The Patriot Post® · Lies, Damned Lies, and Mayorkas

It’d be a shame if Alejandro Mayorkas resigned. A low-down dirty shame.

On the one hand, it’d be an official acknowledgement by the Homeland Security secretary that he’d failed the American people. And that’s the truth. He has, and disastrously so. But on the other hand, it’d deprive the citizenry of a great civics lesson about the real and proper use of our Constitution’s impeachment remedy — as opposed to its deeply disgraceful and purely political use by Democrats against President Donald Trump.

As if Mayorkas’s months-long border-security malfeasance weren’t impeachable enough, we learned yesterday that he lied about a notorious incident from last September involving Border Patrol agents and illegal immigrants in the border town of Del Rio, Texas. There, agents on horseback were said to have whipped the illegals, and a photograph of the incident purported to show the whipping. Adding fuel to the Left’s fire was the racial component of the story: The agents were white and the illegals being “whipped” were blacks from Haiti.

None of it was true, though. And Mayorkas knew it wasn’t true prior to denouncing the incident as “horrific” shortly after Joe Biden, the man whose job it is to secure our nation’s borders, had said the following:

It was horrible what you saw. To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped — it’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. … There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous. It’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.

What a disgrace, this Uniter-in-Chief of ours.

Then came Vice President Kamala Harris: “There needs to be consequences and accountability. Human beings should not be treated that way and as we all know, it also invoked images of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against indigenous people in our country and used against African-Americans in times of slavery.”

Mayorkas, though, is a coward. He’s a vile, agenda-driven leftist bureaucrat who helped this defamatory lie race around the globe despite having been told in advance of his own presser that the photographer who captured the image had said that the incident was being “misconstrued.”

How do we know this? Because an email from Assistant Secretary of DHS Public Affairs Marsha Espinosa, which was obtained by The Heritage Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request, makes clear that the agents didn’t whip anybody.

“I didn’t ever see them whip anybody,” photographer Paul Ratje said at the time. “That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.” Espinosa even highlighted Ratje’s exculpatory comments in the email to Mayorkas.

“Two and a half hours after receiving that email,” Fox News reports, “Mayorkas joined White House press secretary Jen Psaki at a White House press conference, where he continued to push the narrative: ‘Our nation saw horrifying images that do not reflect who we are. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism,’ Mayorkas said.”

“It clearly shows they are willing to lie to the American people for their self interests,” said National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd. “They withheld facts and anytime you withhold facts from the American people … you should step down from your job. Better men step down. This clearly shows they are not better men.”

No, they’re not better men. One of those men, Joe Biden, no doubt in an attempt to deflect attention from his administration’s smears of our Border Patrol agents, announced that he’s arranged to have some asylum-seeking Venezuelans stay on the Mexican side of the border while their case is adjudicated — or at least through Election Day.

Meanwhile, the chorus calling for Mayorkas to resign is growing louder.

“No,” writes constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, “it is not because of the record level of border crossing with millions pouring into the country. It is not the obvious lack of confidence of the rank and file officers in Mayorkas. It is not even past controversies like his Orwellian ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’ No, Mayorkas must resign because he betrayed not just his agents but his oath to ‘well and faithfully discharge’ the duties of his office in his handling of the ‘whipping scandal.’”

The professor is right, of course. But we’d just as soon see this guy stick around. If only to properly impeach him.