Coop Scoop: The Great Shrinking Merrick Garland

The Attorney General was too cowardly to put Trump away right after January 6

March 15. 2024

By Marc Cooper

I’ll start this note off with the punchline.  It’s my sincere desire that US Attorney General Merrick Garland should leave his post when and if President Biden is re-elected and provided that Washington DC does not become a sister city of Budapest. 

He is a disappointment and a disgrace.

And he bears great and burdensome responsibilities for the judicial/political jam we are currently in, with teams of prosecutors and judges madly juggling briefings and hearings and scheduling of trial dates in an strenuous effort to get Trump into the dock before the November elections.  If he gets elected, he gets to skate as he will dismiss or block all pending charges against him. Much of this bollicksing up must be placed directly at the feet of Garland and the DOJ who, so far, like Trump himself, has escaped any accountability for his failures – failures that could lead to the rise of an authoritarian America 8 months from now.

When Garland took up his position in early 2021, it was just days after Donald Trump incited the January 6 uprising, a premediated move that was to top off weeks of conspiring on how to illegally stay in power and prevent the peaceful transition of power.  Even leading Republicans, like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy expressed repulsion over Trump’s actions and McConnell, correctly, said Trump was fair game now for criminal charges.  (Let’s not forget however that Quisling McConnell could have disposed of Trump if he had led his Republican delegation to convict him in his second impeachment).

In retrospect, McConnell is no hero.  And Merrick Garland, it turns out, was even worse. McConnel had no power once he voted to acquit. But Garland actually had in his own hands the enormous power to immediately stop Trump in his tracks, in early 2021. He should have indicted him and busted him as he walked out of the White House as the crimes Trump committed January 6 were televised live for hours and there was obviously enough evidence for a minimal initial indictment.  Granted, DOJ aggressively went after the thousand or so toy soldiers, dingbats, goofballs and generally muddled civilians who broke into, trashed, and defecated on the floors of the Capitol and who were chanting for the blood of congressmembers, but he did not lift a finger to even investigate the top level ring leaders in the White House AND in congress itself who cooked up the planned coup.

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Garland, and his boss Joe Biden, let it be known repeatedly that they did not want the DOJ to be perceived as “political or partisan” as it became under the grotesque and corrupt leadership of Bill Barr.  No sir, Garland said, we are not about revenge or going after our opponents.  We are apolitical and non partisan.  This was a deliberate strategy to not tick off anybody — especially Republicans. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern writing in Slate says:

“[T]he attorney general has a fetish for bipartisanship and a deep, overwhelming desire to be admired by the American people. These dual fixations drive him to conflate the real world with The West Wing, presuming—wrongly and repeatedly—that he could win universal acclaim by appeasing Republicans. It won’t work. Garland’s one genuinely smart move was appointing Jack Smith to investigate Trump (after waiting way too long to do so). And that decision turned the GOP against him forever. One might suppose that Garland, of all people, would realize that Democratic appeasement and unilateral disarmament does not work in the face of Republican hardball.”

“Obama nominated him to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 specifically because the president assumed that Republicans would assent to an older, moderate white man. Obama, we all know now, was disastrously wrong. And somehow, Garland did not learn his lesson. All these years later, he still hasn’t. And it is Biden who’s paying the price.”

Actually, we are all paying the price.. Garland did nothing about Trump for an entire year and a half and was forced into action only by the drama and popular impact caused by the Congressional January 6 Committee’s televised and rather brilliant hearings a year and a half after Jan6.  Better said, he was made to look a fool by how little, actually nothing, he had done and it was only then that he appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel which he could have done 18 months earlier.  So in his quest to not make the DOJ political, Garland made it-ultra-political by giving Trump an initial partisan pass as if he were the untouchable king he now claims to be.

We are racing the clock today, and losing the race at that, thanks directly to Garland’s fecklessness.  If he had acted promptly, Trump would have already been tried and convicted in at least one or two or perhaps more of his pending criminal trials and his candidacy would either have been scrubbed or mortally wounded.

Trump has taken full and extraordinary advantage of the generous elbow room granted him by Garland.  It’s been a good couple of days for Donald Trump in his tussle with the US justice system.  The tyro judge he appointed to the Federal bench just days before he left office, Aileen Cannon, is blatantly cooperating with the indicted former president to delay as long as possible the pending open-and-shut case -- which she is overseeing-- against him for withholding and hiding myriad top secret and classified documents at Mar-A-Lago. 

There is no way on earth that the purloined papers case, the one that is black and white lethal to Trump, will take place any time before the election, thanks to the partisan hand being played by the flunky judge. 

Don’t quote me on this as I am not a lawyer and I am not sure, but I believe the DOJ has the option to try and get Cannon removed by the district court but that is not a move that has been taken. Cannon has already set a glacial pace and this week, on Thursday, she burned up an entire day in court in hearing two patently frivolous motions from the Trump team to dismiss the charges against him – motions that a universe of legal experts say that a less crooked judge would have dismissed out of hand with no hearing. 

There’s something like seven more spurious delay motions still pending on her docket in the Trump case and there is legitimate fear that she will drag out hearings on all these motions to guarantee that the voters do not get to see Trump convicted before the election.  She can set a date for oral arguments for each hearing and then take her sweet time to issue any hare-brained ruling of the sort to which she is prone.  This trial could be stretched out for years even if Trump loses the election.

