Isn’t it funny how the senator had no such concerns about the Biden DOJ?
Former President George W. Bush once said, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” While he misspoke, the second part of his infamous statement serves as a fitting mission statement for Joe Biden’s DOJ.
Over the past four years, Biden’s DOJ worked to surveil, disenfranchise, and economically hard the American people to an unprecedented level.
I am an attorney, as is Sen. Hirono, but you don’t need to be one to find dozens of examples of this shamefulness.
Right before President Biden left office, his Department of Justice released former Special Counsel Jack Smith's report on Trump’s election “interference.” Yet, Sen. Hirono didn’t express even a modicum of concern about it.
Nor did she cry about any of the other dozens of cases of politicization in Biden’s DOJ — like the threats it threw at parent activists’ way.
The early days of the Biden administration saw a wave of parent activism, pushing back against obscene material and radical gender ideology in public schools. This movement came to a head in Aug. 2021, when a father was arrested for speaking out at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting. His daughter was sexually assaulted by a male transgender student in the girls’ bathroom.
Two months later, the DOJ issued a press release. Instead of directly addressing the dangers of eliminating single-sex spaces or the local police’s assault on free speech they condemned the “harassment” of school board members and promised to “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment and response by law enforcement.” The message was hard to miss: Your daughters are collateral damage in the cause of advancing our ideology. If you object to this, we’ll sic the FBI on you.”
Yet, again, not a peep of concern came out of Sen. Hirono’s mouth.
This pattern continued with the DOJ challenging duly enacted state laws reflecting the will of the electorate. For example, Tennessee is currently defending its ban on transgender treatments for minors against a DOJ lawsuit. Similarly, when Texas and Oklahoma passed legislation allowing state law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants, the DOJ sued them for upholding the law. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin attempted to remove 1,600 self-identified non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election and the DOJ unsuccessfully sued to stop him.
As Andrew McCarthy astutely observed in National Review, “The Justice Department is now doing the very thing it indicted Donald Trump for – conspiring to injure the people of a state, in this case, Virginia, in the enjoyment of their right to vote.”
Of course, concern from Sen. Horono was nowhere to be found.
The Biden DOJ’s interventions into the economic marketplace have been equally disastrous.
For example, in its last hours before leaving office, the DOJ aggressively pushed its case against Visa’s debit card business for allegedly holding a monopoly on the debit card industry even though the company only has 60 percent market share and consumers and businesses prefer its product offering. This lack of predictability has had a chilling effect on business, ultimately harming consumers, but Sen. Hirono hasn’t expressed any concern — likely because the case fits with her economic worldview.
In March, Biden also directed the DOJ to co-lead a “Strike Force” to combat “price gouging,” an accusation he has leveled against grocery stores, meatpackers, oil companies, and even rental pricing software.
The latter one is perhaps the most bizarre, given that rental pricing algorithms simply reflect existing market conditions under Bidenomics. If Biden wanted to drive down rents, he could have tackled inflation or increased the housing supply. Instead, he targeted software companies, by filing a lawsuit against one such software company in August, which both the Trump campaign and Wall Street Journal Editorial Board quickly dismissed as politically motivated. Ironically, research suggests that landlords who use algorithmic pricing actually lower their rents quicker because they learn about when demand for housing falls much faster than their peers. In other words, this lawsuit could result in American renters being overcharged.
And yet, although her home state of Hawaii is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, where prices are only continuing to rise, Sen. Hirono has not said a peep about this counterproductive Biden DOJ lawsuit.
Here’s an idea: Maybe she doesn’t actually care about “restoring justice.” Maybe what she really desires if for her preferred side of the WWE ring to have unfettered ability to use the force of government as a political punching bag against those darn “MAGA Republicans.”
Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi has a monumental task ahead of her. Restoring Americans' trust in the DOJ will take significant effort, but I am confident she will hit the ground running to restore justice. If anyone can do it, it’s her.
Edward Woodson is a lawyer, political commentator, and host of "The Edward Woodson Show," which airs weekdays on WZAB and streams online at EdwardWoodson.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member