The Weaponization of Special Counsels Boomerangs on Democrats

As Democrats rush to defend President Joe Biden from damning revelations about just how poor his memory and mental state are, they should remember that they themselves sowed the seeds of this crisis by weaponizing special counsels to target Donald Trump.

In the February 8 release of the final report from special counsel Robert Hur – who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents – Hur concluded by recommended against criminal charges for the president on account of his “significantly limited” memory. In the hours and days that followed, Democrat operatives and left-wing prosecutors predictably and frantically rushed to Biden’s defense.

The damage control campaign began with Vice President Kamala Harris, who called the report “clearly politically motivated” and “inaccurate and inappropriate.” (Harris’s claim that the report is “inaccurate” holds especially little weight given that she was not present for Hur’s interviews with Biden.)

Democrat Congressman Daniel Goldman (D-NY), who served as the head Democrat counsel in Donald Trump’s 2020 impeachment, also criticized the report’s details surrounding Biden’s memory as “irrelevant.”

In a frenzied op-ed, former Obama FBI official Andrew Weissman lamented what he described as a gross mischaracterization of the report by the press—and went on to characterize the report’s details as “entirely inappropriate” and “gratuitous,” noting the dangers of “putting your thumb on the scale” in a way “that could have political repercussions.”

The great irony of the left’s hysteria, of course, is that it was the Democrat Party and the progressive ruling class in the first place that instituted the norm of appointing weaponized special counsels to investigate their political opponents. Today, that precedent is finally coming back to haunt them.

In the last 149 years, the Department of Justice has appointed 50 special counsels to investigate sensitive political matters. Five of those investigations—or 10 percent of all investigations dating back to 1875—have occurred since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, perhaps the most notable of which was Robert Mueller’s investigation into the now-thoroughly debunked Russian collusion hoax.

Other special counsel investigations include John Durham’s investigation into the origins of Russiagate, Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump, and David Weiss’s ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden.

Recent special counsels primarily have been used as a weapon by the left to pursue political witch hunts and investigate unsubstantiated allegations surrounding Trump and other conservatives.

But with nothing more than a few comments on the state of Biden’s memory, Special Counsel Robert Hur—appointed by Biden’s own Attorney General—may have single-handedly destroyed Biden’s presidency and tanked his reelection chances.

Of course, unlike the investigations into Trump, the Hur investigation was indeed warranted by the facts: Biden had willfully retained classified documents in his garage and at the Penn Biden Center, and unlike Trump did not have the authority to declassify them. Moreover, Hur is only detailing the facts from his interviews with Biden, rather than fabricating a narrative out of whole cloth as has been the case with the investigations into Trump.

The onslaught of outrage from the left in response to the revelations of the Hur report—much of which is coming from precisely the same people who led or advocated for a series of politically motivated investigations into Trump and other Republicans—is quite telling.

For years, Democrats have had no problem using special counsels and other elements of the U.S. justice and political systems to baselessly target and smear their political enemies without any regard for the rule of law, judicial independence, or the American constitutional framework.

But now that a special counsel investigation is yielding results that the left finds politically unpalatable, they are crying foul. The reaction of figures like Harris, Goldman, Weissman, and others—who gleefully cheered the flagrant persecution of Trump and the abuse of our legal system for the advancement of left-wing political goals—is illustrative.

Just a few years ago, Weissman, who criticized Hur for putting his “thumb on the scale” against Biden, suggested that Robert Mueller was too timid in his investigation of Trump’s Russia ties, stating regretfully, “We could have done more.” And in his opening statement in Trump’s impeachment hearings in December of 2019, Goldman framed Trump as a threat to “the very foundation of our democracy,” despite the lack of anything remotely resembling criminal wrongdoing (not to mention the fact that Trump has since been entirely vindicated in his concerns about Biden’s corruption).

The fact that the same people who spent years parroting baseless theories that Donald Trump was a Russian asset, among other partisan fantasies, are now berating Robert Hur for some brief commentary on Biden’s memory reveals that partisan lawfare is their highest priority.

Moroever, it confirms that leftist prosecutors and Democrat operatives regard our nation’s legal procedures and constitutional mechanisms as nothing more than weapons in the liberal arsenal with which to target and destroy their political opponents.

If Democrats are so upset with what they say is Hur’s false conclusion, they can easily prove him wrong: all they have to do is release the tape of the Biden interview. Don’t hold your breath.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.