Obama Says ‘I Didn’t Have Scandals.’ So What Are All These?

By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/29/obama-says-didnt-scandals/

May 29, 2018

Former President Barack Obama last Wednesday delivered an hourlong keynote address at Oktane18, a three-day customer conference held by Okta, a San Francisco-based security software firm at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. Photo by Okta, Inc.

At a Las Vegas tech conference last week, former president Barack Obama told an audience that his presidency had been scandal-free. “I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked, according to Newsweek. We hear this talking point quite often from Democrats.

Now, perhaps the president didn’t experience the fallout from a scandal, which is very different from never having been involved in one. For this confusion, Obama can thank the political media.

Why does it matter now? For one thing, historical revisionism shouldn’t go unchallenged. Democrats are running to retake power, and many of them were participants or accomplices in numerous corrosive scandals that have been airbrushed.

The other reason, of course, is that when we start to juxtapose the mythically idyllic Obama presidency with the tumultuous reign of Trump, we’re reminded that many journalists largely abdicated their responsibilities for eight years — which has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in today.

It’s not about Obama’s brazen lying about Obamacare or even recurrent abuse of power. I’m talking about supposed non-scandals like “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.

The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons. An off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.

Despite the incompetence, absurdity, recklessness, and fatalities of the program, the entire affair never really received scandal-like attention. No one lost his job. There will almost certainly be a tweet from Trump this week that political media will afford more attention than a story in which an American border agent was murdered with the gun Obama’s ATF provided.

Not even when the administration refused to cooperate with congressional investigators was it handled like a scandal. Not even when a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the gun-walking operation was it treated as a scandal. Not even when we learned that Obama attorney general Eric Holder misled Congress about when he was made aware of the program did it rise to the importance of a Trump tweet. Holder became the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats — and Obama still never paid a political price.

As it was, the Obama administration persistently ignored courts and oversight, breaking norms because it was allowed to do so. The president was articulate, friendly, and progressive. He might have executed an American citizen without a trial (not a scandal!), but his contempt for the process could be forgiven.

It’s why Obama could secretly send planes filled with cash to pay a ransom to a terror state (using money earmarked for terror victims) and most reporters and analysts would regurgitate the justification they heard in the echo chamber. One Politico reporter might drop a 14,000-word heavily sourced investigative piece (two officials involved in the program went on the record) detailing how the Obama administration undermined law enforcement efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah operating in the United States, and most major news organizations never even mentioned the piece.

When they did, it was usually to give space to former Obama officials to smear the reporter.

It needn’t be said, but if the names were changed to Trump and Russia, the president would be accused of sedition. But by any conceivable journalistic standard, it’s a scandal that should have triggered widespread coverage. So when we see mass indignation over every single hyperbolic statement from the current president, it’s a bit difficult to buy the outrage.

An Obama official famously bragged to The New York Times Magazine that he could rely on the ignorance, inexperience, and partisan dispositions of reporters to convey administration talking points to help push through preferred policy. Rather than being hurt or embarrassed by this kind of accusation of unprofessionalism, many reporters are more reliant on the same people than ever before.

Yet many professionals who supposedly deplore the authoritarian nature of an administration that doesn’t answer CNN’s questions were generally quiet when Obama spied on reporters. The Obama DOJ spied on the Associated Press in an attempt to crack down on internal leaks. The DOJ tapped around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that snared at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The Justice Department spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails and tracking his movements.

Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt similar Trump efforts would be framed as a “rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe,” as if we were pulling the curtains back on a fashion show. It would be, rightly, depicted as an assault on democracy.

Then again, spying was also never really given the scandal treatment during the Obama years. As Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan became aware of an operation ofillegal spying of a legislative branch staffer over torture files and misled the media about it. Did the president know? Shrug. The story hardly made a dent. Likewise, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he misled Congress about spying on American citizens. No scandal.

Today both these people are on TV chumming around with serious journalists who allow them to continue to make reckless, unsubstantiated political statements all the time. It isn’t Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” who asks Clapper tough questions, it’s Meghan McCain on “The View.”

