It’s Bizarre When We Rely On Jokesters For Accurate Reporting

Written by Robert Knight

Last Tuesday, a remarkable thing happened.

Under a split screen of photos of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a message appeared during a Fox News story about Mr. Trump’s arraignment over documents found in the FBI’s raid on his Florida home. In all caps, it said:

“WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”

Well, yes. What sounds like The Babylon Bee is exactly what’s happened. The Justice Department has arrested Mr. Trump because he is Mr. Biden’s main political opponent. This fits with the administration’s ongoing 30-month prosecution of more than 1,000 Trump supporters over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Like China, the FBI is using facial recognition technology to identify people in the crowd. They recently made an example of a TV producer. A photo shows him outside the Capitol with his face circled in ink.

As with the Hong Kong crackdowns, this is aimed at discouraging any more protests. Who wants to spend time in the D.C. jail gulag without trial for months or even years? As Mr. Trump has said, if they can do what they’re doing to me, imagine what they can do to you.

Yet someone at Fox with access to the message bar decided to blurt out the truth for 27 seconds before it was yanked. May God bless (and help) that person.

The former president could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted. No other former president has ever received this kind of treatment over documents. The papers were not floating around but were in his home (not his garage), guarded by the Secret Service.

Mr. Trump was indicted after news broke about a “very credible” longtime FBI informant saying Mr. Biden and his son Hunter each took a $5 million Ukraine-related bribe. Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution says:

“The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

President Biden’s disastrous obliteration of our southern border qualifies as treason. And his alleged payments from Ukraine and elsewhere would constitute bribery.

The first Trump impeachment was triggered by Hillary Clinton’s “Russian collusion” hoax, which weaponized the FBI. Nothing has ever happened to Mrs. Clinton or the other plotters.

Earlier, she faced no penalty for destroying 30,000 emails as secretary of state and smashing cellphones sought as evidence. Mrs. Clinton issued a tweet this past week. It shows her with an “I got away with it” grin and wearing a baseball cap that says, “But Her Emails.”

Yes, she is quite happy to rub this in our faces.

Still ignored by the Justice Department is the boast Mr. Biden made to a Council on Foreign Relations audience on Jan. 23, 2018.

As the video on C-SPAN reveals, Mr. Biden says that while he was vice president, he threatened then-Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and another official to cancel a U.S. loan guarantee if Mr. Poroshenko did not fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor. That prosecutor later said he had been investigating the Burisma gas company, which paid Hunter Biden millions for being on its board: Mr. Biden:

“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 b——, he got fired.”

The audience laughed along with him.

Later, for suggesting in a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he might want to look into Mr. Biden’s boast, Mr. Trump was impeached. This is like charging someone who witnesses a bank robbery with the crime of reporting the robbery.

We’re learning now that the Biden family has pocketed millions for influence peddling in China, Ukraine and Russia using 20 bank accounts.

The House subcommittee on the weaponization of government is churning out shocking evidence of Mr. Biden‘s graft. Good for them. But action is needed.

GOP lawmakers had a chance finally to apply some justice to U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who is still lying about the Russian collusion hoax. But on Wednesday, 20 Republicans voted with U.S. House Democrats to kill a resolution to censure him. He’s scot-free despite his sordid role in the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.

In response to the Trump indictment, U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) said he will put a hold on all Justice Department nominations. Good. It’s not only for the outrageous attack on Mr. Trump, but for partisan lawlessness.

“Merrick Garland’s department harasses Christians for pro-life advocacy, but allows hardened criminals to walk our streets unpunished,”

Mr. Vance said in a press release.

“This must stop. …. If Merrick Garland wants to use these officials to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents, we will grind his department to a halt.”

We need more of this. Much more.

As for the Fox message, the author is following in the footsteps of vigilante truth-tellers. In 1980, with President Jimmy Carter’s economy a mess and an Iranian mob holding our embassy staff hostage, someone mocked up The Boston Globe’s lead editorial. The headline, “Mush from the Wimp,” was supposed to be an in-house joke, but somehow it got printed in one edition.

It’s bizarre when we rely on jokesters rather than journalists to breach the dark media curtain around the truth.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.