We must also blame Garland for his very lame decision in appointing US Attorney Robert Hur, a Federalist Society Republican, to carry out the investigation of Biden’s possession of classified documents. Again he chose a conservative Republican to make sure the rest of the Republicans would not blame DOJ for being partisan.  This, even though, Republicans already blamed Democrats, the DOJ, Biden and the imaginary Deep State for being responsible for all evil in the world from inflation to the eruption of volcanoes in Iceland. 

Hur finally issued his report two weeks ago exonerating Biden but he did so in a bad faith under-handed way.  The simple fact is that reading the transcripts (issued this week) of Hur’s hours long interviews with Biden is it clear that Hur did not charge Biden simply because he had zero evidence of a crime and there would be zilch to present to a jury.

That would have been too easy for Hur to just say and let stand alone. Instead he introduced his report by saying that Biden was a well meaning elderly man with a faulty memory and that he could not remember when his son died (clearly implying the decision to not charge was a humanitarian gesture for an old senile coot)..  Hur, an up and comer in the right wing legal world, knew exactly the sort of firestorm those words would set off, how much Trump would love it,  and, frankly, he should be officially reprimanded for his unwanted and unprofessional psychoanalysis. Worse, Hur had to appear before a House committee (where Republicans ripped him for not indicting Biden and Democrats excoriated him for his editorializing) right after the just-released interview transcripts revealed that Hur was something of a fabricator, or at a minimum a shameless partisan spinmeister.  The transcripts of Hur’s interrogation of the President have no evidence of memory failures by Biden and at one point Hur compliments the president for having “photographic recall of detail” – something deliberately and scandalously omitted from Hur’s report.

When one Democrat pressed Hur two times in the House hearing if he had indeed said those words that appeared in the transcript and asked for a yes-no answer, Hur on both occasions with a total deadpan said “those words appear on the page.”  Talk about an arrogant chickenshit who won’t own up to his glaring hypocrisy or to even attempt some sort of clarification.

Garland selecting a guy who turned out to be a sort of covert MAGA agent was not just a random mistake. Before he was appointed, Hur was a very well known right wing political element who had appeared at a previous law and order dog and pony show that Donald Trump had staged at the White House while in office.  And, even more to the point, Trump had appointed Hur to the post of US Attorney for Maryland so for anybody to suggest that Garland did not know he was taking a big risk in appointing Hur doesn’t know the real story.  There are dozens of other US Attorneys that Garland could have chosen but he went with a Trump appointee.  No excuse for that.

We also learn today of another DOJ fiasco under Garland.  The Manhattan DA’s criminal felony trial of Trump for buying the silence on Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2020 election was supposed to start in less than 10 days.  Turns out, though, that Garland’s DOJ turned over tens of thousands of documents in the Daniels case to the DA just a few days ago and the Trump team wants a delay – properly—to review the new boxes of evidence before trial. This prompted a motion to dismiss the case or to delay it for at least 90 days.  Prosecutor Alvin Bragg said he would be ok with a maximum 30 day delay but there is no ruling yet from the judge.

But here’s the killer data point. DA Bragg had formally solicited these documents over a year ago and Garland’s DOJ refused to turn them over – until this week on the very eve of the trial. And thereby causing a delay in what might be the only criminal trial that would take place before November.  There’s word that another shipment of yet unseen DOJ docs are still be delivered next week and that could further delay things.

And just one more dangling data point. Those new DOJ documents derive from the Trump DOJ’s prosecution of Michael Cohen some years back in the same Stormy Daniels case. Cohen took a three year prison plea and served hard time. But the evidence case clearly names Trump as Co-Conspirator One actually managing and encouraging Cohen’s law-breaking. We know why Bill Barr did not also go after Trump. But when Garland took office, the statute of limitations in the case had not yet expired and there is no sensible explanation as to why Garland did not complete the Daniels investigation by federally indicting Trump — even though the bulk of evidence against the former president had already been developed by the DOJ in the prosecution of Cohen. That clean-up job was left to the Manhattan D.A.

Clearly, Trump’s miracle survival and re-invigoration post January 6 owes most directly to the unspeakable cowardice of the Republican Party and specifically the gaggle of Republican Senators who have acted as collaborators, co-conspirators and cucks to Donald Trump instead of properly representing the interests of the American people by helping to extirpate the Trump cancer from the body politic.  Ditto for the in-the-tank judges like Aileen Cannon and the ambitious beltway and dead-eyed creatures like Robert Hur who are constantly on the partisan make.  But if we are gonna round up the suspects for how Trump is getting away with it, how he is playing the courts like a Duncan yo-yo, then you have to include the spineless Merrick Garland in the line-up.  I sincerely hope that in a second Biden term, he has the self-respect to take off and never be heard from again. Hearing his always self-righteous and pompous pronouncements make my teeth chatter,

Wouldn’t it be something that come 2025 Trump is back in the White House and Judge Aileen Cannon becomes his next Supreme Court pick with Robert Hur getting elevated to the Federal bench?  It’s hardly impossible.  If that nightmare scenario comes to pass, please make sure you include Merrick Garland in your doleful wails to heaven.  ++

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