{"id":2602059,"date":"2026-05-13T09:04:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T13:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/calls-for-justice-department-independence-are-a-sign-of-gop-weakness\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T09:10:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T13:10:36","slug":"calls-for-justice-department-independence-are-a-sign-of-gop-weakness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/calls-for-justice-department-independence-are-a-sign-of-gop-weakness\/","title":{"rendered":"Calls For DOJ &#8216;Independence&#8217; Are A Sign Of GOP Weakness"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fcalls-for-justice-department-independence-are-a-sign-of-gop-weakness%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2602059&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>the passage argues that a National Review proposal-urging President Trump to keep the DOJ institutionally autonomous and \u201cbreak the cycle of weaponization\u201d through restraint-is effectively a call for surrender. It claims that conservatives advocating \u201cnorms\u201d wont one side (Republicans) to behave mildly while the other side (Democrats) fights aggressively, so procedural fairness becomes a one-sided standard.<\/p>\n<p>The author dismisses the article\u2019s purported constitutional\/legal authorities (e.g., Lord Hewart and Griffin Bell) as either irrelevant to the U.S. system or as evidence that only the left\u2019s legal establishment is considered legitimate. The piece then portrays Democratic use of law enforcement and legal proceedings (\u201clawfare\u201d) as systematically aimed at damaging or disabling political opponents-especially targeting Trump and Republicans-rather than as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/top-10-takeaways-from-fbi-director-christopher-wrays-house-judiciary-testimony\/\" title=\"Key points from FBI Director Christopher Wray...s House Judiciary Testimony\">neutral law enforcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It cites alleged coordinated efforts underlying the \u201cRussia hoax,\u201d subsequent biden-era prosecutions and legal strategies against a former president, and additional revelations referenced through \u201cOperation Rampart Twelve\u201d and documents about coordination between the Biden administration and Fulton County DA Fani Willis. The author concludes that the DOJ has not been neutral for years and that asking for unilateral restraint would only validate prior abuse.It also argues that even Supreme Court corrections (like *Fischer v. United States*) have not changed Republican insistence on deference to institutions already accused of misuse, and advocates instead for an assertive DOJ posture aimed at objecting to and investigating weaponization rather than standing aloof.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>There is a kind of conservative who believes the republic will be preserved by procedural fastidiousness \u2014 that if only the right norms are observed, the right courtesies extended, the right institutional deference maintained, then justice will somehow emerge from the machinery of the state as though it were a thermodynamic inevitability. Writing in National Review last week, Paul McNulty and John G. Malcolm have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2026\/05\/the-attorney-general-is-not-the-presidents-fixer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">offered<\/a> the latest installment of this genre. <\/p>\n<p>The authors are colleagues and friends of mine from the Bush 43 Justice Department era and Federalist Society circles, so I mean them no ill will. But their advice to President Trump is classic \u201cweak sauce\u201d that must be discarded because it\u2019s gone sour.<\/p>\n<p>Their thesis is familiar: \u201cThe <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/breaking-ag-barr-authorizes-federal-prosecutors-to-pursue-substantial-allegations-of-voting-irregularities-before-2020-election-is-certified\/\" title=\"BREAKING: AG Barr Authorizes Federal Prosecutors to Pursue &quot;Substantial Allegations&quot; of Voting Irregularities Before 2020 Election is Certified\">attorney general<\/a> is not the president\u2019s fixer;\u201d the Department of Justice must maintain institutional independence; President Trump should \u201cbreak the cycle of weaponization\u201d by declining to wield the weapons that were turned against him. The argument sounds principled. It even feels principled in the way all arguments feel principled when they demand restraint only from one side. But it is, at bottom, an argument for surrender dressed in the vocabulary of civic virtue.<\/p>\n<p>Consider the authorities summoned to support this position, including Lord Hewart, who warned against the \u201cnew despotism\u201d of administrative overreach. One hesitates to interrupt a good lecture, but it must be observed that Gordon Hewart, 1st Viscount Hewart, was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-wins-right-to-appeal-u-s-extradition\/\" title=\"WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Wins Right to Appeal U.S. Extradition\">lord chief justice<\/a> of England, not of the United States nor any other American jurisdiction. He was a British jurist writing about British parliamentary delegation to British administrative agencies under British constitutional principles that recognize no separation of powers as Americans understand it. <\/p>\n<p>To invoke Hewart as though he were an American Founding Father, or even a relevant interlocutor in the American constitutional tradition, is rather like citing the rules of cricket to settle a dispute about baseball. The man has nothing whatsoever to do with our Constitution, and the fact that his name is pressed into service to restrain a Republican president tells you everything you need to know about the enterprise. One searches in vain for the moment Democrats consulted Lord Hewart\u2019s jurisprudence before launching their campaigns of lawfare.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is Griffin Bell, President Carter\u2019s attorney general, held up as a model of institutional rectitude. Bell served a Democrat president who advanced a quite unpopular Democrat agenda, leading to stagflation in the 1970s. To hold Bell up as an authority for Republicans is to concede that the norms of the left\u2019s legal establishment are the only legitimate norms. Democrats do not consult Bell\u2019s ghost when deciding whether to indict a former president. Why should the right consult him when deciding whether to hold the architects of that indictment accountable?<\/p>\n<p>The authors urge President Trump to \u201cbreak the cycle of weaponization.\u201d This is the Marquess of Queensberry Disease in its purest form. The Marquess of Queensberry, of course, lent his name to the rules that transformed bare-knuckle prizefighting into a sport governed by gloves, rounds, and referees \u2014 a codification of fair play that made boxing civilized and also, crucially, made it survivable only for those willing to fight within the rules. The phrase \u201cMarquess of Queensberry Rules\u201d has passed into the language as a synonym for fair conduct, for doing things the right way, but in an effete way. And this is precisely the disease from which the Republican establishment suffers: an obsessive, almost pathological insistence on fighting by rules that only one side observes.