I saw this on Josh Marhsall’s TPM site. It’s an article written for Politico by Ankush Khadori, who used to work for the white collar division of the DOJ. It’s a stinging indictment of Republican malfeasance on the federal bench and from the U.S. Senate to protect Donald Trump from ever being held accountable for his multiple crimes. But Khardori also points a finger at President Biden and his choice of Merrick Garland for AG for failing to hold Trump accountable. Khardori writes — and I agree with him — if Trump had been found guilty and been in prison long before this election he would not be heading back to the White House now.
Some will not want to hear any of that, but we are were we are because of Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnel, and a corrupt SCOTUS.
What I want to focus on is the error President Biden made in choosing Merrick Garland.
Basically, Khardori states what many outside observers noticed long ago: Garland dragged his feet on investigating Trump’s role in Jan 6th.
It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department...
In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.
Emphasis is mine.
Also remember, on the documents case, it took nearly 18 months for the FBI to eventually search MAL to find the documents Trump had stolen from the government. Jack Smith was not appointed as special counsel until November 18th of 2022. Approximately 21 months go by before the DOJ is seriously investigating Trump.
Why so long? If memory serves, I watched many a legal expert state on TV that if someone like myself had stolen government documents they would have been sitting in jail in no time. Instead, It took three more months for Garland to get off his ass and appoint a special counsel to deal with the documents case AND the Jan 6th insurrection.
Khardori goes on to castigate the legal analysts and some Democrats who continued to defend Garland’s mishandling of the cases against Trump. At first, many of the TV legal analysts stated that you start an investigation from the ground up, so it had to take time to prosecute Trump. However, the case was so big that this approach guaranteed delays when it came to prosecuting Trump.
By the way, I’m betting most of those insurrectionists will get pardons now from Trump.
Khardori does not mention the reasons why Garland dragged his feet, but I believe that Garland’s main objective was to restore the reputation of the DOJ by being “apolitical” at all times. As I have stated before, Garland was playing to Washington insiders and some mythical swath of American voters who cared more for appearances than actual justice.
Khardori sums up how Garland will be viewed by history:
As for Garland, his legacy is now out of his control, and the early returns are not looking good.
Garland is a serious, well-intentioned and complex figure. But given all this, he may go down as one of the worst and most broadly unpopular attorney generals in American history — hated by the anti-Trump part of the country for failing to bring Trump to justice, and hated by the pro-Trump part of the country for pursuing Trump at all. I sincerely hope he provides a first-hand accounting of what happened after he too leaves office next year.
The rest of the article deals with how Republicans did everything they could to protect Trump, which most of us saw in real time with Mitch McConnell letting Trump off the hook for the insurrection to a SCOTUS that has given Trump the powers of a king. This most of us on Daily Kos already know. But it’s a good summation of the failure of the entire federal justice system.
