The most unserious "news" theme is insisting the Justice Department has been independent and impartial under recent Democrat presidents, especially Joe Biden's. After four years of Biden's DOJ pursuing January 6 defendants and appointing a special counsel to put Trump in jail, the newfangled CBS Evening News on Friday began with a "Schoolhouse Rock"-style lecture about impartiality.
That's right. CBS claimed to favor impartiality.
JOHN DICKERSON: If you check the Justice Department`s Web site, as we did today, you will find at the top of the mission statement the words "to uphold the rule of law."
MAURICE DUBOIS: I'm Maurice DuBois. And on that same Web site, under the heading "Our Values," you will see "independence and impartiality."
DICKERSON: But after yet another federal prosecutor resigned in protest today, is the department, under the influence of President Trump, living up to its mission or its values?
DUBOIS: Seven U.S. prosecutors have now quit, rather than follow orders from Trump allies in the department to drop criminal charges against New York City's Mayor, Eric Adams.
DICKERSON: But the implications of this go far beyond the Adams case. They go to the integrity of the justice system throughout the country.
Then the CBS duo turned to reporter Scott MacFarlane, which underlined the silliness of their point. Perhaps no reporter was as hopelessly devoted to Team Biden's partisan prosecutions than MacFarlane, who made January 6 into 9/11 in his reporting. Well, except CBS was far more critical of the government response to 9/11 than to January 6. It depends on whether the president is a (D).
SCOTT MacFARLANE: A day of absolute turmoil inside the Department of Justice amid these concerns about efforts to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams, who pleaded not guilty to trading official government actions for gifts and travel. But the concerns are spreading into concerns that prosecutors in communities big and small could be on a short leash and under the president's thumb.
(voice-over): The aftershocks of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams might be more powerful than the initial earthquake itself.
This is a CBS story, so the heroes were going to be the anti-Trump crusaders.
MacFARLANE: One after another, those prosecutors have quit in protest, including an assistant U.S. attorney in New York who not only refused to drop the charges against Adams, but in a letter announcing his resignation said: "I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me."
Tom Dupree served in George W. Bush's Department of Justice. What do you make of this back-and-forth, this mass resignation wave?
TOM DUPREE: Well, it's reminiscent of the Nixon era, where you saw the president basically try to find someone who would carry out his orders in the Justice Department and had to go through several officials before he finally was able to find someone who would carry it out.
Dupree is a Bush Republican, or in the first Trump term, his donation record displayed sort of a Liz Cheney/Larry Hogan Republican. Under Biden, CBS used Dupree to posit that Hunter Biden was somehow a lovable Charlie Brown, and the DOJ was Lucy pulling away his football. How does whatever favors Adams took from the Turks compare to the millions the Biden family was taking from Russia, Ukraine, China, and the rest? CBS is DNC-TV, so none of those questions will be allowed to surface.
CBS made no attempt to explain that the local Democrat extremists want to defeat Mayor Adams in a primary because he's too "rule of law" on the flood of illegal immigrants into New York -- which is synonymous with "too pro-Trump." Biden's Justice Department can just as easily be painted as prosecuting Adams for embarrassing their indolence on the border.
