Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) Website
Phone: (202) 224-3353 Washington, D.C.
Phone: (216) 539-7877 Cleveland
During a Senate hearing yesterday, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) called out corruption in the Biden Justice Department. Following a request by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) for unanimous consent to go into executive session to vote on President Joe Biden’s nomination of Tara K. McGrath, to be U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California without debate, Vance objected.
His comments follow:
My objection is not specific to this nominee. I think the Biden administration is not sending its best to the Department of Justice. Many of the nominees are unqualified. Some of them seem actively corrupt, and some, I assume, are good people. But the problem is not this specific nominee.
The problem is the fact that the Department of Justice has been corrupted under the Biden administration, and there needs to be some reckoning with the American people and with this body and with the nominations process before we allow these nominees to glidepath to the confirmation process.
Let’s just talk about a tale of two leaders in this country right now—one a democrat and one a republican.
Of course, for the president of the United States, his son Hunter Biden has multiple federal charges, multiple federal investigations that implicate directly on the president’s business dealings and may very well implicate the president directly, and plausibly could lead to some significant problems for the president in the presidential election.
Yesterday, the plea deal that the Department of Justice cut with Hunter Biden fell apart with minimal scrutiny from the federal judge in that case. That is how the Department of Justice treats the democratic leadership in this country, with kid gloves, even in the face of very serious corruption.
Let’s ask ourselves how they treat the former republican president in the face of a classified document scandal, where, literally, the claim is that the president of the United States mishandled the documents of his own administration.
Now, nobody doubts that President Trump had the right to declassify documents at issue in this case. The argument is that he didn’t, and, therefore, they want to throw him in jail. Is that really what we are doing at the height of the presidential campaign—trying to throw the former president in jail, the likely leader of the opposition, in prison, because he didn’t cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the classification or declassification process?
This is a ridiculous scandal in our entire country.
Look, whether these nominees are qualified or not qualified, we should have the vote and make that determination as a body. It is not, at the end of the day—as I have learned in eight months—all that difficult and all that hard to vote. But we have to stop giving these nominees a glidepath until [Attorney General] Merrick Garland commits to using the Department of Justice for justice and not for politics, as it is being used today.
So I object.
