Victor Davis Hanson is often the avuncular and sobering voice of reason on the conservative right. But on Friday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” guest-hosted by Will Cain, ‘VDH’ unleashed a clarion call on the FBI so passionate it may move you to tears. Watch:
“At moments like this, why has what we’ve watched over the last 24 hours taken place?” Cain asked. “Why have they targeted Donald Trump?”
“Well, they’re afraid in the short term, but in the long term, they believe they’re morally superior to America, and therefore, any means necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends,” VDH said. “Right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington. Whether you’re targeted or exempt depends on your ideology. So in the past, when there was a dispute over the archives or presidential papers, Barack Obama just said, ‘I’m not going to turn them over, the freedom of information.’ He spent $30 million resisting efforts to do that. George Bush had an executive order and said,’ you know what, I’m not going to do this.’ And that was adjudicated. And now we go after a president, and go to his house with 30 agents. In the past when a high official was called for a congressional subpoena, Eric Holder just said, ‘I’m not going, and I’m not turning over any of this Fast and Furious.”
“The idea that you would put him in shackles or you’d confront him with his family and grab his phone is just ridiculous,” he added. “But this is what we’re doing on ideological basis. And when you start to do that, you don’t have a democracy anymore. And I don’t think we do.”
“And the second thing is this January 6th committee, Will, is sort of like a French Robespierre Committee on Public Safety to be on that committee,” VDH added. “You have to have one criteria — you had to vote to impeach Donald Trump. If you’re a Republican, there was one other qualification. You had to be politically inert with no future. And it was deductive. It started with the premise that we’re going to destroy Donald Trump. And then we’re going to bring in witnesses and we’re goingallow narratives for that end. There’s gonna be no cross examination. There’s going to be no disinterested council.”
“We know that when Dick Cheney himself made a commercial and he bragged about his daughter, that she was the one power that could stop Donald Trump,” he continued. “But that’s not what her job is on that committee. It’s to be disinterested, it’s to be inductive, it’s to find out what happened on January 6th, not start with a boast that you’re going to destroy Donald Trump and make the witnesses and the testimony fit that.”
“And, finally, I never thought I would say this — the FBI is beyond redemption,” VDH said. “All of its bureaus and its institutions have to be farmed out and broken up. If you have a warrant, an FBI warrant, there’s no guarantee that that has not been altered. If you subpoena and you want FBI records on phones with a Mueller — they will be wiped clean. If you want disinterested legal counsel, look at Lisa Page.”
“And Peter Strzok, if you’re the FBI, and you want to find out why Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to find dirt on a political opponent, then you will hire that same foreign national,” he went on. “And you look at the last four directors. We just saw Christopher Wray, and he just stonewalled every question. And then he flew on an FBI plane, our plane, a luxury jet, because he had to go to his own vacation spot. He took over, remember from Andrew McCabe, what did he do? He lied four times to federal investigators and his wife was running for an office with Clinton related PAC money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”
“He took over from James Comey, who leaked confidential memos, written on FBI devices to the media,” he went on. “And then when he was called before Congress on 245 occasions, he said, ‘he didn’t know,’ or ‘didn’t remember.’ Anybody listening to this tries out with the IRS and they’re going to go to jail.”
“And he took over from Robert Mueller, whose entire special counsel case was based on two premises,” he noted. “The information that was false in the Steele dossier and the shenanigans of the Clinton hired GPS disinformation firm. And when he was asked specifically, he said under oath, he ‘knew nothing about either entity’.”
“And so this is very ironic because all of this is destroying this country,” VDH concluded. “And it comes from the people who warned us: ‘democracy dies in darkness.’ And they have descended upon us, the greatest cloud of autocracy and illiberality in the history of this Republic. And we’re going have to do something and hope and pray that the House is under new leadership.”
“And then it will be up to Kevin McCarthy and Republicans, as you say, to reply in kind,” he went on. “I don’t want to live in a country where Kevin McCarthy tears up the State of the Union address as soon as Joe Biden gives it. I don’t wanto to live necessarily in a country when Kevin McCarthy says ‘no Squad member is going to be on any House committee’ or Mitch McConnell is going to go to the Supreme Court and yell about Supreme Court justices. But that’s what we’re at. Let’s pray to God the Republicans can save us.”
This brilliant summation of our nation’s plight is a curtain call on the last days of the American republic. Let us hope it is the siren song for the politicized FBI, as well.
Current Founder, CEO and Chief Editor of Becker News. Former Writer & Associate Producer at Fox News for #1 top-rated prime-time cable news show. Former Director of Viral Media and Senior Managing Editor for award-winning startup website IJReview, which grew to a readership of 20-30 million Americans a month. Led editorial and social media team that was #1 ranked news & politics publisher on Facebook for story engagement. Writer whose thousands of digital articles have been read by over 100 million unique users.