The Associated Press, which has given up its role as a dispassionate news source to become a handmaiden of the Democratic Party, recently savaged "MAGA favorite" Kash Patel, whom we are warned would politicize the presumably nonpartisan FBI if he were put in charge of it. As proof that Patel could never equal the political impartiality of a Merrick Garland or perhaps James Comey, the legacy media have pointed to his unwillingness to say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) almost twisted himself into a pretzel during Patel’s confirmation hearing on Thursday, trying to get the nominee to recognize Biden as the victor in the 2020 presidential election. Patel kept responding to Welch’s query with the statement that Biden was declared the certified winner. When Welch in exasperation asked if Biden won that contest just as Trump did in 2024, Patel calmly replied: “Both were certified as winners.”

The reality is that Patel had no intention of vouching for the integrity of an election he may still view askance.

Allow me to confess that I love how Patel responded to Welch’s grilling for several reasons. One, the nominee had no reason to let a hostile opposition party push him into distancing himself from his presidential benefactor. Patel took the proper, indeed obligatory, position by stating the obvious about both presidential victors being certified and leaving the matter at that.

Two, Welch and just about every other Democratic senator is Patel’s enemy and will undoubtedly vote against him. You should never try to accommodate your adversaries by letting them drive a wedge between you and the president you intend to serve. I can’t imagine why Patel, unless he were an utter fool (which he obviously is not), would fall into that trap.

Three, Congress is full of Democratic election deniers, starting with Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). If Welch is so concerned about election deniers in government, then perhaps he could show his sincerity by going after the offenders in his own party.

In fact, Welch’s party has a long history of election denying, going back well before 2020; one can easily find statements by Hillary Clinton and even Joe Biden questioning Republican presidential victories. As early as 2005, 31 Democratic members of Congress denied that George W. Bush won the state of Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. As Karl Rove shows, Bush won Ohio easily, and Clyburn, the black activist Democratic congressman to whom Biden owed his nomination in 2020, engineered the attempt to remove the Buckeye State from W’s column. Why should Patel submit to being questioned about election denial by members of a party that has regularly indulged in that practice?

Although I don’t know for sure whether Democratic cheating determined the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Everything the Democrats have done suggests they will employ any trick to win elections. Blocking voter identification laws, trying to register those illegal aliens they’ve obviously brought into the country as future Democratic voters, working to move elections from more to less supervised settings, and trying to throw a powerful presidential opponent into jail or having him removed from state ballots to keep him from running were all actions that Democrats have taken against Trump. Let’s also remember those Democratic Party officials who tried to keep social media from sharing anything that might hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning the 2020 election.

The Democrats belabor Republicans with the charge that they don’t really recognize Biden’s victory in 2020, and they expect Republican candidates and nominees to answer this charge by loudly affirming the indisputable character of Biden’s election. But the Republicans will be given no brownie points even if they provide the desired answer.

Conceding that the 2020 election was fraud-free also provides at least indirectly a justification for the incarceration of hundreds of January 6 demonstrators, only a small number of whom were involved in physical violence. If the 2020 election was as clean as Democrats and their media friends want us to believe, then should we assume that many of those who have been complaining about electoral fraud have been lying to us?

Perhaps the protesters on January 6 were just looking for an excuse to devastate our Capitol and commit insurrectionary acts. If we believe on the other hand that the 2020 election raised justifiable suspicions, that it looked “rigged” — to borrow the title of Mollie Hemingway’s book — then we are recognizing that there were extenuating circumstances for those who were upset enough to demonstrate unlawfully.

The reality is that Patel had no intention of vouching for the integrity of an election he may still view askance. The election understandably looked fishy to him even if neither he nor I can prove incontestably that massive fraud determined that election’s outcome.