By John F. Di Leo –
After over two years, the dust is finally settling on the Mueller investigation. The report is out, and it clearly shows what all but the uninformed and the most partisan leftists knew all along: Not only was the allegation of Trump-Russia collusion poppycock from the beginning, but more importantly, the very investigation was unfounded, a hit job that its instigators planned as a sort of internal coup, designed to either take down the administration through a framed impeachment or to utterly hamstring the Trump-Pence administration and reduce its effectiveness.
There is much yet to be done, and it is clear that William Barr was the right man for the job of Attorney General at this point. We need to investigate the investigators – to determine exactly who, and how many, were responsible for turning the federal bureaucracy into a political weapon. Some have acted more like the secret police of the communist world, or like the dirty cops who sometimes plant evidence and convict the innocent in our own cities, shaming an otherwise honorable profession with their tyranny.
Attorney General Barr has promised to tackle this issue, and that’s good. It’s high time.
The Mueller investigation has done immense damage to the nation, but as we continue to explore this arena, we should also remember the missed opportunities – the work that both the current Attorney General and his predecessor have been unable to focus on, because they have been so overwhelmed by this wasteful, destructive, criminal investigation.
Imagine for a moment that you have a back yard and a front yard, both of which need mowing, and only one lawnmower and an hour of time before guests arrive. You can only do one yard or the other, not both. There isn’t time to do the whole job.
There is a law of missed opportunities that’s relevant here. Just as the necessity to mow the front lawn in our example eliminates the ability to mow the back in time, our Attorney General’s need to deal with the Mueller investigation – funding it, managing it, worrying about it – has reduced his office’s ability to deal with everything else that an Attorney General must do.
The regular business of the AG has continued without interruption; both Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr have done their job well in appointing federal attorneys, vetting judicial nominees for the federal benches, etc., despite the drag on resources and attention caused by this fraudulent investigation of non-existent Trump-Russian collusion.
But what of the many other projects that they intended to do when they arrived? What of the many separate and critical efforts that America desperately needs an engaged AG to tackle? These have had to be relegated to the back of the line.
The office of the Attorney General – the directorship of the entire federal Department of Justice – is far broader than most Americans realize.
In addition to the things that appear in the news all the time – judges, district attorneys, and the FBI – the DoJ also includes a host of other agencies. For example:
Community Oriented Policing Services:
This office dispenses billions of dollars in grants to local police departments. It’s a very politically-charged subject, as some administrations have tried to emphasize law enforcement while others have emphasized the radical position that crime is the result of poor relationships between police and civilians, requiring intentional impairment of local police.
This group’s mission desperately needs public debate and refocus. There has been no time for such attention, as the Mueller investigation sucked all the air out of the room for two years.
Office on Violence Against Women:
This office is focused primarily on the Violence Against Women acts of 1994 and 2000. In law enforcement, there are all kinds of crimes – including everything from bribery and extortion to antitrust violations, from bank robbery to sexual assault, from muggings to murder. Arguably, it does make sense to have a federal office focused on specific crimes against women, such as unjust discrimination, sex trafficking, rape, gender mutilation and honor killings, which are so different from many other types of crime.
Some of these are greater risks in America now than ever before, as we continue to import, both legally and illegally, millions of people from 3rd world countries who arrive with misogynistic and violent attitudes, especially the cultural horror known as sharia law. As long as we fail to focus on assimilation as a key element of immigration, the violence against women that is literally bred into some immigrant populations is a growing danger to both individuals and to the American way of life in general.
This office can and should address such issues, but decades of politically motivated hires have skewed and limited its direction and potential.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives:
As one of the best known bureaus in the DoJ, this one has been efficient in managing import regulations regarding alcoholic beverages, the legal trade in the manufacture and sale of weapons, etc, for generations, while the Drug Enforcement Agency has dealt with the illegal importation and distribution of illicit drugs. Unfortunately, we have a massive national disconnect today, between states that are thoughtlessly and hurriedly legalizing marijuana products and a federal government that continues to consider them illegal.
The DoJ needs to address this disconnect and take a leadership role in drawing the line between legitimate medicinal marijuana products and purely recreational ones, for states that have skipped over the hard parts and just decriminalized without thought of consequences, and without instituting appropriate and rational regulatory measures. National standards are needed to establish what constitutes a DUI from weed, similar to the blood alcohol levels used for booze.