<\/p>\n<p>The Democrats do not fight by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. They fight with lethality. They fight to destroy. And they have demonstrated this repeatedly, across every institution of American life, with a consistency that ought to have discredited the Queensberry caucus long ago.<\/p>\n<p>Consider the record. The Russia hoax \u2014 the single greatest political fraud perpetrated on the American public in modern history \u2014 was not a product of rogue actors. It was a coordinated operation involving the FBI, the Department of Justice, the intelligence community, and the Obama White House, designed to cripple a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/mike-kelly-same-people-criticizing-trump-peddled-russia-collusion-hoax\/\" title=\"Mike Kelly: Same People Criticizing Trump Peddled Russia Collusion Hoax\">sitting president<\/a> on the basis of fabricated evidence paid for by Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign. <\/p>\n<p>When the hoax collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty, no one was held accountable \u2014 at least not yet. No FBI official was prosecuted. The institutions simply moved on to the next line of attack, and the Queensberry Republicans murmured that we must preserve \u201cthe norms\u201d \u2014 oh, \u201cmuh precious norms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Then came the lawfare of the Biden era, a systematic campaign to imprison and bankrupt a former president and prevent him from returning to office through aggressive prosecutions and novel legal theories that many commentators regarded as politically motivated.<\/p>\n<p>Each of these cases, taken individually, might be defended by its partisans as legitimate law enforcement. Taken together, however, they constitute a pattern that no honest observer can deny: the systematic deployment of the legal system as a weapon of political warfare. And the response from the Queensberry Republicans? Calls for restraint. Insistence on norms. Warnings about the dangers of weaponization. The Democrats played hardball, nuclear and scorched-earth hardball, while the Republicans played comparative Tiddlywinks.<\/p>\n<p>Now consider what the Arctic Frost document drops and hearings have revealed. On April 21, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing that exposed \u201cOperation Rampart Twelve,\u201d yet another Biden-era FBI investigation targeting Republican members of Congress. The FBI covertly obtained sitting lawmakers\u2019 phone toll records. Even DOJ prosecutors voiced concern about the legal requirements for this action, yet the investigation proceeded. The FBI closed it only after failing to find credible evidence, which is to say, after mapping the communications networks of the political opposition without cause in true East German Stasi fashion. <\/p>\n<p>The hearing also produced documents showing collusion between the Biden administration and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis\u2019 office during her get-Trump probe. The Biden White House was not merely tolerating the weaponization of justice; it was orchestrating it, coordinating across federal and state lines to <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >construct legal siege works<\/a> around a single man, Donald Trump, and the political movement he represents.<\/p>\n<p>This is not speculation. This is well-documented. Yet the Queensberry Republicans continue to insist that the proper response is to unilaterally disarm, to appoint an attorney general who will stand aloof from the political battle as though the battle were not already raging around him.<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court, at least, has begun to impose some corrective measures. In <em>Fischer v. United States<\/em> (2024), the court rejected the Biden DOJ\u2019s expansive interpretation of 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1512(c)(2), repudiating a prosecutorial strategy wielded against Jan. 6 defendants. The Queensberry Republicans noticed this development, nodded gravely, and then resumed their lectures about the importance of \u201cour institutional norms,\u201d as though the institution the Supreme Court had just corrected for abusing its power was somehow still owed deference.<\/p>\n<p>The question is not whether the attorney general should be a \u201cfixer.\u201d The question is whether the attorney general should be a conscientious and energetic objector in a war the other side started and shows no signs of wanting to end. The authors of the National Review piece write as though the Department of Justice were a neutral instrument that has merely been temporarily captured by partisans as a kind of surprising \u201cone-off\u201d \u2014 as though the restoration of neutrality were simply a matter of appointing the right sort of person and then standing back. <\/p>\n<p>But the Department of Justice is not neutral. It has not been neutral for years. It was weaponized against a president, his supporters, Republican members of Congress, and the constitutional rights of American citizens. The evidence is not speculative; it is documentary, voluminous, and growing with each new revelation from the Arctic Frost investigation.<\/p>\n<p>To respond to this weaponization by insisting on unilateral restraint is not principled. It is pathological. It is the Marquess of Queensberry Disease: the compulsive need to observe rules the other side has already discarded, to extend courtesies that will never be reciprocated, to fight a knife fight with a copy of \u201cRobert\u2019s Rules of Order.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The Democrats understand power. They understand that institutions are instruments, not limp shrines. They understand that the attorney general who refuses to investigate the investigators is not preserving the rule of law but ratifying its abuse. And they are counting on the Queensberry Republicans to continue their noble, futile, self-immolating insistence on fighting fair.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Jeffrey Bossert Clark is the vice president of litigation at the Oversight Project. He is a past acting administrator of the White House OMB\u2019s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as well as Department of Justice assistant attorney general of two of its seven litigating divisions, and a veteran of the Bush 43, Trump 45, and Trump 47 administrations. He also knows a thing or two about lawfare \u2014 from personal experience.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some conservatives think procedural restraint and \u201cproper norms\u201d will magically produce justice from state machinery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4283,"featured_media":2602060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump-Press-Conference-P20250627.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[7076,79586,9224,42234,32171],"class_list":["post-2602059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-doj","tag-gop-weakness","tag-independence","tag-legal-affairs","tag-political-commentary"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Trump-Press-Conference-P20250627.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2602059"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2602063,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602059\/revisions\/2602063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2602060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2602059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2602059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2602059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}