Someone or a group decided to commute 37 out of 40 death sentences in the federal penal system, but we really don’t know who. And too many in the White House press corps don't care.
Hugh Hewitt doesn't think 'legacy media' will be able to 'recover'
'The Hugh Hewitt Show' host Hugh Hewitt talks about why he doesn't think 'legacy media' will ever be able to change on 'One Nation.'
"He’s an addled, demented old man," Senator Tom Cotton declared about President Joe Biden on my program Monday, Christmas Eve eve.
The senator is right. It is not harsh or cruel to make such a statement, especially because its predicate was the announcement Monday morning that President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of 40 killers on death row in federal prison. Biden’s handlers were apparently indifferent to the feelings of the survivors of the murderers who will get the news about the killers of their loved ones during Christmas week, so why should anyone be concerned about the feelings of the president’s family and friends? Bravo Senator Cotton for stating the awful truth clearly and concisely. Joe Biden is addled and infirm. He isn’t making coherent decisions. He’s doing what he’s told to do. He’s being managed. By whom we don’t know.
This disgusting action by the handlers of the president will not be defended by the president because the president doesn’t take questions from the White House press corps anymore—because he can’t.
Who are the only death row prisoners in the federal system not being given this gift by whomever is making decisions in the president’s name? The Boston Marathon bomber and the killers of the congregants at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh are the unlucky three. Those killers were a bridge too far for whomever is guiding the president’s hand on the commutation form. There is no explanation as to why not these three, no standard articulated. The president’s handlers just don’t care about coherence or plausibility. They are counting on the legacy media that has never met them down yet.
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But that nameless, faceless group of handlers is truly clueless on what the public sees and remembers. We will remember "37 out of 40," and biographers and presidential historians will long note and long record and elaborate on this abuse of power, along with the pardon of Hunter Biden, and all the other outrageous abuses of power. The people around our apparently incapacitated president don’t care at all what history will declare about Biden. Their indifference purposeful. It’s a display of shamelessness. Don’t look past it. They know what they are doing, it’s just the president who doesn’t.
After the Wall Street Journal’s detailed story on the president’s mental incapacity last week, the decision by the unnamed politburo actually running the country to issue these commutations is hard to understand as anything other than a giant [expletive deleted] to the rest of the country.
BIDEN COMMUTES SENTENCES OF 37 FEDERAL DEATH ROW INMATES IN FINAL MONTH OF PRESIDENCY
"We know you know, but we don’t care" is the unspoken addendum to the commutations. It’s just another indignity heaped upon the complicit White House press corps as Biden shambles towards the exit.
Joe Biden has been burdened by steadily advancing infirmity since at least 2021. That is what the Wall Street Journal’s reporters concluded. (Kudos to Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes of the Journal and their editors. They won no friends in the Democrat Party or on the left generally with their blockbuster of December 19.)
Anyone watching closely knew the truth of the president’s false front long ago, but it took courage for these four to put their names to the story that does far more than any other in legacy media to expose the president’s infirmity and his handlers abuse of power. The Journal’s blockbuster also exposed too many in the White House press corps as something other than a "press corps." That’s the key takeaway from the story. Everybody in the press room knew or should have known. Nobody reported it. Until last week.
Some of us have been stating the obvious for years. I’ve got my pile of receipts—e.g. this column. So do many others. To repeat: It hasn’t been a secret for anyone who watched the president closely and who has experience covering the White House.
But it doesn’t matter who was right. It matters who was wrong. It especially matters who in the press was complicit.
Let’s start in the White House press room. Peter Doocy of Fox News is the only name who jumps to mind as someone who was consistently aggressive in trying to get the story of the president’s infirmity on air. Doocy pushed again and again for clarity on the president’s mental capacity, often indirectly but sometimes via obvious questions about obvious manifestations of infirmity. Doocy got stiffed again and again first by Jen Psaki and then by Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby, but Doocy didn’t just give up. He kept pressing despite scorn from the podium and micro-storms of anger from the president.
Does anyone else with a White House press credential have evidence of their growing skepticism about the president’s mental capacity over the last four years? Evidence in the form of stories that aired or were printed?
