They have literally learned nothing. Nothing.
The establishment media are at it again, now openly attacking President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks with salacious and unverified misinformation in an apparent campaign they are waging to try to sink the president-elect’s incoming administration. Meanwhile, the sitting and outgoing President of the United States, Joe Biden, just issued what amounts to one of the most controversial pardons in American history on Sunday evening when he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden. Biden’s complete and unconditional pardon of his son spans more than a decade and is more expansive than Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal.
Yet, again, what are the establishment media focused on? Well, the supposedly respected and revered New York Times and New Yorker are leading a campaign to try to tank Pete Hegseth’s appointment by Trump to be the Secretary of Defense in his incoming administration, while CNN’s deep state stooges are going ballistic over attorney Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to run the FBI. Others are attacking his nominee for Director of National Intelligence, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii–a former Democrat who left the party and joined the GOP this year when she endorsed Trump–over nonsensical claims that she is somehow a Russian agent. Obviously all of these smears are dubious at best, and frankly many of them are being spread by the very same people who spread fake attacks repeatedly on Trump for a decade–and also importantly by people who covered for the deep state and Democrats including Biden during this same timeframe.
It begs several questions: How did the media industry get so far off on the wrong track and does anything they say even matter anymore? What are the origins of this fact-free information warfare? Why are they waging it? What’s their end game? On whose behalf are they doing it? Will they ever change?
Let’s start with delving into what should be the biggest story in American politics by far: Biden pardoning his son Hunter after repeatedly lying to the country and telling everyone for years he would not do exactly what he just did is a massive scandal. The pardon is expansive, and will take months if not years to fully investigate but some things are abundantly clear from the outset: The president’s actions shield not just his son but himself as well from scrutiny. This pardon covers a span dating back to January 2014, when Biden was Vice President of the United States and his son was working for the natural gas company Burisma in Ukraine. Biden, of course, threatened to withhold aid to the Ukrainians if they did not fire a government prosecutor who was investigating his son’s employer. Well, the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father the president ensures that there will be no criminal consequences for that whole fiasco if there were ever going to be any to begin with.
There are plausible legal arguments in favor or against the pardon. In favor of it, former Biden family press aide Michael LaRosa offered a justification in an interview with The Hill by saying he thinks the various cases against Hunter Biden on the tax and gun issues were weak and that legally the pardon makes sense:
Okay fine, even if you agree with that argument–but certainly if you do not–you cannot miss the fact that what appears to be the first ever presidential pardon of a family member this close to the sitting President of the United States is hugely politically controversial at best and perhaps devastating for Democrats long-term. Even LaRosa understands the political problems of this, and particularly the quagmire Biden forced them into by repeatedly lying to the country and claiming that he would not under any circumstances do what he just did.
But then we cross into the theater of the absurd when we look at how some others are framing it. What does the New York Times’s top columnist, Ezra Klein, have to say about the pardon? Well, he blames Trump for it.
What?!?!?!? Seriously? How is Biden issuing a more expansive pardon than Ford’s Nixon pardon post-Watergate to his own son even remotely possibly Trump’s fault?
Regardless of that ridiculous argument, there are at least a million follow-up questions that need to be asked of Biden and his White House. First off, is he done pardoning family members? Does he intend to pardon himself? How about his brothers and sister? What about other family members? What about administration officials like his cabinet members or White House staff? Biden, for good measure, issued the pardon moments before he hopped on Air Force One to jet overseas for what is likely his last foreign trip as president off to Angola ensuring he will not be in the spotlight here at home on this in the days immediately following the highly controversial move. There are no White House press briefings for several days either, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre–one of the least honest people to ever hold the job–will not have to face cameras for some time on this.
