, the deep state, and the Biden administration have orchestrated unfair investigations of Trump.
The reality staring Republicans in the face is that Biden is at least making a good-faith effort to respect the Justice Department’s independence. And he is doing it in just about the most painful possible circumstance — at the expense of a son whose drug addiction led him into a series of incidental criminal offenses. Their party’s leader makes no pretense of respecting judicial independence and is instead promising to reduce the Department of Justice into a Putin-esque tool of nakedly biased partisanship.
The only possible way Republicans can justify such a grave step is to tell themselves the other side is just as bad. The belief is simply too necessary to be abandoned in the face of evidence.
