Author, columnist, speaker
Will Democrat Wrongdoers Ever Face Justice?
By Robert Knight
Have you noticed that nobody on the left ever—ever— seems to pay a penalty for criminality and even treason?
“What will it take?” you might ask.
Exhibit A: When Joe Biden was vice president, he boasted on Jan. 23, 2018, before a Council on Foreign Relations audience that he had told the president of Ukraine in March 2016 to fire a prosecutor or lose a billion dollars in U.S. loan guarantees.
Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general, was investigating Burisma, the energy company that had given Hunter Biden a plum job on its board. Joe Biden recounted his discussion with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and an aide:
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’
“Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
The room erupted in laughter. I viewed the video several times. It’s real. You can access the audio on YouTube.
Nothing ever happened to Mr. Biden, whose family was also getting rich from deals with communist China. As a matter of fact, he became president three years later with a stunningly implausible 81 million votes.
Fast forward to July 25, 2019. President Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was seeking more U.S. aid. At the end of the call, Mr. Trump asked him to look into well-founded allegations involving the Bidens.
Democrats sprang into action. On Sept. 24, 2019, the House started a formal impeachment inquiry. Three months later, they voted to impeach Mr. Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, although the Senate declined to convict.
Democrats impeached Mr. Trump again after the Jan. 6, 2001, Capitol riot, staged a kangaroo court trial, and again failed to secure a Senate conviction.
I bring all this up because we have a huge institutional memory hole thanks to a legacy media controlled by leftists. Even after eye-opening exposures, Democrats skip away and conduct business as usual, their misdeeds forgotten.
Mr. Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, lied under oath about the U.S. shipping guns to Mexican drug cartels in 2012 and was held in contempt of Congress. Big deal. He stayed on as the nation’s top lawman for three more years.
In July 2016, under President Barack Obama, the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane, which kicked off the Russia Collusion Hoax. Corrupt officials said the Trump campaign was getting help from Russia (which it wasn’t), and that a dossier full of disinformation was proof of Mr. Trump’s corruption. All of it was false, but that didn’t matter.
The scandal tied up the first Trump administration and wasn’t resolved until 2023 with the Durham report’s release. FBI officials who misled a FISA court faced no charges.
After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, several former Trump aides were hauled into court, including Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. The two men rightly refused to testify against their boss and thus destroy Oval Office confidentiality. They were sent to prison for several months.
The list of Democrats, by contrast, who were caught red-handed with no consequences is as long as your arm.
Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, who was ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, lied about having evidence of the Russia collusion and pushed the fake dossier. He went on to become a U.S. senator.
Mr. Obama’s IRS targeted conservative and tea party organizations from 2010 to 2012, trying to ruin them. Nonprofit division head Lois Lerner took the Fifth and left with a government pension.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton broke security rules, lied about her server, and destroyed evidence.
U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice flatly lied about what happened at Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, when four Americans were slain.
Biden health officials lied about the efficacy of alternative treatments to COVID shots and ruined people’s lives with vaccination and masking mandates.
Mr. Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, targeted pro-lifers and traditionalist Catholics while ignoring attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers.
And then there was the FBI raid in 2022 on Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, four unfounded criminal prosecutions, and several attempts to remove him from state ballots.
Democrats say that holding anyone accountable for these abuses is “weaponizing government.”
After all this, take heart that the tide finally may be turning toward justice.
Former FBI Director James Comey, who leaked confidential conversations with the president to the New York Times, has been indicted for his reposting an online meme apparently calling for killing the president.
The FBI under Director Kash Patel has brought 11 felony counts against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been stoking hatred against Christians and conservatives and making millions while funding actual hate groups like the KKK.
The FBI is revisiting the Russia collusion hoax, including roles played by Obama intelligence adviser James Clapper, who also lied to Congress about the NSA surveilling Americans, and former CIA chief John Brennan, who helped concoct a letter by 51 national security experts that lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election.
The agency is also reportedly looking into COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci’s conduct before and during the pandemic.
On May 15, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston to stop gender transitions on minors, pay $10 million to the state, fire the doctors, and open a detransition clinic to help kids recover their natural sexuality. The only thing better would be criminal charges.
There’s much more, but let’s pray that the wheels of justice might finally be rolling.
I told a friend about all this. Unimpressed, he said, “I spell ‘accountability’ this way: p-r-i-s-o-n.”
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
At the University of Texas on Feb. 6, Mr. Talarico said, “I’m a Christian progressive. I believe the Gospel is inherently radical—it challenges the powerful, lifts up the poor, and calls for justice in every sphere of life.”
When progressives talk about “justice” they mean “social justice.” This is envy, disguised as compassion and politicized to enable governments to redistribute income and rewrite society’s moral code.
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.