To their credit, some Democrats like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) did publicly criticize Biden’s move immediately:
Since Sunday night with those statements, other Democrats have joined the party late. Per Axios, other members like Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) have joined in criticizing it. Several other Democrats have joined in on the chorus criticizing Biden too:
But former Attorney General Eric Holder, the right hand man of former President Barack Obama–to whom Biden served as Vice President and whose administration some of the Hunter Biden pardoned activities like the aforementioned Ukraine shenanigans happened during–was out actually defending the pardon. It’s no surprise to see Holder, who was voted into criminal and civil contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with lawfully issued congressional subpoenas over the Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal that led to the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry, show such a disregard for the rule of law. But again, this perverted vision of justice and law and order that most of the Democratic Party has embraced in the modern era–a vision that Americans have rejected at the ballot box multiple times including most recently less than a month ago when they sent Trump back to the White House–does seem to have begun with Holder during his time as attorney general during the Obama administration.
Regardless of Holder’s nonsensical argument attempting to justify this egregious action by Biden, this pardon of Hunter Biden is absolutely one of the most damning political indictments of Democrats as a party and could have serious long-term damaging consequences for them as time goes on. Nate Silver, the statistician and polling analyst whose modeling every election cycle aims to capture the picture of the electorate, sounded off furiously about the pardon on Sunday evening noting that while he voted for Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump in the November election that nobody should ever vote for any Democrat who does not condemn Biden’s pardon of his son.
This decision by Biden to pardon his son is both shockingly egregious and completely unsurprising. Of course, in hindsight, the president was without question going to do this. And of course he, the White House, and the Democrats were going to absolutely lie about it until he did it.
But the fact of the matter is the move is so over-the-top–even though expected–that it deserves major scrutiny of how the nation got here. First off, back when stories about Hunter Biden first surfaced like the New York Post’s original report on his “laptop from hell,” deep state actors from the so-called “intelligence community” circulated a letter calling it disinformation.
Then later when that collapsed and Hunter Biden was charged and then convicted of several crimes–despite a last second plea deal attempt that collapsed with the slightest bit of scrutiny from a federal judge–the establishment media went all in on the lies from Biden and the White House that Biden would not pardon his son.
None of these people has shown even the slightest bit of remorse for their actions in this. All of them–at least as far as we can tell right now–think they did nothing wrong. In fact, some of them even as recently as Monday morning when asked by Breitbart News if they had any remorse for their actions got extremely defensive and claimed they were just reporting what the president said at the time.
Others, like CNN’s Elie Honig, are putting the blame on Biden saying that he lied to the country for a long time about this:
The deeper issues with America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies date back much further than Biden’s presidency, to be fair, but he and his inner circle have not only done nothing about fixing them they have actually very much exacerbated them. The FBI, Justice Department, CIA, NSA, and many others in the intelligence and federal law enforcement apparatus–broadly, the “deep state”–have issues that date back to even long before Obama ascended the presidency in 2008. There were Ruby Ridge and the Waco siege back in the early 1990s, sure, but things really seem to have intensified when Obama was elected and when he picked Holder as his attorney general.
Holder, by almost every account, was by far the most partisan attorney general in modern history. He gladly bore the informal title of Obama’s “wingman,” and he regularly engaged in highly partisan activity atop the Justice Department. In fact, emails uncovered thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showed that Holder’s staff regularly colluded with George Soros-funded Media Matters for America to smear conservatives including journalists like specifically me when I worked for Daily Caller more than 12 years ago. The Justice Department under Holder lied about this for years, and then finally released the records years later. That was the beginning of the weaponization as it’s been seen in modern times, and since then after Trump’s first term in office when Biden rose to power we’ve seen his attorney general, Merrick Garland, and specifically Garland’s deputy Lisa Monaco (who Trump told Breitbart News recently is clearly “really running” things over there at Main Justice) refine the tactics first deployed by Holder to include actual law enforcement actions against conservatives like the January 6 protesters and pro-life activists among others. That doesn’t even get into what the Biden DOJ did to Trump himself. They charged Trump with ridiculous allegations of federal crimes–charges they have now dropped post election, essentially an admission the case was purely political from the get-go–and they had the FBI raid his home at Mar-a-Lago. Think about that for a minute: Joe Biden’s Justice Department and FBI raided the personal home of his chief political rival on obviously ridiculous charges that they now admit were purely political since they are no longer pursuing the cases.
