The following is an excerpt from Sen. Ted Cruz’s “Justice Corrupted.” It can be purchased here.
…Vice President Biden repeatedly assured crowds on the campaign trail—if a few dozen people sitting in white chalk circles in half-empty parking lots can be called a “crowd”—that the Department of Justice was hopelessly broken. He claimed that he, a lifelong politician who had finished near the bottom of his class in law school, was the one to fix it. He would do this, he claimed, by staying away from the DOJ altogether. The department, he promised repeatedly, would operate completely independently of him and his political cronies.
During an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, held shortly before the election, Biden was asked about his plans for the Justice Department, specifically the civil rights division. The question came from one of the many far-left activists that the Biden campaign was then attempting to win over. The vice president’s answer, scattered and meandering though it was, covered all the talking points he’d been given.
“The Justice Department under my administration will be totally independent of me,” he said. “I will not direct them when to prosecute, how to prosecute, what to prosecute, and I will not be injecting—I will not enter their decisions based upon the judgments they make about the cases they bring and what they don’t bring.”
Biden continued:
Most of all, I would have an attorney general who understood his oath of office. Not a joke. An attorney general has an oath of office that could do and move on what the professionals in the department thought had to be pursued without my interfering and saying no, they’re my friends; go after this person. Go after Hillary, or this kind of stuff . . . I get asked the following question: If in fact you get elected, would you prosecute Trump? Would you pursue prosecuting Trump? And the answer is I’m not going to pursue prosecuting anyone. I’m going to do what the Justice Department says should be done. And not politicize it.”
That was a noble promise. Since taking office, however, President Biden has done precisely the opposite of what he promised to do. In fact, almost every word of the answer above has turned out to be a lie. Although he has shown a willingness to stay “independent” of certain aspects of his job—looking the other way, for example, while the United States military was embarrassed during its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, or twiddling his thumbs while inflation climbed to record heights—he has been unusually present and engaged when it comes to the affairs of the Department of Justice.
Shortly after taking office, for instance, according to a report in the New York Times, he “confided to his inner circle that he believed former president Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted.” Toward the end of that first year, he told reporters that he believed the Department of Justice should prosecute anyone who refuses to cooperate with the kangaroo-court demands of Congress’s increasingly partisan January 6 select committee. Despite his press secretary Jen Psaki’s attempts to walk these comments back during a briefing the next morning, the message from the Biden White House was clear. Now that the Democrats had seized power, their enemies were not safe from the claws of the federal government.
In other words, President Biden has picked up where President Obama, the man who taught him how to check names off his enemies list using the machinery of the federal government, left off. The only difference was that by the time Joe Biden took office, his list of enemies was much longer. It included not only people who attacked his administration directly, but also those who dared go against the new neo-Marxist, “woke” orthodoxy that he and his supporters are devoted to.
The Department of Justice began doing this work as soon as President Biden took office, moving on multiple initiatives long before any of his judicial nominees were even confirmed. Anything that might upset the new regime was summarily dismissed.
On February 3, for instance, months before any of President Biden’s judicial nominees would even be confirmed, the Department of Justice formally dropped a case against Yale University examining the methods by which the school decided which students to admit to its undergraduate program. For years, Asian American students had been claiming—with mountains of evidence on their side—that major universities such as Harvard and Yale aggressively discriminated against them. In various lawsuits, Asian American groups claimed that by adhering to strict guidelines on affirmative action, these universities were deliberately putting Asian students at a disadvantage during the admission process.