Using the logic of Democrats and the media from the last two years, the only conclusion to be reached from their hysteria over Attorney General William Barr is that someone has something to hide.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., ABC’s “This Week,” April 7, 2019: “I think the main thing here is what is the president hiding?”
Chris Cuomo, CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Dec. 11, 2018: “Again, central question: Why lie if you’ve got nothing to hide?”
Ari Melber, MSNBC’s “The Beat,” June 8, 2018: “The people who obstruct investigations typically do so because they have something to hide.”
Philip Rucker, Washington Post, April 24, 2018: “Trump keeps saying he’s innocent. So why does he keep sounding like he’s guilty?”
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Feb. 18, 2018: “My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him.”
We’ve since discovered by way of Robert Mueller, he of liberal legend, he of unlimited time and money, that if Trump is hiding anything, it was never found. They flipped Trump’s personal lawyer, his “fixer,” Michael Cohen, and somehow Trump’s still hiding something? Trump couldn’t hide a 13-year-old affair with an aging porn actress and yet he somehow covered up a massive conspiracy involving dozens of people and one of America’s chief adversaries, all while committees in the House and Senate and the special counsel and every national news organization were hot on the trail!
Amazing.
The conclusion of Mueller’s investigation left Democrats empty-handed, and so now Trump has given his attorney general the authority to investigate and declassify material that could explain to the public how all of this happened. Barr has stated in front of Congress that the purpose of any such investigation would be to ensure that it never happens again and would likely result in new DOJ policy and safeguards against the unnecessary spying on private citizens. Excuse me, not “spying.” I meant surveillance.
Sounds reasonable, unless you’re listening to the media and Democrats who very apparently want something to remain hidden.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post, a paper that in different circumstances actually came down on the side of transparency, said there might be a “cherry-picking of facts to create a misleading and politically expedient narrative.”
My colleague Byron York has a fantastic rundown of Democrats and anti-Trump obsessives who previously saw the great undoing of Democracy when the White House and Republican allies in Congress tried getting to the bottom of who was spying on Trump’s campaign and why.
During testimony in front of Congress last month, Barr said there was reason to believe inappropriate “spying” had occurred on the Trump campaign. It’s a known fact that it happened, but rather than expose themselves as hypocrites for opposing the very type of infestation they themselves have championed, Democrats pretend there’s an issue over terminology.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, during the hearing, asked Barr if he wanted to “rephrase,” because “the word spying could cause everybody in the cable news ecosystem to freak out.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., demanded that Barr “retract his unfounded, irresponsible claim.”
House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., also called on Barr to “retract his statement immediately or produce specific evidence to back it up.”
The specific evidence is that Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was literally wiretapped by the FBI. The specific evidence is that ex-professor Stefan Halper was meeting with Trump aides and, unbeknownst to the campaign, relaying their conversations to the FBI. In every sense of the word, Halper was operating as a spy. Media insistence that he be referred to instead as an “informant” is a semantics game.
A Washington Post story last month said Trump and his supporters “have struggled to legitimize their accusations that the FBI conducted political spying” on the campaign, even as it went on to say that Page was “secretly surveilled” by the FBI.
It’s not clear what distinction Democrats and the media are making when they urge that there’s a difference between “spying” and “surveillance.” If they’re going to order everyone to use a different word than “spying,” maybe they shouldn’t have picked an exact synonym for it.
We don’t know what, if anything, Barr will find in his investigation. But why do Democrats and the news media behave as if they have something to hide?
