The stunning memo released by the Biden Administration last Wednesday brazenly soliciting the media’s help in its fight against the recently House impeachment inquiry can only mean that panic is beginning to set in at the White House. Issuing statements rebutting opposing views is one thing and fairly routine. But telling media outlets that “[i]t’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies…” is quite another.
Yet, this is what the memo also had to say:
Covering impeachment as a process story – Republicans say X but the White House says Y – is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable… And in the modern media environment, where every day liar and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds and obscure the truth.”
Nor is this the first time that the Biden team has been trying to stack the deck.
It will be recalled that in May of last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a furor with its announcement of the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board charged with “countering misinformation related to homeland security, focuses specifically on immigration and Russia.”
As we noted at the time, there was to be an official mechanism in place – replete with governmental imprimatur, for monitoring comments by Americans in these two areas. Its investigators would probe whether the comments “misinform” (i.e., run counter to Biden Administration policy) other Americans and then provide the “correct” take on events. At the same time, there were no guidelines as to how far the government agents could go in their investigations, or any limits on any remedial action they wanted to take.
If this all seemed too Orwellian for the United States, it was, and caused an uproar. And this was even before Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before a Senate Committee in support of the plan. Responding to testimony about his appointment of one Nina Jankowicz as head of the board, he said he wasn’t aware of her reputation for sharp Democratic partisanship – that she had vouched for the veracity of the now discredited Steele Dossier or that she had claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was the product of Russian disinformation or that she dismissed parental concern about critical race theory as merely the GOP “weaponizing people’s emotion.”
And then, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, there was that finding several months ago by a federal district judge that the Biden Administration had pressured Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media companies to scrub content and ban users that officials claimed were spreading harmful and misleading information about vaccine safety, masking measures, election security and other divisive topics. The judge’s findings were upheld last week by the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals based in New Orleans.
To be sure, the Biden Administration is seeking Supreme Court review. But isn’t it about time they gave democracy a chance? You know, the kind of government based upon things like the free market place of ideas.
This is especially so given the facts that precipitated the impeachment review. No one denies that Hunter Biden lobbied members of the U.S. government for years and was paid millions for it over a period of years. And documentary evidence and his own first-hand accounts point to President Biden as his compensated point person during the time the latter served as Vice President.
So, you do the math. Would those payments have been made had there not been substantial results forthcoming from the Vice President? Wouldn’t this be a valid assumption even if the firing of that Ukrainian prosecutor at the senior Biden’s behest is not really what it seems to be?
Because of the dynamics of looming litigation, the cascade of evidence continually being uncovered by the Comer and Jordan committees will likely come to an end leaving an impeachment inquiry the only way for all of the facts to be uncovered. And, from what is already on the public record, it would hardly be based on Republican lies and misrepresentations.
The system must be allowed to work its way free from partisan manipulation.