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - AUGUST 19: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. Delegates, politicians, and Democratic party supporters are in Chicago for the convention, concluding with current Vice President Kamala Harris accepting her party's presidential nomination. The DNC takes place from August 19-22. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) (Brandon Bell)
What about the rest of the vaunted "White House Correspondents Association?" There are some fine professionals in that room, but their reputations were earned before 2021. Who is proud of their "work" on President Biden’s competence to guide the country since then? Does anyone with a chair in that room want to share their work from the past four years and point to their pushing the White House palace guard on Joe Biden’s mental acuity?
There have been big scandals in the legacy media before this one. Look up Jayson Blair and The New York Times or Dan Rather and "Rathergate," or the Duke lacrosse scandal. There are many more. But this one is the worst one because it is the one of most consequence and the one that has been going on the longest.
Biden ought never to have been elected in 2020 and wouldn’t have been had the legacy media done its collective job in 2019 and 2020. He ought never to have launched a re-election campaign.
Think about that. Biden’s handlers had to have concluded that "running it back" with an impaired president was just fine because most of the White House press corps would go along with the ruse. Biden ought not to be allowed to drive himself or babysit a grandchild much less be the most powerful actor on the planet. He’s not competent. We all know it. The emperor had no clothes…for four years!
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, U.S. December 10, 2024. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)
Thus the breathtaking nature of this latest abuse of power with the commutations, and behind that, the operations of this White House for four years. It’s such a massive scandal that it will take some time for it to sink in. But the commutation story is putting a line underneath and an exclamation point at the end of the Journal’s expose.
Somebody—we actually don’t know who is running the office of the president—decided to have the president pretend to consider these 37 cases and put his signature or the auto pen on the commutations of the 37 death sentences. That same somebody or group of somebodies also decided that three cases were too outrageous even for this White House to be indifferent to. Thus the gang running the White House couldn’t even see that the setting aside of the three would draw more attention and not less to the abuse of power and the underlying incapacity of the president in whose name it was done.
It is genuinely difficult to imagine how accountability for this massive cover-up and abuse of power follows. President-elect Trump could get a start on helping the legacy media rebuild its shattered credibility by exiling from the White House grounds anyone who participated in the cover-up. He could direct the chairs in the press room be re-allocated to reporters from outlets like the Washington Free Beacon or the New York Post that actually have pushed hard on this giant con job. It is not censorship or an assault on the First Amendment to name and shame the complicit.
Trump could simply revoke every press pass and then begin to re-issue them based on merit, not on being a "legacy admission" to the room or as the function of the chop of a discredited guild, but on actual demonstrated craftsmanship in the exercise of journalism. The left has decided legacy admissions are bad. Fine. Let’s apply that standard to the White House press.
WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 19: U.S. President Joe Biden listens to a question shouted from the press as he arrives at the White House December 19, 2023 in Washington, DC. President Biden spent the weekend in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
"Journalism" isn’t a profession. It’s a craft. The late Michael Kelly would make that point in almost every appearance on my program. Journalism is very close to painting in its practice. And we all know there are great painters and awful ones and every kind in between.
We now have yet another example of terrible craftsmanship in the White House press corps in the first wave of stories about the commutations. The New York Post was hot out of the box on the repulsiveness of the decision and not even the Post—which has been intrepid about everything since the laptop scandal of 2020—spoke to the mechanics of who made this decision. It’s early yet so perhaps they will dig up the details.
But as Christmas arrives and mercy is in the air, don’t forgive those in the White House press corps. No pardons for them. They failed, collectively and comprehensively. "Coverage" of Biden’s capacity issues has been so passive that the president’s handlers intuit that they will get another pass from the press on this story. The victims of these killers who live on—parents, siblings, spouses and friends of those they killed—have no voice and can expect no accountability. Too many in the White House press corps checked out in 2020. They aren’t going to suddenly show up Christmas week 2024.
Because Manhattan-Beltway media elites have been in on the con all along, we can expect zero accountability from within these "news" organizations. They are perhaps a little embarrassed, for a fleeting moment, but that’s all. They aren’t changing the assignments. They are not firing the people who wholly missed or refused to voice their concerns, and now we are reminded in as brusque a fashion imaginable that they are failures at their avowed profession.
Astonishing, really. Hundreds of journalism’s "best and brightest" went along for the ride—are still "ridin’ with Biden"—and no one gets a pink slip. Simply astonishing.
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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