For once, left and right agree: Merrick Garland is the worst.
I was surprised when I first saw this article from MSNBC and CNN contributor Dean Obeidallah declaring Garland to be “America’s Worst Attorney General.” Had it finally dawned on someone in our corporate press that smearing parents as “domestic terrorists” and prosecuting political opponents of no less stature than a president might have been a bad idea? (No, it hadn’t.)
The failure for which Garland deserves infamy, according to Obeidallah, was not trying hard enough to throw his boss’s presidential opponent in prison. For that insufficient zeal, he says Garland is “the biggest failure of an attorney general in our lifetimes.”
Even Joe Biden, who nominated Garland, appears to have caught onto the fact that Garland’s DOJ is infected with partisan corruption. Biden accused Garland’s department of having “singled out” certain targets for prosecution based on political reasons, and then “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” them and “treated [them] differently” than other defendants.
“Raw politics has infected this process,” Biden wrote last Sunday in a letter absolving his son of any federal crimes he might have committed over the past decade. (What an awkward end for Garland, after all he’s done to protect the Bidens!)
Biden’s more correct than he knows. Raw politics, indeed, has rotted the nation’s highest law enforcement agency. Thanks to Garland, Americans are rapidly losing confidence in the DOJ and its shock troops in the FBI. As Garland prepares to leave his post in disgrace, it’s worth revisiting the failures that actually make him “America’s worst attorney general.”
Attempting to Throw His Boss’s Presidential Opponent in Prison
The behavior of Garland’s DOJ in attempting to throw Donald Trump in prison while he was running for president against Garland’s boss is disqualifying, but not for the reason Obeidallah claims. One week after Biden declared to the country that “I’m making sure [Trump] does not become the next president again,” Garland tapped Jack Smith as special counsel in charge of running two prosecutions against Trump, one related to his retention of documents and another related to his speech about the 2020 election. At Garland’s bidding, Smith attempted to jail the former president for mishandling classified documents, something “every U.S. presidential administration since the 1980s” has done thanks to complicated laws and the massive logistical scale of presidential records. A judge threw out the case and ruled Smith’s appointment unconstitutional in July.
In a separate case, Smith attempted to criminalize Trump’s speech and even beliefs about the 2020 election. Relying in part on a federal law written to crack down on fraudulent financial recordkeeping and the destruction of financial records, Smith twisted Trump’s comments into bizarre “obstruction” and “conspiracy” charges. Chided multiple times by the U.S. Supreme Court, Smith tucked tail and went home once Trump was elected president in November.
Raiding a Former President’s Home
One of the most outrageous moments of those prosecutions was the FBI’s “unannounced” 9-hour raid on the Trumps’ personal home at Mar-a-Lago, in which around 30 agents who were authorized to use “deadly force” descended on the residence and dug through everything from Mrs. Trump’s closet to the president’s safe. A few days later, Garland admitted he had “personally approved” the raid. Two years later, Smith’s team admitted to tampering with the evidence they seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Covering for Biden’s Classified Docs Scandal
At the same time Smith was trying to throw Trump in prison for misuse of documents, Garland’s DOJ helped Joe Biden get away with the improper retention of classified records. When records from Biden’s tenure as vice president were found in his garage and at the Penn Biden Center, the FBI played nice. Not only were none of Biden’s residences raided, but the FBI let Biden’s attorneys go through the documents first without agency supervision. A special counsel selected by Garland to investigate Biden declined to charge him because he was a sympathetic “elderly man with a poor memory” whom it would be difficult to convince a jury had committed a crime that “requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Ignoring a Congressional Subpoena …
When Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden for his likely crimes involving classified documents, his reasoning — combined with Biden’s public exhibition of dementia symptoms — increased concerns about the mental capacities of the man ostensibly running the country. Facing demands to release the audio tapes from Hur’s interviews with Biden, Garland refused to make them public to the American people. Even when Congress issued a subpoena to Garland for the audio, he ignored it.
… While Imprisoning Trump Officials for Ignoring Subpoenas
Meanwhile, the Garland DOJ successfully sought jail time for Trump officials Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for refusing to answer congressional subpoenas. Announcing Bannon’s indictment, Garland crowed that the charges “reflect the department’s steadfast commitment” to the “rule of law.”
When the House of Representatives voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress for ignoring his subpoena, however, Garland’s own Justice Department “quickly said it would not prosecute Garland for contempt,” as Axios reported at the time without a hint of irony.
Leaving Fingerprints on ‘Get Trump’ Lawfare in New York, Georgia
Garland’s DOJ wasn’t the only entity trying to cash in on the fad of prosecuting Trump. When Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg prosecuted Trump for, basically, trying to shape public opinion about himself while he was campaigning for president, he somehow coaxed Matthew Colangelo to leave his cushy post as Garland’s third-in-command to join the local prosecutor’s team. Before that, someone had magically convinced Bragg to pursue the prosecution despite his previous decision “not to seek criminal charges” against the former president.
Likewise, members of Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis’ team prosecuting Trump in Georgia mysteriously met with Biden White House officials multiple times.