There was unprecedented politicization of the government under Obama — most of it, I imagine, excused for being part of a good cause. The NLRB. The Justice Department. The IRS. The Office of Special Counsel, which reviews whistleblower allegations, foundthat IRS employees urged callers to vote for Obama, wore pro-Obama swag, and campaigned for Democrats in conversations with taxpayers — all of it illegal.

But far more seriously, IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively targeted conservative groups before elections. The IRS admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’  demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy.

What difference does it make, right? While the extent of the incompetence and negligence during the Benghazi terror attack on September 11, 2012 is still unknown, what we do know is that Obama and a number of high-ranking officials in his administration lied about what happened for partisan reasons. Susan Rice went on a number of national television shows and claimed that Benghazi was a “spontaneous reaction” to “hateful and offensive video,” even when she knew it was a sophisticated and pre-planned terror attack. (Rice is now on the Netflix board, and Obama is a very rich man. At some point you’ve made enough money, but that time is not yet. )

Although they knew it was a complex terror attack, Obama and Hillary Clinton cut television ads to placate radicals in Islamic nations by repeating the claim that a video perpetuated the attack, and apologizing for American free speech — a scandal in itself.

Worse, however, the administration detained the man who produced the offensively amateurish “Innocence of Muslims,” and initially charged him with lying about his role in the production of the video. This was a blatant attack on free expression. Yet most of the mainstream press continued to take the administration’s word for it and report that the video was the cause of the “protests.”

Democrats in general just kept pretending that every accusation was merely a partisan, racist plot to undermine the president. Whether it was bypassing process and oversight to fund cronyistic green projects that enriched political and ideological allies with tax dollars, or the Secret Service’s embarrassing debauchery or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency or, perhaps the most immoral, the Veterans Affairs’ negligence regarding veterans, they would never admit they faced a scandal.

This double standard in coverage makes today’s often sanctimonious reactions to Trump a bit difficult to take. Many reporters will snarkily point out that most of the stories critics latch onto have been reported on or broken by mainstream journalists. It’s true. There are plenty of good journalists out there. But it’s the intensity of the coverage and the framing of the events that is evidence of ideologically motivated coverage.  And every time Obama or his allies claim that they were scandal-free, millions of Americans are reminded of the obsequiousness of most media coverage.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the forthcoming book,First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

DOJ Announces Fast and Furious Documents Withheld by Eric Holder Will Be Released

By Katie Pavlich

https://townhall.com/

March 7, 2018

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday additional documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal during the Obama administration will be released to the House Oversight Committee. The documents were previously withheld by Attorney General Eric Holder, who was voted in civil and criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to turn them over. President Obama invoked executive privilege in June 2012 to prevent their release just hours before the contempt vote was held.

“The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law. This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions released in a statement.

The Department stated the document release is part of “the conditional settlement agreement, filed in federal court in Washington D.C.” and  “would end six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration’s refusal to produce documents requested by the Committee.”

During an interview with Fox and Friends Tuesday, the brother of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry called on the Trump administration to reopen the investigation into the operation and to release previously withheld documents. 

"We need to find out the truth, exactly what happened, how it happened, why it happened. We need Mr. Trump, President Trump, to unseal the documents, reverse executive privilege so that we know what happened, and that we can hold the people accountable that are responsible," Kent Terry said.

Terry was murdered by Mexican cartel rip crew members in December 2010. They were carrying guns illegally trafficked by ATF to Mexico through the Fast and Furious program.

Operation Fast and Furious was a secret ATF program, overseen heavily at the highest levels at the Department of Justice, which took place between September 2009 and December 2010. ATF agents repeatedly and knowingly allowed individuals working for Mexican cartels to traffic thousands of AK-47s, .50 caliber rifles and handguns into Mexico. The operation ended in 2010 when Agent Terry was murdered and years of coverups surrounding his death and the extent of the operation ensued. Hundreds, if not thousands of Mexican citizens have been murdered as a result of the U.S. government putting guns into the hands of narco-terrorists and a number of firearms trafficked during the operation have been found at additional crime scenes in the United States.

