In what most of the media is characterizing as “a routine” event, Joe Biden has asked 56 U.S. attorneys appointed by Donald Trump to resign.
Indeed, it used to be a routine announcement. It’s part of the transition and shouldn’t draw any scrutiny. In with the new, out with the old, farewell, and good luck.
Except when Trump did it in 2016, you’d think it was the end of democracy. This was the headline story on the MSNBC website after Trump asked for the resignations on March 13, 2017.
Trump sparks new controversy with U.S. Attorney dismissals. Ten years after the last Republican White House had a U.S. Attorney scandal, Donald Trump has one of his own.
What “scandal”? The U.S. attorney for New York, Preet Bharara, threw a tantrum because he says Trump promised he could stay. He refused to resign and was promptly fired. The media blew this tantrum into a clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch.
But when Biden does it, it’s “routine.”
And then there was CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who complained of Trump, “one would have thought they’d have handled it better.” Blitzer’s colleague, Jim Acosta, complained, “They’re off to a very slow start… So it’s not surprising they’d do it in this fashion.”
The New York Times headlined its coverage, “Trump Abruptly Orders 46 Obama-Era Prosecutors to Resign.” One can still be looking for the Biden announcement on the Times’s website.
The media misconduct remained consistent with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Routine practices were always criminal for the big bad orange man, while remaining admissible for Democrats.
In Biden’s “routine” firing of U.S. attorneys, he allowed two of them to stay on.
The U.S. attorneys will begin transitioning out of their roles, with the exception of the prosecutor overseeing the federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden, David Weiss for Delaware. John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, will resign from his position as U.S. attorney but will stay on as special counsel to continue his now years-long investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday was asked about Weiss and Durham, and said that those “decisions were made in order to fulfill his promise of maintaining independence.”
It was politically smart for Biden to continue the Hunter Biden probe. He really didn’t have any choice because it may eventually lead back to him. But he could have taken the risk and asked for Weiss’s resignation too. That he didn’t is significant in that he wants to keep the focus on Trump impeachment and his pandemic relief bill.
For all the machinations of the media to destroy Trump’s presidency, none of it mattered in the end. All they ended up doing was destroying what was left of their credibility with the vast majority of the American people. And it’s things like this that sealed their fate.
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