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Gingrich smears the DOJ's mission as a leftist vendetta.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet July 26, 2017, 11:22 AM GMT
"The Trump administration, which has been caught lying hundreds of times and continues to ceaselessly attack the media, sunk to new lows Tuesday as former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched an attack worthy of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
Gingrich, who has never shied away from verbal jousting, held forth on NPR’s Morning Edition in an outrageous, eight-minute attack on the federal Department of Justice, smearing the DOJ as a “left-wing” institution bending laws and abusing its authority to destroy lives. He said the lawyers who are overseeing the special counsel investigating the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia are all Democrats, as evidenced by donations to institutions supporting that party.
Gingrich glossed over the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller is a Republican—as NPR host Rachel Martin interjected—and countered that the DOJ is filled with Trump-hating career staffers. He said Mueller’s first hires included lawyers who were “killers,” predicting they would stop at nothing to convict Trump associates of fake crimes.
Gingrich's assault did not merely seek to delegitimize the ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—which may bleed over into Trump's business deals with Kremlin-connected Russians. It was also an attack on the DOJ’s mission, writ large, which includes enforcing anti-corruption laws—which Gingrich fully knows, being the first Speaker of the House ever fined while in office for ethical breaches ($300,000 in 1997).
While Gingrich plays the part of the loyal foot soldier to Trump, his attack fits the administration's pattern of seeking to delegitimize critics in the press and the government who do not embrace Trump’s far-right agenda. Gingrich's attacks intentionally distort the DOJ’s mission, the basis of Mueller’s role and the legitimacy of the Trump-Russia probe. The purportedly anti-Trump lawyers he names all have Jewish surnames. Gingrich is vying to be Trump’s attack-dog minister of propaganda. Goebbels would be proud.
Gingrich opened his attack by attacking the DOJ as a bastion of leftists, offering proof via guilt by association, which could be seen, he said, by the vast majority of their presidential campaign contributions going to Clinton.
“The Justice Department is an extraordinarily left-wing institution,” Gingrich began. “Ninety-seven percent of its donations went to Hillary Clinton. It has an embedded bureaucracy, which was captured very, very well by Sidney Powell in her [2014] book, Licensed to Lie. And I think that he’s [Trump] deeply troubled by the entire way that both Comey and Mueller have operated, and the degree to which the attorney general has not exercised any authority over that.”..."
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/newt-gingrich-vies-become-joseph-goebbels-trump-administration