Fast and Furious: The scandal in Washington no one is talking about

By Paul Sperry
http://nypost.com/
May 21, 2016


President Obama and his former Attorney General Eric Holder are tight-lipped on the Fast and Furious gun scandal -- but a judge has ordered the release of 20,000 pages of buried emails and memos. (AP)

The deadly-but-forgotten government gun-running scandal known as “Fast and Furious” has lain dormant for years, thanks to White House stonewalling and media compliance. But newly uncovered emails have reopened the case, exposing the anatomy of a coverup by an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history.

A federal judge has forced the release of more than 20,000 pages of emails and memos previously locked up under President Obama’s phony executive-privilege claim. A preliminary review shows top Obama officials deliberately obstructing congressional probes into the border gun-running operation.

Fast and Furious was a Justice Department program that allowed assault weapons — including .50-caliber rifles powerful enough to take down a helicopter — to be sold to Mexican drug cartels allegedly as a way to track them. But internal documents later revealed the real goal was to gin up a crisis requiring a crackdown on guns in America. Fast and Furious was merely a pretext for imposing stricter gun laws.

Only the scheme backfired when Justice agents lost track of the nearly 2,000 guns sold through the program and they started turning up at murder scenes on both sides of the border — including one that claimed the life of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

While then-Attorney General Eric Holder was focused on politics, people were dying. At least 20 other deaths or violent crimes have been linked to Fast and Furious-trafficked guns.

The program came to light only after Terry’s 2010 death at the hands of Mexican bandits, who shot him in the back with government-issued semiautomatic weapons. Caught red-handed, “the most transparent administration in history” flat-out lied about the program to Congress, denying it ever even existed.

Then Team Obama conspired to derail investigations into who was responsible by first withholding documents under subpoena — for which Holder earned a contempt-of-Congress citation — and later claiming executive privilege to keep evidence sealed.

But thanks to the court order, Justice has to cough up the “sensitive” documents. So far it’s produced 20,500 lightly redacted pages, though congressional investigators say they hardly cover all the internal department communications under subpoena. They maintain the administration continues to “withhold thousands of documents.”

Even so, the batch in hand reveals the lengths to which senior Obama operatives went to keep information from Congress.

The degree of obstruction was “more than previously understood,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz said in a recent memo to other members of his panel.

“The documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials — including Attorney General Holder — intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” he asserted.

They also indict Holder deputy Lanny Breuer, an old Clinton hand, who had to step down in 2013 after falsely denying authorizing Fast and Furious.

Their efforts to impede investigations included:

• Devising strategies to redact or otherwise withhold relevant information;
• Manipulating media coverage to control fallout;
• Scapegoating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for the scandal.

For instance, a June 2011 email discusses withholding ATF lab reports from Congress, and a July 2011 email details senior Justice officials agreeing to “stay away from a representation that we’ll fully cooperate.”

The next month, they went into full damage-control mode, with associate Deputy Attorney General Matt Axelrod warning an ATF official that providing details about Fast and Furious “strikes us as unwise.”

Then, in late August 2011, another email reveals that Holder had instructed his staff to have an official at ATF “close the door to his office” to prevent information about the mushrooming scandal from leaking.

Talking points drafted for Holder and other brass for congressional hearings made clear that Justice intended to make ousted ATF officials the fall guys for the scandal.

“These (personnel) changes will help us move past the controversy that has surrounded Fast and Furious,” Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich wrote in August 2011.

In an October 2011 email to his chief of staff, moreover, Holder stated that he agreed with a strategy to first release documents to friendly media “with an explanation that takes the air out” of them, instead “of just handing them over” to Congress.

“Calculated efforts were made by senior officials to obstruct Congress,” Chaffetz fumed.

“Over the course of the investigation,” he recounted, “the Justice Department has provided false information, stonewalled document requests, produced scores of blacked-out pages and duplicate documents and refused to comply with two congressional subpoenas.”

Though Obama prides himself on openness, transparency and accountability, the behavior of his administration belies such lofty principles. “Transparency should not require years of litigation and a court order,” Chaffetz pointed out.

Obama insists Fast and Furious is just another “phony” scandal whipped up by Republicans to dog his presidency. What does his heir apparent Hillary Clinton think?

