On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) stated that President Joe Biden “has run his campaigns and governed saying that he was helping to try to rescue our democracy from the clutches of Donald Trump,” and now he has “somewhat, in my mind, accepted Donald Trump’s standard” by attacking the Justice Department over its prosecution of his son, Hunter, and President Biden doing so “undermines their ability to do their job well. In fact, I think we’re going to see a lot of them leave” the DOJ and FBI.
Bennet said, [relevant remarks begin around 26:20] “I believe that he has run his campaigns and governed saying that he was helping to try to rescue our democracy from the clutches of Donald Trump, which is a very worthy thing we should be trying to do. But when you turn around after you say, month after month after month, you’re not going to pardon your son, and then you do pardon him, putting the personal ahead of your responsibilities to the American people, it just gives the American people a sense that there’s one system for the rich and powerful, and another system for everybody else, which is one of the reasons why we haven’t been able to keep Donald Trump from coming back here again for a second term.”
Host Kaitlan Collins then asked, “Do you believe it basically means Democrats lose the moral high ground on this?”
Bennet responded, “I think it’s very costly with respect to that. We have to get out of a politics that says that, when a Republican president is elected, the Justice Department is going to do their work, when a Democratic president’s elected, the Justice Department’s going to do their work. That is not how this is all supposed to work in a country that’s committed to the rule of law, committed to democracy, the Justice Department is supposed to stand for the American people, and also provide justice whether somebody’s rich or somebody’s poor, which doesn’t mean that everybody gets it perfectly. But I think we have, somewhat, in my mind, accepted Donald Trump’s standard when we say that the political — or that the prosecution of Hunter Biden, for example, was political. That is incredibly unhelpful when you think about the precedent that it’s going to set for Donald Trump. It’s a gift to Donald Trump, because he’s going to come here and claim that he’s just doing what Joe Biden did, and I think that is hurtful for the American people.”
Later, he added that the gift to Trump is “partly the idea that we’ve accepted the narrative that the Department of Justice is a corrupt institution when there are thousands and thousands of people all over the United States of America that are working for that agency, that are defending the interests of the American people when there are lawbreakers or when there are polluters or when there are folks that need to be taken on in the rule of law and it undermines their ability to do their job well. In fact, I think we’re going to see a lot of them leave the Department of Justice, you’re going to see a lot of people leave the FBI, maybe even the Department of Defense, which is exactly what Donald Trump wants, because what he wants is chaos and what he wants is to destroy these agencies, which we can think of as the federal government, but we can also think of them as our exercise in self-government.”
Bennet concluded that Congress does need to do oversight of agencies.
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