Perhaps that’s why seeing Holder’s comments on the Hunter Biden pardon is so fascinating–and it brings us to the next major point to focus on here as Trump assembles a government to take over after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.
In literally the exact same social media post as the one in which Holder defends the Hunter Biden pardon he then proceeds to attack Trump’s pick of Patel to lead the FBI. Why does Holder not want Patel at the FBI? Is it because Patel will actually bring some real reforms to the bureau that may uncover some nasty and gnarly things Holder himself or his goons did when he was in power?
Holder asks a rhetorical question in that post defending the Hunter Biden pardon which is whether Patel is “qualified” to lead the FBI, then answers his own question by saying “hell no.” Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe sounded off on CNN literally within seconds of Patel’s appointment announcement, too, with the same argument:
Holder and McCabe–and everyone else ripping him–are ignoring Patel’s impeccable credentials. Patel was a senior attorney on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). He was the Pentagon chief of staff. He was a senior adviser to the Director of National Intelligence. He served as a top counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council (NSC) in the White House during Trump’s first term, literally helping plan the counterterrorist actions against people like ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi–where Trump ordered his assassination and once and for all ended ISIS after the Obama-era geniuses who ran the military and intelligence communities said ISIS could never be defeated. Patel had an illustrious career before that as a federal prosecutor–yes, he prosecuted more cases than Kamala Harris did–and even won an award from the very same Obama-era DOJ that Holder led for his successful prosecution of terrorists.
In other words, Patel is absolutely eminently qualified to serve as FBI director and anyone who argues otherwise–like Holder or McCabe–is lying. That begs the question: Why are they lying? What it is about Patel they hate so much that they would blow their own credibility in a desperate mad dash to stop him? Well, it’s probably that Patel is going to actually reform the way things work at the FBI if confirmed, and that change is coming to the bureau at long last. What would that mean for people like McCabe and Holder? What would it mean for the establishment media figures who have worked closely with people like them for the last decade or longer? Well, beyond an ideological shift from the left to the right, people like Patel getting confirmed into positions like FBI director mean serious institutional change that could threaten the very livelihoods of those who have made careers out of things generally staying the way they long have been at these places. In other words, no it’s not that these folks are engaged in widespread criminality that the FBI is all of a sudden going to uncover if Patel is confirmed and calling the shots over there–though there certainly might be some of that–it’s more that the drastic changes to the way things have long been shifts power and control away from the failed people of the past toward a different and new future and that change is scary to powerful people who pull down hefty salaries and have built lives around what they’re doing.
A similar type of scenario exists with Hegseth. No part of the federal government is swampier than the Department of Defense, and the Pentagon blows through cash like newborn babies blow through diapers. Since he’s not part of the current Pentagon leadership structure of generals and political officials from which presidents usually pick Secretaries of Defense, Hegseth represents a major institutional shift away from the ways of the past toward serious change. As Trump’s other allies over at the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already made clear, DOGE is very likely to focus on Pentagon waste. That makes insiders who currently control the levers of power–and thereby the flow of cash–very uneasy. So cue the media attacks, as the New York Times dug up Hegseth’s divorce records to uncover a deeply personal from his mother–one she retracted almost immediately, as Breitbart News reported–to smear Hegseth. The New Yorker followed suit with a suspect report on Hegseth written a decade ago before he even worked at Fox News back when he was running a veteran’s group. The media is likely to continue these attacks all the way until either Hegseth is confirmed or not. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer ironically calls Breitbart News a mouthpiece for Trump, yet she in her story reveals she was actually whipping Senate votes against Hegseth because she quotes Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) as reacting to the terrible character assassination of Hegseth contained within her piece. (Mayer was upset that Breitbart News preempted her piece with one of our own, thereby taking the sting out of her reporting).
Then of course there are other Trump picks like Gabbard and RFK who are also under fire. And the anti-Trump forces already got former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general–Trump has since replaced him with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who’s likely to sail to confirmation–so they are clearly on the hunt for as many scalps as they can get. The question really becomes whether Republicans in the Senate fall for it–again–or if they reject the smear campaigns of these increasingly desperate leftists and media figures like they did when they confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Time will tell.