The anti-gun zealot has been silent on the gun-proliferation scandal. But then, she’s been busy sweeping subpoenaed emails under the rug of her own scandal.

Paul Sperry is former Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”

FILED UNDER BARACK OBAMA ,  ERIC HOLDER ,  FAST AND FURIOUS ,  GUNS ,  JUSTICE DEPARTMENT , SCANDALS ,  WHITE HOUSE

Salt in our race wounds

By Linda Chavez
http://nypost.com/
March 13, 2015


Attorney General Eric Holder speaks at the Justice Department in Washington, Wednesday, March 4, 2015, about the Justice Department’s findings related to two investigations in Ferguson, Mo. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Another shooting has taken place in Ferguson, Mo. — and this time, two police officers were the victims.

The violence should not come as a surprise, given the ugly tone set by the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder.

The most divisive attorney general since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell, Holder has fanned the flames of racial grievance for much of his tenure.

In his early days in office, he called America “a nation of cowards” on racial issues.

Last week, his target was the Ferguson Police Department. Holder promised, “We are prepared to use all the power that we have…to ensure that the situation changes there.”

No, he didn’t intend for someone to try to kill two police officers by shooting them in the face. But by portraying the police department as racist to the core, he contributed to the culture of vengeance that led to the shooting.

There is no doubt that the Ferguson PD has major problems and needs reform. As the 105-page Justice Department report issued last week documents, city officials have seen the police department largely as a cash cow:

“The City budgets for sizeable increases in municipal fines and fees each year, exhorts police and court staff to deliver those revenue increases, and closely monitors whether those increases are achieved.”

The main sources of those revenues are criminal and civil fines. The policy encourages police to make more traffic stops, conduct more searches, issue more tickets and make more arrests and the courts to issue more warrants and fines to drive up revenues.

It’s a lousy policy — but one not unique to Ferguson.

If the Justice Department were truly serious about changing the abuses more broadly, it would have conducted a larger study that looked at similar patterns in other localities — including largely white tourist towns, where traffic tickets are often a huge source of revenue.

But Holder isn’t interested in the insatiable appetite of government for more revenues. He came to Ferguson in search of racism — and of course, he found it.

It was predestined from the moment President Barack Obama announced he was sending Holder to Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown last August.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the Justice Department’s investigation is that it cleared the Ferguson police officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, of any wrongdoing in Brown’s death.

Obama, Holder and many of the liberal media were quick to suspect that Wilson, who is white, shot Brown because he was black.

For months after the shooting, protesters around the country adopted the mantra “hands up, don’t shoot” to describe Brown’s actions before he was fatally shot by Wilson.

Now the Justice Department’s investigation has concluded that nothing of the sort happened.

According to all available forensic evidence and credible witnesses, Brown attacked the police officer and was in the process of charging toward him when Wilson fired the fatal shots.

Racism wasn’t responsible for Michael Brown’s death. Brown’s own behavior precipitated his unfortunate end.

Blaming racism for every statistical disparity that exists between whites and blacks — from education to income and poverty to crime — gets us no further in solving the problems that exist for many black Americans.

Nor does it get us closer to wiping out the racial prejudices that do, unfortunately, still exist among a minority of the American population.

But those prejudices — examples of which were found by the Justice Department among police officers in Ferguson — are not unique to whites.

In every study of racial attitudes among Americans, whites are no likelier to harbor prejudices against people of other races than are blacks, Hispanics or Asians.

Eric Holder will leave office as early as next week if the Senate confirms Loretta Lynch to be his successor. It will be none too soon.

A man who could have done much to improve race relations will instead leave behind a sorry legacy of inflaming racial tensions when the nation most needed a healer.

FILED UNDER ERIC HOLDER ,  FERGUSON ,  JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ,  RACE ,  SHOOTINGS

Fueling cop-hate: How politicians fan the flames

By Heather Mac Donald

http://nypost.com/

March 13, 2015

Investigators survey the scene outside the Ferguson police station where two police officers were shot.Photo: EPA

Government-fueled cop hatred has claimed more victims. Two St. Louis-area police officers were shot Wednesday night during a protest outside the Ferguson, Mo., police department, one in the face, the other in the shoulder.

