https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-left-weaponized-our-legal-system/
Setting: Loudoun County, Virginia, 2021. A girl is sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a self-styled “trans girl” – i.e., a boy. But school administrators are so fiercely devoted to transgender ideology that they cover up the assault – and when the victim’s father, Scott Smith, speaks up at a school-board meeting, he gets tackled by cops. In the wake of this and similar incidents around the country, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) collaborates with Biden White House staffers on a letter to the Justice Department falsely claiming that parents like Smith have been guilty of “malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” and asking the DOJ to deal appropriately with these “domestic terrorists.”
Cruz, who begins his splendid third book, Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, with this story, points out that it’s taken months for the DOJ to answer letters from him – a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But it took only six days for the NSBA letter to result in a memo by Attorney General Merrick Garland promising to act against recalcitrant parents and ordering the FBI and DOJ to investigate them. Thanks to widespread publicity, massive displays of parental outrage, a definitive investigation by the Daily Wire, and a firm grilling of Garland by Cruz himself at a Senate committee hearing, the DOJ backed off. For the moment, anyway.
Such weaponization of executive agencies isn’t new. Cruz tells the story. The DOJ, founded in 1870 by President Grant to address the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, succeeded eventually in bringing it down. Grant was a Republican and the Klan was overwhelmingly Democratic, but the DOJ’s mission wasn’t political; it operated independently from the White House, and continued to do so under successive administrations. That changed under FDR. Both the DOJ and Edgar Hoover’s FBI (founded in 1908) engaged in extralegal shenanigans on FDR’s orders; FDR also seems to have been the first president to weaponize the IRS (founded in 1913), which he used to target personal enemies as well as New Deal critics such as Huey Long and William Randolph Hearst. Later, JFK not only sicced the DOJ (conveniently led by his brother) on his enemies, but also told the IRS to deny nonprofit status to conservative groups.
Then came Nixon, at whose behest the FBI harassed the likes of John Lennon and Muhammed Ali; in 1975, a committee led by Senator Frank Church uncovered sundry abuses not just by the FBI but also by the CIA and NSA. But during the Nixon years there were also cases of impressive integrity. The IRS, while willing enough to look into Nixon’s enemies, balked at acting against them; indeed, IRS commissioner Donald Alexander eventually halted such investigations altogether, and when Nixon tried to fire Alexander, Treasury Secretary George Schulz threatened to quit. Similarly, when a low-level Nixon aide, with the president’s approval, proposed a joint DOJ, FBI, and CIA operation against presidential enemies, both Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell said no; later, both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus famously quit rather than obey Nixon’s order to dismiss Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. In short, as Cruz puts it, to a remarkable extent “the system worked during the Nixon administration.”