With modern marijuana ranging in potency all the way from near beer to everclear and beyond, but without a similarly understood means of evaluating exposure, traffic accidents, workplace impairment, and every other aspect of life are increasingly at risk, as a society raised with an understanding of alcohol proof levels faces a newly legal drug with no such commonly understood measurement. Only the DoJ is in a position to take such leadership and bring some order to this issue.
Office of Tribal Justice
The United States’ relationship with the Native Americans whose ancestors arrived before the days of European settlement has always been difficult. While the Federalist administration of President Washington tried its best to start out on a good footing – with responsible treaties, respect for Indian territories, and an invitation for a path toward assimilation – our first administration’s opponents (then known as the Jeffersonians, who later developed into the Democratic Party) undermined those efforts from the beginning. The relationship between the USA and our Indian neighbors – both those within and without the officially designated Indian nations – was therefore already sabotaged long before the permanent breach engineered by the Jackson administration.
We have therefore been punting on this matter for over two centuries now, with many whose ancestors arrived here centuries before mine being treated as second class citizens, held down by a welfare state that’s administered, often for political or economic gain, by a combination of corruption, bigotry and neglect.
This too is a bigger issue than the DoJ alone can handle, but the Office of Tribal Justice would be a good place to start, in attempting to right a 200-year-old wrong.
A Drop in the Bucket
These are just four of the dozens of bureaus, agencies and other federal offices situated within the DoJ and managed, in theory, by the Attorney General. There are many more we don’t have room here to discuss, from the Bureau of Prisons to the Washington unit of Interpol, from the US Parole Commission to the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Like every large department, however, most of these offices continue to manage themselves, propelled by the inertia of past administrations, led by the civil service hires of past decades and past political waves. They are therefore populated by Bush appointees and Obama appointees, Clinton appointees and Reagan appointees… many of whom, over the years, just blend in together to take on the generically statist ideology of the regulatory state… few of whom share the ideology of today’s American voter.
There are so many issues today that cry out for correction, or at least address, by the DoJ:
- We suffer massive vote fraud, as millions of legal and illegal immigrants cast ballots in American elections despite being non-citizens, with an impact on our election results many orders of magnitude greater than any other criminal source.
- We suffer huge upticks in local crime, especially on the border and in our big cities, as gang violence and illegal drug distribution are run by immigrant gangs like MS-13.
- We have national debates on criminal justice matters, such as capital punishment, standardization of sentencing, the overcrowding of prisons, the marketing of aborted baby parts… some of which are state-level issues but the resulting decisions of which have a national impact.
- There is an actual assault on the police, a very real effort to side with the criminal element against both police and victims, as best exemplified by the outrageous, radical positions of the group known as Black Lives Matter, and the anti-enforcement policy planks of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and – from all indications – similar planks from almost all of the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidates.
We desperately need the office of the Attorney General to lead the DoJ in addressing these issues – in both reforming the many misguided offices within the DoJ and in using the national bully pulpit to help our nation find its way again.
We expected this progress to begin under Jeff Sessions, now we hope for it to commence under Bill Barr. The Mueller investigation, however, was so overwhelming, little progress has been made, and we’re more than halfway through the Trump administration’s first term.
This is not an unexpected consequence. This too was one of the goals of the traitors who engineered the Mueller investigation. It was intended to derail the Trump administration’s reform efforts, and it succeeded to an extent. In addition to unjustly slandering the name of the president and many around him, and ruining the lives of the many lower-level innocent people pulled into its orbit, the investigation robbed the DoJ of the time and resources needed to focus on general reforms.
The damage done by that malevolent investigation is incalculable; in this piece, we have only addressed its effect on the DoJ, and even there we’ve barely scratched the surface. The Mueller investigation hurt or immobilized many other agencies and departments outside the DoJ as well.
We need progress… we need reform… and we need to make up for lost time.
And we need to identify those responsible for the travesty that blew the administration off course, and hold them all accountable for their crimes.
Copyright 2019 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer, actor and writer. His columns are found regularly here on Illinois Review.
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