Both are expected to survive, unlike the two New York City police officers assassinated in December.

Such violence is the sadly predictable outcome of the lies about the police that government officials and the media have stoked for the last year.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has done all he can to keep tensions at a boiling point in Ferguson.

This, though his own Justice Department demolished the hoax that a pacific Michael Brown was killed in cold blood by Police Officer Darren Wilson in August.

The Justice report on the Brown shooting, released last week, demolished every myth around the shooting.

It confirmed virtually everything Office Wilson had testified to, including that Brown had attacked Wilson, tried to grab his gun, then charged at Wilson after the officer exited his car.

The iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan? Most certainly a fiction.

The report explained why Brown lay for four hours in the street before being taken away: “Kill the cops”-screaming protesters kept barging in on the crime-scene investigation, while gunfire rang around the perimeter. The detectives had to constantly put their work on hold while waiting for more backup.

The Brown report should have forced a massive reconsideration of the virulent anti-law-enforcement campaign that sprang up in the wake of the shooting.

Instead, Holder paved the way for the report’s marginalization by calling, a few days before its release, for a lower standard of proof for civil-rights cases.

Implication: Only an artificially high standard of proof prevented Justice from prosecuting Wilson.

This implication was utterly false. Wilson couldn’t be convicted under any standard of proof, since there is no credible evidence against him.

Yet the media ran with this “burden of proof” angle and buried the report almost as soon as it was released.

Meanwhile, in a stunning bait-and-switch, Holder presented a new report to justify last year’s riots and the ongoing anti-police campaign.

That report claimed that the Ferguson Police Department engages in a “pattern or practice” of violating blacks’ civil rights.

Where the Brown report was measured and thorough, this second report was disingenuous and agenda-driven.

Its most disturbing allegations consisted of anecdotes of apparently unconstitutional stops and arrests by officers acting boorishly toward suspects.

If those anecdotes are true and represent standard procedure in the Ferguson PD, then Ferguson’s force is abysmally trained, with little understanding of the Constitution and a great need for a refresher in courtesy and respect.

But after the evisceration of the Brown hoax, it‘s folly to take stories against the police at face value. Yet there’s no indication that the Justice lawyers double-checked any victim accounts.

Moreover, though the report calls such apparently bad stops “frequent,” it makes no attempt to quantify them in relation to the overall number of stops and arrests, and so establish a “pattern or practice” of civil-rights violations.

The rest of the report goes downhill from there. Its alleged statistical proof of race-based stops and arrests wouldn’t earn its authors a D in Statistics 101, since it lacks a valid benchmark for its stop and arrest data.

That benchmark would include, at a bare minimum, crime rates. But the report assumes, contrary to incontrovertible fact, that black and white crime rates are identical, and that therefore any racial disparity in police stops and arrests must be the result of racism.

As for the claim that the Ferguson PD uses traffic enforcement to generate city revenue, that doesn’t distinguish Ferguson from the vast majority of US towns and cities.

More important, Justice provides no argument that such a motive results from racism, rather than cupidity.

Justice’s only alleged evidence for systemic racism is a half-dozen racist jokes e-mailed by a court clerk and two police supervisers.

While deplorable, such e-mails don’t come close to proving that racial animus drives Ferguson’s traffic-fee system.

President Obama echoed the Holder spin two days after the reports’ release. “We may never know exactly what happened” to Michael Brown, he told students at South Carolina’s Benedict College.

Actually, we do know what happened. Numerous credible witnesses and the forensic evidence confirmed Wilson’s account.

But Obama presented the case as a subtle standard-of-proof problem: “The finding that was made was that it was not unreasonable to determine that there was not sufficient evidence to charge Officer Wilson.”

He then blasted the Ferguson PD: The overwhelmingly white force was “systematically” biased, he said, placing minorities under its care into an “oppressive and abusive situation.”

Such rhetoric guaranteed that the purges of Ferguson officials in the wake of the second Justice report would fail to satisfy the protesters.

Wednesday, before the shootings, Ferguson’s police chief announced his resignation, following in the steps of the city manager and municipal judge. The protesters wanted more, though what exactly is uncertain.

