It used to be understood, before we started rewarding lawbreakers with goodies like birthplace citizenship, that punishing bad guys was the most effective way to stop bad actions. The best way to drop the murder rate, for example, is to swiftly and justly execute murderers.
For the same reason, the best way to end the political weaponization of the bureaucracy is to punish the weaponizers. As long as the architects of the most infamous abuses — from the Russia collusion hoax to the Biden DOJ effort to throw its political opposition in prison — escape accountability, new partisans will be emboldened to abuse their prosecutorial power for political ends.
The role of consequences as deterrent is obvious to any disciplined child. It’s obvious to members of the American public who want to see the likes of James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith held accountable for their war on the rule of law. It’s so obvious, in fact, that the corporate press feels compelled to work very hard to pretend that’s not the case.
During a DOJ press conference on Tuesday, CNN’s Paula Reid delivered a perfect example of the media’s feigned stupidity on the subject.
“President Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted,” she said, setting up a question to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “So now that you’re in this position, how are you going to balance that relentless pressure with this administration’s promise to end the weaponization of this department?”
The hackery becomes more obvious when you distill the question down to its parts. Put another way, she’s asking: How are you going to balance the relentless pressure to prosecute criminals with your promise to stop crimes?
The media’s definition of “ending weaponization” is having the Trump DOJ do absolutely nothing about the decade of the Obama and Biden DOJ’s partisan lawfare, until Democrats can take over and start doing it again. The one thing they don’t want the Trump DOJ to do is actually take the steps required to hold the serial weaponizers accountable. When the media talk about “ending weaponization,” they mean the exact opposite.
It’s the same playbook they use to guilt Republicans into being useless on deportations. Democrats can blow up our immigration laws all they want, but if Trump tries to fix it, he’s not allowed, because norms. The only approach acceptable to the media is that he do nothing until Democrats can take control.
Blanche seems to understand the ruse. “When you talk about weaponization … [you] talk about ending weaponization as if that’s a bad thing for us to do,” he responded to Reid. He’s right: the media, who played a supporting role in the weaponization of state power to target Trump via the Russia collusion hoax and later lawfare campaigns, don’t want actual accountability for weaponization because they were in on the operation.
“For four years, some of you same people sat here with the last administration when you saw a weaponization of this department the likes of which had never been seen in history,” Blanche continued, reminding a squirming press pool of the Biden DOJ’s numerous attempts to throw Biden’s presidential opponent in prison — an effort which included spying on a handful of Republicans senators and hundreds of conservative organizations.
The media didn’t just turn a blind eye to the weaponization; they actively aided the attempts to deploy the government against Trump and his allies. When the Clinton campaign and the Obama intelligence apparatus launched the Russia collusion hoax, it was the media that helped launder the false narrative to the public. When the Biden FBI raided the home of a pro-life father and dragged him away in handcuffs in front of his children, the corporate press buried the story. When the Biden DOJ attempted to chill the speech of concerned parents by falsely associating their concerns about school boards with “domestic terrorism,” the media either ignored the scandal or framed it as “Republicans pouncing.” When the department and its associates raided Trump’s personal home, made him sit for a mugshot, dragged him into a courtroom, and tried to imprison him, the media worked to legitimize the false narratives on which the prosecutions were based.
Only a media establishment utterly complicit in all of that weaponization could try to claim that the pre-Trump DOJ “has historically operated independently from presidents,” as a triple-bylined piece in Axios last week did.
Axios framed outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster as a case of Bondi failing to sufficiently “target [Trump’s] political rivals” after he “very publicly put pressure on” her to do so. “But despite her efforts, MAGA activists and influencers demanded more indictments and blamed Bondi for the failure despite the lack of prosecutable evidence.”
In the minds of the media, Bondi was fired because she didn’t weaponize the DOJ enough. (As is their habit, the media quickly turned from hating her to casting her sympathetically the minute her name could be used to attack Trump.) In reality, Americans who want lawfare perpetrators punished were frustrated that Bondi’s shortcomings left room for Democrats to weaponize the DOJ against conservatives again, as prominent leftists have promised to do.
It’s not a hard frustration to understand, if you’re a normal person who thinks the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement agencies under Obama and Biden was a terrible thing for the country that should never be allowed to happen again. Punishing the architects of that weaponization isn’t just not contradictory to ending weaponization, it’s an essential feature.
As Rachel Bovard noted recently, “There are only three reasons politicos respect norms and abide by the Constitution: duty, religion, and fear. Among Democrat elites today, the first two are obsolete.” The only thing that will stop the next Crossfire Hurricane or the next Arctic Frost from targeting untold opponents of the American left with character assassination, financial ruin, privacy invasions, and even prison is the fear of just penalties for such corruption. Those just penalties aren’t weaponization, they’re its antidote.
But the media don’t actually want to end weaponization, because they have been in on it from the beginning. Their tattered reputations hang on maintaining the illusion that the real problem is not the abuse of power but the use of power to stop it.