Tucker: Biden admin using force of law to crush political dissent
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host analyzes why federal agents raided Rudy Giuliani's home
Today, Joe Biden gave his first address to a joint session of congress. The speech amounted to a mushy casserole of clichés designed to calm your suspicions that anything weird or scary might be going on and to reassure you that everything’s going to be just fine, in fact, better. In that way, it had the same narcotic intent of the Biden campaign itself. Remember that? "Don’t worry. We’re moderates. We’ll make everything normal again." Whatever you think of Joe Biden, that turned out to be one of the greatest lies ever told. In four months, this White House has changed America more quickly and more radically than any before it. They’ve moved so fast and with such stunning aggression that even people who are paid to keep track of it, like us, can barely keep up. Every change they’ve forced has moved the country in the same direction: away from democracy where every voter has the same power as a voter, and toward something very different, toward tyranny. Most ominous of all, they haven’t hesitated to use the force of law to punish their political opponents. Here’s the latest, which may be the scariest:
At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, federal agents raided the home of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. They seized his personal property, including his electronic devices, which included all of his digital communications and records. Before they did this, the feds notified their allies at the Democratic Party’s campaign operation, The Lincoln Project. The Lincoln Project then bragged online that they knew the raid was coming. You may have imagined that the Lincoln Project was done, we told you that, in fact. We believed it was permanently discredited by a child molestation scandal. Which they admitted. But it wasn’t. Under this administration, the Lincoln Project is stronger than ever – strong enough to know about an FBI raid before it happens. And of course, it’s stronger, because the Lincoln Project is an ally of the White House, and so by definition, they can do whatever they want, and they do.
FEDS RAID RUDY GIULIANI APARTMENT IN UKRAINE INVESTIGATION
But Rudy Giuliani is not a political ally of the White House. He was the personal attorney of the former president — whose communications the Feds are of course now reading. That was Giuliani’s offense: being Trump’s lawyer — that, and having the gall to try to learn more about what exactly Joe Biden and his son were doing in Ukraine several years ago. The Justice Department announced today that asking too many questions about Biden’s dealings in Ukraine is now a crime. They called it something else, but that’s what Giuliani did.
The one electronic device the feds didn’t seize in today’s raid was a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive from his laptop. Giuliani had a copy of it in his apartment. At one point, agents picked it up and looked at it. But when Giuliani told them it came from Hunter Biden, they put it down, and they left it there. It was the one thing they didn’t want. That’s very strange if you think about it. The Justice Department is now telling us that Giuliani was somehow involved in foreign tampering with our democracy. Russia, by implication, was involved. So you’d think they’d want to examine Rudy Giuliani’s own copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Why? Because Hunter Biden himself just told us on television that laptop, that hard drive, could be tied directly to Russian intelligence. The fake Russian laptop, with all the photoshopped pictures of Hunter Biden smoking fake Russian crack with fake Russian hookers. Why wouldn’t the FBI want to see Rudy Giuliani’s own copy of that? Well, you’d think they would. Because as Joe Biden told us during the October debate on TV, he believed Rudy Giuliani was a quote "pawn" of Russian intelligence.
JOE BIDEN: We are in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to interfere in the outcome of our election. His own national security adviser told him that what is happening with his buddy, Rudy Giuliani, he's being used as a Russian pawn. He's being fed information that is Russian. Information that is not true.
Oh, he’s being fed information by Russian intelligence, by Vladimir Putin. So, if Rudy Giuliani was working for the Russian government, as the now-president claimed in public, you’d think Biden’s Justice Department would want all the Russia-related evidence it could get from Rudy Giuliani’s apartment.
Oh, but they didn’t, that’s not what they wanted. Instead, they explained that they had a search warrant for all communications between Giuliani and, among others, a journalist called John Solomon. If the name sounds familiar, John Solomon often appears on ‘Hannity’ with Sean Hannity.
So, why are they interested in John Solomon? Well, we don’t know, but here’s a guess: At one point, John Solomon’s reporting uncovered the fact that a key figure in the Mueller investigation -- a Ukrainian businessman called Konstantin Kilimnik -- was in fact informant for the U.S. government. Now, that was an essential fact to know, but Robert Mueller didn't disclose that in his final report. Instead, he portrayed the Ukrainian as a Russian agent.
Now, that was a lie, it was a lie by omission. And that lie helped prop up the collusion hoax. John Solomon exposed that lie. It looks like the Biden people haven’t forgotten about it.
The FBI's pretext for investigating Giuliani is that he violated something that no one in America even heard of a few years ago called FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. For 50 years, only seven people faced criminal charges for violating FARA. Only one was convicted. In fact, the U.S. attorney's manual at the DOJ said that you should warn lobbyists who don’t comply with FARA, not prosecute them, warn them. Most violations were ignored — they still are — it’s extremely common in Washington. And it’s not Russia that people are lobbying for. They’re treated as a civil matter.
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That changed when Trump was elected. FARA investigations became a tool the DOJ used against mouthy and inconvenient Republicans. There have been more FARA prosecutions in the past three years than we’ve seen over the past half-century. Process crimes, weaponized against political opponents. Political opponents are prominent in Washington, and particularly the Biden administration.
Roger Stone has a Ph.D. in that subject. Roger Stone has never been elected to anything. You could argue he’s never wielded profound political power. But he has been a long-time informal advisor of Donald Trump. In 2019, for that crime, Roger Stone was arrested on the grounds of lying to Congress about a subject that, honestly, no one now can seem to remember. What were the details? No one knows. And by the way, the context is this: lying to Congress, it happens all the time. Roughly every day. And sometimes, it greatly hurts the country.