At least one in their midst, however, wanted what protesters in New York had chanted before the assassination of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu: “What do we want? Dead cops.”

By now, the media and politicians are on ample notice that their crusade against law enforcement carries deadly risks. There’s no more excuse for inflaming hatred against the police, especially when the allegations used to inflame that hatred are proven untruths.

Officers put their lives on the line every day to protect law-abiding members of poor communities. Increasingly, those officers are at risk not just from thugs but from the rhetoric emanating from the highest reaches of government.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of “Are Cops Racist?”

FILED UNDER FERGUSON ,  POLICE ,  SHOOTINGS

America betrays its values by not sending top U.S. officials to Paris unity rally

This country has always been better than anyone at standing up for freedom, courage and principles. That’s what world leaders and others did at a rally in Paris on Sunday. America’s only representative was its ambassador to France. A recognizable face of the Obama administration should have been with them.

BY MIKE LUPICA

http://www.nydailynews.com/

January 11, 2015

There was an extraordinary moment and extraordinary scene in the middle of Paris, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon that will be remembered, after a week when it was Paris this time that became the capital of a dangerous world, when terrorists came to Paris to shoot up a magazine and a Jewish deli. This is how it works now, sometimes terrorism is just bad men and women coming through the front door with guns.

So millions took to the streets of Paris on this day, and 40 world leaders locked arms at the front of it all, including the prime minister of Israel and the Palestinian president. They all spoke defiantly, just by being present, about what had happened at the magazine Charlie Hebdo because of political cartoons, and at that deli, where more innocent people died.

This was a different form of French resistance in Paris on this day, all of these people coming together and sending out pictures like this to the world about the world we still want this to be, instead of the one that terrorists want, and that means all terrorists, the world where we live in constant fear.

And the United States of America should have been at the front of that line. And was not.

If you give the President every benefit of the doubt about why he should not show up in Paris at this time even though Angela Merkel did and David Cameron and Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, there should have been a more visible representative from this country than our ambassador to France, Jane Hartley.

We are told that Secretary of State Kerry had important business in India, though you wonder what would have been more important on this day than Paris. But Joe Biden shows up everywhere. At the least, the very least, Attorney General Eric Holder, who was already in Paris for an international conference on terrorism, could have taken some time out from doing interviews for Sunday morning talk shows to stand in one of the front rows Sunday, just because Holder has been a prominent face in Barack Obama’s administration for a good, long time.

This was a day to show up and to stand up, for the kind of march about freedom and courage and principles that this country has always done better than anyone. This is what the best and most noble of our marches on Washington must have looked like to the rest of the world.

“This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” the President said in September, with great force and conviction. And you know how often he has spoken in the past several months about the international coalition that will be needed to combat the growing threat of ISIS.

Some of those that he wants — and needs — in that coalition were there on the streets of Paris on Sunday. Cameron was there, and will most likely be in Washington in February when President Obama convenes his own summit on extremism in the modern world. Perhaps Francois Hollande of France will be in Washington, too, and Merkel. But before that they were in Paris on this extraordinary day. A real face of the Obama administration, a recognizable face, should have been there with them.

Of course there was no battle being fought in Paris on this day, with this angry, amazing crowd of people and the politicians who came to march with them. What happened in Paris and in front of the world does not change the executions inside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, does not bring back any of the dead. Demonstrations never do, even when they speak to the best in all of us.

Of course there was no war being fought on this day. It only looked that way, a war and a movement all at once. It was the kind of fight you don’t want to sit out and should not sit out if you can help it.

No one is saying Obama should have been in a setting like that, or could have been. But if we decided not to send Biden, and Kerry couldn’t make it, what possible reason is there for Holder, who was already in Paris, to have sat out a moment like this?

“We are the ones who asked, rightly so, for troops to support us in Afghanistan, troops to support us against ISIS. We are looking for cooperation from around the world; symbolically we should have had someone there who is instantly recognizable,” Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) said, “so when people around the world see these photos, they recognize the face and say that’s the United States of America.”

Everybody knows how complicated this country’s relationship with France has been, in war and in peace. Certainly there have been times when the leaders of France could have done better by us. We should have done better by them on Sunday. Only you couldn’t find us.