Those Democrats fuming about a new House panel formed to investigate overreach by federal agencies have their party doing a 180-degree turn from the days it was suspicious of the FBI and the CIA, Ben Shapiro said Wednesday.
The GOP-led House passed a resolution Tuesday forming the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will be led by Rep. Jim Jordan, (R-Ohio), who will also chair the full Judiciary Committee. The panel will probe the Executive Branch’s information-gathering tactics and how it has worked with private companies such as Twitter and Facebook, to tread on the rights of Americans.
“And people are fighting mad about it in the press and in the Democratic Party, which is amazing, because you’ll recall that there have been times in America’s past where it’s been the Democratic Party that has been very, very upset with the FBI,” Shapiro, the Daily Wire co-founder and best-selling author said on his podcast and radio show. “Go back to the 1960s or go back to the 1930s, and you’ll recall that the Democratic Party and the media had been very upset with the idea that the federal government should have the power to reach into people’s lives and uncover information and in fact have been very much in favor of oversight.”
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More recently, Shapiro noted it was Democrats who accused the intelligence community of leading the nation into wars over oil and called for defunding law enforcement.
The difference now, according to Shapiro, is that Democrats now hold power in these agencies and don’t want lawmakers looking over their shoulders. The FBI worked with Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign to investigate former President Trump’s non-existent ties to Russia. In 2021, the Department of Justice sought to characterize parents who object to leftist local school boards as domestic terrorists. More recently, revelations from Facebook and Twitter have shown how the FBI regularly pressured the platforms to stifle pro-Trump and anti-Biden content.
“This is all about deep state nonsense,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat whose unrelenting claims of Trump-Russia collusion collapsed when the Mueller probe revealed them to be baseless. “Republicans claim without merit that this subcommittee will investigate the so-called weaponization of the federal government.”
In addition to Schiff’s criticism, Rep. Jim McGovern, (D-MA), claimed that Republicans on the new panel are “anti-police.”
“Republicans claim to care about law enforcement but this new committee is about attacking law enforcement,” McGovern said. “It’s about going after people. It’s about destroying people’s careers and lives.”
Shapiro noted that the media, including the Washington Post, joined with Democrats in decrying the new subcommittee, which will include eight Republicans and five Democrats. The paper claimed that the committee will have access to information that, if shared, could hurt national security and endanger the lives of American intelligence officers.
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But Shapiro said it is high time the federal agencies shown to have spied on and silenced people and meddled in elections face oversight.
“Investigating all of these agencies would be a basic, proper function of government,” Shapiro said. “One congressional investigator who works on oversight issues says its mandate is whatever Jim Jordan wants to do, to which I say ‘Good.’”