Ilhan Omar Attacks GOP on Biden Documents, Doesn't Realize What She's Actually Done
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar has spent more than four years demonstrating to Americans how wrong a Democrat can be.
Whether it’s her antipathy for police, her willingness to engage in unfounded attacks on Christians, or the barely disguised anti-Semitism that produces her anti-Israel positions, Omar is sort of a walking caricature of the worst of Democratic excesses.
But her response to the classified documents controversy currently surrounding President Joe Biden is in a class by itself.
In an appearance Saturday on MSNBC (of course) Omar said Republicans are simply using the revelations of Biden’s cavalier treatment of classified information as a “political game.”
First, Omar declared that she was “glad” a special counsel has been appointed to investigate the Biden documents. (The liberal website Mediaite has the video here.)
“Because any time there is a deviance in regards to security protocols that should be taken serious, it should be investigated,” she said.
Then, Omar went on the offensive — invoking, as Democrats obsessively do with all things, former President Donald Trump.
“What I find interesting is that Republicans who have defended Trump after he literally stole classified documents, refused to turn them over, lied about having them, made up some story about how he declassified them, had to have his house raided in order for those documents to be found, are now only interested in investigating Biden, who has cooperated, whose own staff and former staff have themselves turned these documents in,” she said.
“So you have to understand, right? Republicans aren’t really interested in upholding the law, in following security protocols. What they’re interested in is playing a political game and now only wanting to investigate Biden.”
The documents that are the subject of Trump’s current dispute with the National Archives and Records Administration (and an unprecedented FBI raid in August) were not “literally stolen” not even by Biden’s woefully ignorant interpretation of the word “literally.”
It’s true, they’re the subject of a disagreement. And Trump could well be on the losing end of that disagreement, but “literally stolen” isn’t even close to being the legal conclusion of the case.
As to Trump making up some story about having declassified the documents? The reality is that Trump held the office of the presidency of the United States, and therefore had the power to declassify anything he chose.
The documents in the Biden case related to the time when Biden was vice president — and had such power only in limited circumstances (see the clarification note at the bottom of this page).
Democrats, Omar implied, are interested only in all that is right and just when it comes to their investigations. Any American who lived through the past five years — even the kind of American who might be found watching MSNBC on a weekend afternoon — knows that’s utterly backward.
From the time of Trump’s unlikely upset of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have been devoted entirely to using any trickery, any deception at their disposal in a “political game” against the president-elect, then the president, now the former president.
Remember the FBI was cooking up its sham case against Trump even before the election. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the “Russa collusion” hoax picked up steam with the appointment of a special counsel that ate up taxpayer money and valuable time from the Trump presidency.
From the time Democrats took control of Congress in the 2018 midterms, Trump’s impeachment was a foregone conclusion.
When “Russia collusion” flamed out, it was on to Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zalenskyy about an investigation of the Biden family and its obviously suspicious ties to Ukraine. (The fact that every piece of evidence that comes to light about Hunter Biden’s global grifting seems to give Trump’s suspicions more credence just makes Omar’s statements more backward still.)
This is the same political party, remember, whose last candidate for the presidency embodied contempt for the rule of law and, as Omar put it, “deviance to security protocols.”
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server — the unbelievable situation in which an American secretary of state, the chief diplomat of the nation with all the secrets that implies — was literally (literally) running her office by conducting official correspondence outside of the security net of the American government.
She was not only not punished, she was damn near rewarded with the highest office in the land — an office she would almost certainly have won had the GOP run any candidate besides Trump against her.
And Democrats took her defiance of the law and disregard of national security implications in stride.
Americans who follow the news even casually know that. Even Americans who watch MSNBC know that, which means all Omar’s statement really is doing is bringing more attention to how negligent the powers that be in her own party actually are when it comes to “deviance from security protocol.”
Which puts Omar’s pathetic take on it in a class all its own. Clearly, she thought it was time for a takedown.
And clearly she thought MSNBC was the place for it.
But if she thought was she was doing was a description of how the GOP is working, it’s fair to wonder exactly what country Omar has been living in for the past five years.
Omar herself might not realize it, but as an attack on Republicans and a defense of Democrats, it backfired spectacularly.
CLARIFICATION, Jan. 24, 2023: The original version of this story stated that during his time as vice president, President Joe Biden lacked the authority to declassify documents. In fact, an executive order issued in December 2009 by then-President Barack Obama extended the authority to classify documents to the vice president. The same order gave the vice president the authority to declassify documents if they were classified by the vice president in the first place.
Because the documents involved in the Biden case have not been publicly described, it’s not known whether Biden’s power to declassify their contents would apply.
This post has been edited to reflect that.
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