Fiddling as SCOTUS Faced Unlawful Intimidation Mobs
After a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May 2022, mobs of pro-abortion activists swarmed the homes of Republican-appointed justices who were expected to make up the majority. It was obvious their intention was to intimidate and pressure the justices into abandoning the draft in their final ruling, which is illegal under 18 U.S.C. §1507. But Garland’s DOJ didn’t lift a finger to stop the lawbreaking for a month, until a man went to Brett Kavanaugh’s home with weapons and home invasion tools and told police of his plans to kill the justice. Nearly a year later, a DOJ whistleblower revealed training slides instructing U.S. Marshals that “making arrests and initiating prosecutions is not the goal of USMS presence at SCOTUS residences.”
Prosecuting Peaceful Pro-Life Protesters
Early on the morning of Sept. 23, 2022, more than a dozen FBI agents carrying rifles swarmed the home of pro-life father-of-seven Mark Houck. Houck was accused of “attacking a patient escort” at a Planned Parenthood facility in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Houck contended that he had physically blocked the man from harassing his 12-year-old son, and the man’s attempt to sue Houck over the incident was thrown out of district court. Although a jury eventually acquitted Houck, the process was the punishment.
In addition to Houck, the Garland DOJ has put dozens of other pro-life activists through prosecution — and some in prison — for peaceful demonstrations at abortion facilities. Meanwhile, the agency showed substantially less aggression in prosecuting the culprits who vandalized, firebombed, or otherwise intimidated more than 40 pro-life individuals and organizations.
Targeting Parents as ‘Domestic Terrorists’
During Garland’s first year in office, parents nationwide began exercising their rights to speak out at public school board meetings in protest of post-Covid school closures, mask mandates, and racial and sexual dogma in their children’s schools. In a letter later alleged to be at the “request” of the Biden administration, the National School Boards Association asked Biden to crack down on these parents using domestic terrorism laws. Just days later, Garland happily complied, directing the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to work with local law enforcement to go after these parents.
Overseeing FBI Targeting of Catholics
As an agency within DOJ, the FBI is ultimately responsible to the attorney general, so Garland bears blame for the many abuses of power perpetrated by the FBI during his tenure. One of those was the creation of a 2023 memo out of the FBI’s Richmond field office painting “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” who attend Latin mass as connected to “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” and white supremacist ideology.” It was later revealed that at least two other field offices “were involved in or contributed to the creation of FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.”
Suing States to Keep Noncitizens on Voter Rolls
Shortly before the 2024 election, after the state of Virginia had removed 6,000 noncitizens from its voter rolls, Garland’s DOJ sued Virginia to keep Gov. Glenn Youngkin from continuing to remove foreign nationals, who are ineligible to vote. The DOJ had previously brought a similar lawsuit against Alabama in September, and Garland promised in March to target popular state laws requiring voter ID.
When Democrat county boards in Pennsylvania publicly decided to count legally disqualified ballots in November, however, Garland was nowhere to be seen.
Covering for Biden Family Crimes
Documents and testimony from IRS whistleblowers revealed that the Justice Department had hampered a tax investigation into Hunter Biden. The interference began before Garland’s tenure at DOJ, but under Garland, “at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices” had “declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so,” Just The News reported based on whistleblower allegations in 2023.
Garland promoted David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who had been investigating Hunter Biden during the period in which IRS whistleblowers said the DOJ was stonewalling their investigation, to special counsel just a few months after the whistleblower allegations came to light. Before that, Garland told members of Congress that Weiss had possessed “full authority” in charging decisions related to Hunter Biden, a claim that whistleblowers said Weiss had flatly contradicted in meetings.
Weiss ended up arranging a sweetheart plea deal designed to let the younger Biden escape accountability for his crimes, until it fell apart under a judge’s scrutiny in court. The DOJ let the statute of limitations expire on a number of tax crimes and never charged Biden with more serious offenses in which he was implicated, such as money laundering or bribery.
Targeting IRS Whistleblowers Who Revealed the Cover-Up
When the allegations of DOJ interference on behalf of the Bidens became public in 2023, one of the whistleblowers and “his entire team” were removed from the Biden investigation “at the request of the Department of Justice,” according to the whistleblower’s lawyer.
Twisting Laws to Make a Political Example out of J6 Protesters
Under Garland, DOJ prosecutors led by D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves charged more than 1,500 people for their presence inside the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. As media outlets, congressional Democrats, and President Biden sought to make an example out of the pro-Trump protesters, the DOJ invoked laws “never before used against political protesters,” as investigative reporter Julie Kelly noted.
“Sentences range from a few days in jail to up to 22 years as the DOJ seeks ‘terror enhancements’ to tack on additional time,” Kelly reported. So eager was the DOJ to punish these J6ers that prosecutors tried to use the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, written to crack down on financial fraud, to charge hundreds of people with “obstruction of an official proceeding.” The Supreme Court shot down this interpretation earlier this year.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
Jesus Christ is King
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