Biden deserves worse during the transition than he’s likely to get

Broadly speaking, there are three ways an administration that’s on its way out can treat an incoming administration. It can cooperate, it can largely decline to cooperate, or it can subvert.

In 2016, the Obama administration, of which Joe Biden was a part, chose to subvert Team Trump. Therefore, Team Biden should not be heard to complain if the Trump administration chooses the less malignant approach of not cooperating.

Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times reminds us:

In 2016, Democrats, Obama administration officials and liberal media moved quickly to target President-elect Trump. Over 73 days, there were calls for impeachment, a resistance movement, attempts to infiltrate the Electoral College, false opposition research and FBI surveillance. . . .

Here is some of what the Obama administration did to subvert Trump:

During the transition and afterward, Democrats repeatedly accused Mr. Trump and his campaign of conspiring with the Kremlin to hack Democratic computers and release internal emails. They relied greatly on their paid-for dossier from the Kremlin, which has been shown to be false.

Newly declassified intelligence papers show that Mrs. Clinton made a decision in late July to pin the Russian interference on Mr. Trump. Special counsel Robert Mueller concluded in March 2019 that he could not establish such a conspiracy took place.

As he was about to assume the presidency, Mr. Trump likely did not know the full picture of what was swirling behind the scenes. Today, more is known. Attorney General William P. Barr and the director of national intelligence have released dozens of once-secret documents telling the anti-Trump narrative, particularly at FBI headquarters.

With Russia as a backdrop, here is what the left did in the fall of 2016 and early winter of 2017:

• Boycotted the Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration. Fifty-three Democratic members of Congress refused to attend, accusing Mr. Trump of conspiring with Russia to tip the election. Mr. Mueller found no such evidence after nearly a three-year FBI investigation.

• Organized a “resistance” movement. Inside the Democratic-heavy federal bureaucracy, there was talk of leaking to press and stopping new policies. Clinton activists held a postelection strategy session in Miami to fund anti-Trump campaigns.

The resistance cry even reached inside the FBI. A bureau lawyer investigating the Trump campaign text-messaged colleagues, “viva le resistance.”

Project Veritas, the undercover activist group, captured federal employees on hidden camera talking about stopping Mr. Trump.

“What you are about to see is the hidden face of the resistance inside the executive branch of our government,” Veritas director James O’Keefe said before showing a State Department official chatting with undercover operatives. The official said he would routinely “f*** s*** up.”

Attorney General Barr summarized the Obama administration’s resistance to the president-elect this way:

Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called ‘The Resistance,’ and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, ‘resistance’ is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous — indeed incendiary — notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic.

Joe Biden was part of the resistance to the incoming president. He participated in the White House meeting on January 5, 2017 at which James Comey briefed the president and others on the phony Democratic Party opposition research dossier prepared by Christopher Steele. Biden’s notes mention the Logan Act as a possible basis for targeting Michael Flynn, Trump’s designee as national security adviser. The FBI had already cleared Flynn of wrongdoing.

There’s plenty more in Scarborough’s article. But the offenses cited above are more than sufficient to justify this statement by John Dowd, who represented President Trump during the Mueller investigation:

It does not lie in the mouths of Democrats and their media cousins to insist on regular order and transition before the certification of the election results when they trashed, demonized, undermined and obstructed the lawful efforts of President Trump and his colleagues to form an administration to serve the American people in 2017. No president has been treated so poorly and unlawfully by the opposition, the deep state and the fake media.

Dowd is right. Joe Biden’s calls for unity and cooperation are cynical. They ring hollow. Non-cooperation is better than Biden deserves.

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