GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argued Sunday that the Department of Justice and the FBI under President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama became an instrument used to target political foes.
While then-President Richard Nixon tried and failed to make the DOJ do his political bidding during the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, the senator contended that Biden and Obama succeeded in present times.
Cruz makes his case in his new book “Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System,” which he discussed on the Fox News program “Life, Liberty & Levin.”
Host Mark Levin asked Cruz what is most concerning to him about the current state of the justice system.
“Unfortunately, under the Democrats, they’ve turned the Department of Justice, they’ve turned the FBI, they’ve turned the intelligence community into political enforcers in a way that has never happened in the history of our country,” Cruz responded.
The senator noted that both he and Levin are DOJ alumni, and he has a reverence for the department’s mission of fair and impartial justice, but he said that’s not happening now.
“The degree to which under Joe Biden this department has been weaponized — that the deep state has taken over — it is dangerous, and it is a fundamental threat to our liberty,” Cruz argued.
Levin cited the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August as a prime example of the DOJ targeting political foes of the administration.
“In 230 years of our nation’s history, this has never happened,” Cruz said.
Has the Justice Department become a political weapon?
“We’ve never seen the Department of Justice raid the home of a former president. It’s being done by a successor of the opposing political party. It’s being done because they want to attack Donald Trump.”
Cruz also referenced the Crossfire Hurricane investigation the FBI launched against Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 while Obama was president, which morphed into special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month probe into Trump and his associates.
Mueller’s team was primarily made up of Democrats, including two with close ties to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Cruz went on to highlight the FBI investigations of parents who voiced their opposition to education policies at school board meetings. The move came following the National Association of School Boards soliciting action from the Biden administration, likening parents to domestic terrorists.
“Right now today, the DOJ and the FBI — they’re interviewing moms and dads. They’re treating the FBI as the political enforcers of the Democrats,” Cruz said.
The Texan also offered the example of how Jan. 6 defendants are being treated.
“What the Biden DOJ has done is it’s used the violent acts of the few to target and smear the tens of thousands of peaceful protesters who were in Washington on Jan. 6 and, more fundamentally, the tens of millions of conservatives and Trump voters across this country,” Cruz said.
“And the double standard is ridiculous,” he continued. “At the same time, they ignore the Black Lives Matter and antifa rioters who firebombed police cars, who looted homes, who murdered police officers, who committed horrific crimes.”
“Why are the Jan. 6 prisoners treated differently than other prisoners?” Cruz asked, referencing the pre-trial, months-long solitary confinement and other hardships these defendants are suffering.
These and other instances all demonstrate that the DOJ has become the political arm of the Biden administration, according to Cruz.
The Republican contended that Nixon was the last president to try to use the department in such a brazen political fashion.
In the infamous Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out the president’s orders.
Cox was overseeing the investigation into the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., by Nixon operatives during the 1972 presidential campaign.
“The White House dispatched FBI agents to close off the offices of the special prosecutor, attorney general and deputy attorney general,” according to History.com.
Nixon’s move to take over the DOJ resulted in articles of impeachment being introduced in Congress, which ultimately forced his resignation in 1974.
“It starts off with Richard Nixon because Richard Nixon tried to do this — tried to use DOJ, the FBI and the IRS to target his political enemies,” Cruz said. “By and large, the system worked. They resisted and said no.
“Well, what Richard Nixon tried to do, Barack Obama succeeded in doing, and now under Joe Biden it has metastasized where the institutional resistance of DOJ and the FBI has been worn down,” Cruz added.
He stated that Obama and Biden “put hard partisans in the senior career levels at those institutions, and they now view themselves as the jack-booted thugs for the DNC, and that’s not what the Department of Justice is supposed to be.”
Cruz concluded, “Our judicial system is not just a political weapon to persecute the enemies of the president. Well, under Barack Obama and now Joe Biden, that is what it’s become and that is extraordinarily dangerous.”
A version of this article originally appeared on Patriot Project.
