Government

Rep. Jim Jordan Outraged About DOJ Refusal To Investigate Italian Space Laser Election Fraud

Well, it's less stupid than 2020, but 2021 is stilly pretty ridiculous.

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Congressman Jim Jordan is big mad. Why won’t the Justice Department investigate the extremely credible claim that Italian satellites threw the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden? Not even after White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent him a YouTube video “proving” it!

“That is a problem,” the Ohio congressman thundered at yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing on the Capitol Insurrection, referring to the recently released cache of emails showing a sustained pressure campaign by the White House to force the Justice Department to interfere in the 2020 election. “When the chief of staff to the president of the United States asks someone in the executive branch to do something, and they basically give him the finger, I think that’s the problem we should be looking into.”

To be clear, the Italygate theory is beyond batshit. It involves Barack Obama amassing a secret $400 million war chest, then cahootsing with former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to disrupt vote tabulation in key swing states using Italian military satellites. And somehow this was all coordinated at the US Embassy in Rome, according to Brad Johnson, a self-described retired “CIA Station Chief” and current Epoch Times columnist.

On New Years Day, Meadows forwarded a video by Johnson entitled “Rome, Satellites, Servers: an Update” to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Unfortunately said video has since been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service, which just goes to show how far THEY will go to hide the truth!

Rudy Giuliani also tried to get the FBI to engage with Johnson, and called it “an insult” when AG Rosen invited him to walk into the nearest FBI field office and tell the nice man at the counter all about the #ItalyDidIt plot.

Rep. Jordan was similarly incensed that the DOJ failed to hop to it and investigate the allegations of massive vote fraud in Georgia being flogged by then Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell in concert with the Trump campaign. The same day he was spamming Rosen with spaghetti Westerns, Meadows instructed Rosen to “get Jeff Clark [then head of the Civil Rights Division] to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation.”

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There wasn’t.

Democrats were outraged that the White House Chief of Staff was instructing the DOJ to coordinate with the Trump campaign to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to decertify the state’s electoral votes. But Jordan was only pissed about the scandal of an independent Justice Department refusing to follow White House orders.

“Wow, lotta pressure there,” he sneered sarcastically. “Every chief of staff I bet for every single one of us sends the same kind of emails and letters every day. You get constituents, if people call you, you send it to the agency: ‘Can you look into this?'”

Which is true, as far as it goes. But that’s not very far, because congress isn’t the DOJ’s boss. By custom, there’s supposed to be a firewall between the White House and the Justice Department to ensure independent law enforcement — as Mr. Jordan surely knows, since he screamed bloody murder about the Obama White House unmasking Michael Flynn after he got picked up on a wire tap of the Russian ambassador promising sanctions relief after Trump was inaugurated.

But worse than violating norms, Meadows’s blatant attempt to interfere with the Department violates the White House’s own policy, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein points out.

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A 2017 memorandum to all White House staff authored by then White House Counsel Don McGahn admonishes employees that only he, the President, and the Vice President are to have any contact with the Justice Department.

“In order to ensure that DOJ exercises its investigatory and prosecutorial functions free from the fact or appearance of improper political influence, these rules must be strictly followed,” he wrote [emphasis original], cautioning that the Counsel’s office needed to approve any other communications and “unless you are certain that the particular contact is permissible, you must consult with the Counsel’s Office before proceeding.”

Not only did Meadows transgress long-established norms meant to protect the Justice Department from just the kind of political interference he engaged in, but he was also in flagrant violation of the White House’s own policy.

But disregarding flagrant violations is kind of Jim Jordan’s bag, so perhaps yesterday’s antics should come as no surprise.

Jordan tears into DOJ officials for hostility to Meadows’ election fraud inquiries [Politico]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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