James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when he said the NSA wasn’t spying on millions of Americans. The NSA was, in violation of our constitutional rights. James Brennan, the former CIA director, lied when he said the CIA wasn’t spying on the US senate. Can you imagine an Intel agency spying on the legislative branch? That was happening, he lied about it. Another case of perjury.
Here’s the interesting thing: Neither Clapper nor Brennan was prosecuted. In fact, both got better jobs. Why did they get off? They’re on the right side. Roger Stone, by contrast, advised Donald Trump. Here’s what happened to him.
JON BERMAN, CNN: Exclusive footage you're looking at right now from CNN as the FBI arrives at Roger Stone's residence in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, taking him into custody…Again, they arrived before dawn just after 6:00 a.m., a dozen officers we're told.
CNN was tipped off to that raid before it happened. Imagine a country in which the Department of Justice – men with guns who can shoot you and get away with it – can use the American news media for political purposes to hurt you before you’ve even been put on trial. That’s corrupt.
It was one of the most grotesque displays of corrupted justice in our lifetimes. In the end, Stone got a presidential pardon in the final moments of the Trump administration. But the harassment continued. The Biden administration has now announced that they're suing Stone for nonpayment of interest and penalties on his taxes. He’s paid the taxes, not an easy thing when his prosecution left him unable to work. When the judge in the case said he couldn’t even speak in public. He was completely broke.
Stone had paid nearly everything he owed. He was negotiating a settlement for the rest. He was negotiating with the government, as many do. And then, the day after Biden's inauguration, the Feds pulled out of the negotiation and went after him publicly. Roger Stone is broke. They’ve wrecked his life.
But guess who’s doing great these days?
Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden has tax problems too. We know that from his laptop. It indicated he may have taken millions from communist party officials in China. Did he pay taxes on that? The Justice Department at one point was ordering that too. They had a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax question. But you haven’t heard much about it lately. Weird. Or maybe not so weird. On Inauguration Day, Joe Biden named a new head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division.
That man, Nicholas McQuaid, was a law partner of Hunter Biden's defense attorney for years. Funny how that works.
Under McQuaid's leadership, the feds have become more aggressive than ever in using the force of law to crush political dissent. In leaks to the media, for example, the Feds announced they were investigating Congressman Matt Gaetz for the crime of sex trafficking. You can read about it in the New York Times. They dutifully wrote a whole piece about it. That story essentially destroyed Gaetz, took him off the map completely as a rhetorical force. Whatever his flaws, Gaetz is smart, articulate, and brave. Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members of congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents. Now he’s a sex trafficker.
So the question is, who exactly did Matt Gaetz sex traffic? We can’t answer that question, because no charges have been filed. All remains is the stigma. The remarkable thing is, there is apparently material on Hunter Biden’s laptop that suggests he was involved in the sexual abuse of minors. If that’s so, the FBI would know, because they have a copy of the laptop.
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And yet here’s the funny thing: no one has leaked anything about this to the New York Times or Politico or NBC News. Hunter Biden has not been charged with this, not with sex abuse. He has not been charged with a federal firearms felony that he committed. We can say that conclusively. He lied on a background check, he committed a felony.
So is he going to jail? Oh, no. he’s thriving. Hunter Biden got a million-dollar book contract and a gig teaching at Tulane. It’s good to be the president’s son.
It’s not good to be a Trump voter. That’s very clear now. A partisan federal prosecutor explained that Republicans who so much as trespassed at the Capitol on January 6 will be treated like Al Qaeda:
MICHAEL SHERWIN: After the 6th, we had an inauguration on the 20th. So I wanted to ensure, and our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible before the 20th. And it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they're like, "If we go there, we're gonna get charged."…We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.
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What you just read is the opposite of justice. In a just system, you punish people for the crimes they committed equally with everyone else who has committed those crimes. You don’t punish people extra to send a political point, or to deter future behavior that might inconvenience a political party, or to stop dissent. And that’s exactly what he did. And it’s not legal. A District Court judge, Christopher Cooper, just released one man who's been in DOJ detention for four months.
That man, a 60-year-old named Richard Barnett, had made the mistake of entering Nancy Pelosi's office without permission. He didn’t burn it down. He didn’t hurt anybody. For that crime, he was locked away in solitary confinement. There, he was allegedly beaten by prison guards, including one who told him that he hated all white people.
Judge Cooper -- an Obama appointee -- had to inform the DOJ this week that Richard Barnett, though you may not like who he voted for, still has rights. He released Barnett from jail.
That case wasn't unusual. He was one of more than 36 protesters from January 6 who has been held in solitary confinement at a D.C. jail for months. This is so disproportionate, especially considering people who torched buildings, including federal buildings and rape others, are getting out of prison in a day. It's such egregious treatment that Democrats -- including Dick Durbin and Elizabeth Warren -- are speaking out against it.
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"Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging," Warren said. "And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet."
She may be wrong on everything else, but she was right on that. In a functioning democracy, every member of the Democratic Party would be saying the same thing. Republicans would be saying it too. Where are the Republicans, by the way? What does Mitch McConnell do for a living? But they’ve been largely silent about this abuse of human rights. There’d be demands for the immediate release of every nonviolent protester who went to the capitol on January 6. But there aren’t. So the White House will likely lock up more.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 28, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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