The White House has finally made official what it has been implying for more than two years: Any journalist who reports on President Biden’s misdeeds and corruption is betraying American democracy.
The latest call for loyalty oaths comes in response to House Republican leadership launching an impeachment inquiry on Biden family corruption.
The White House leaked a draft letter it will send to major media outlets urging them to “ramp up their scrutiny” of House Republicans “for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”
The effort to preemptively blunt media criticism of President Biden is being led by Ian Sams, the White House’s official “spokesman for oversight and investigations.”
He got that title because “Baghdad Bob” was already taken.
Sams said Wednesday that all those phone calls to Hunter during squirrely business meetings were simply proof Joe Biden “loves” his son.
In May, after congressional investigations exposed a vast multimillion-dollar web of Biden family influence peddling, Sams tweeted that “allegations against the President are nothing more than innuendo and insinuation.”
Sams is the Chicken Little of the Biden media team.
Whenever Republicans or the media criticize the president, Sams hyperventilates as if the death of democracy is imminent.
Some observers are stunned at the brazenness of the latest White House demand for media subservience.
But Team Biden could be panicking because a federal appeals court crippled heavy-handed censors at the White House and other federal agencies.
The court unanimously revived part of an injunction from a July 4 court ruling that prohibited federal officials from seeking to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies” to suppress “social-media content containing protected free speech.”
Democratic candidates won’t be aided by censorship next year nearly as much as they were in the 2022 midterm elections.
So if Team Biden can’t sneak through the back door to kill embarrassing stories, it has no choice but to sound the trumpets and summon the media to help block the front door.
And here is where the Ian Sams Histrionic Show comes to town.
Sams is outraged at the media “[c]overing impeachment as a process story” — which is a “disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable.”
Except for the White House.
Sams wailed in that draft letter that “in the modern media environment . . . every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox.”
Again, except for the White House.
Maybe Iam Sams can invent a story about Biden’s youth akin to George Washington and the cherry tree — an apocryphal tale to prove Biden has always been irrevocably honest, notwithstanding any facts to the contrary.
Why not have simply have Ian Sams ride a pink pony into the press room each day and scatter magic dust that erases reporters’ memories?
Actually, most of them don’t have a memory beyond 48 hours, so that would be a waste of good magic dust.
The president is facing a daunting challenge.
In 2020, Biden won thanks to a “basement campaign” where voters rarely saw his physical and mental struggles, and his brazen lies on Hunter Biden’s laptop and other issues were rarely challenged.
But with congressional investigations closing in, the Biden 2024 campaign will need to seal his entire life (or at least all its records) in an underground bunker.
The Iam Sams edict for mandatory media groveling is simply another branch of Team Biden’s faith-building in Leviathan.
The Department of Homeland Security early last year proposed the Disinformation Governance Board to combat any person or group seeking to “undermine public trust in government institutions.” (The New York Post helped demolish that monstrosity.)
The FBI has a task force of 80 agents working to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”
How much more groveling can the White House squeeze out of the press corps?
Biden’s re-election prospects hinge on the White House’s efforts to demonize critics.
But if Joe Biden really had nothing to hide, then the White House would have nothing to fear. Will Americans be satisfied with presidential piety in lieu of transparency?