In 2016, the American Bar Association. I couldn't say enough about Merrick Garland, then chief judge of the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, when he sent the Senate a report giving his highest rating. Then, at Garland's confirmation hearing, a bar association official gave The senators are examples of the unanimous praise of hundreds of lawyers, judges and law professors who were contacted by the group's evaluators.
“He may be the perfect human being,” said one anonymous fan. Another: “Judge Garland has no weaknesses.”
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Therein lies the tragedy of Merrick Garland. A man who could have been a true supreme justice, but for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's unprecedented Republican blocking, became a seemingly ineffective attorney general, at least when it came to challenging defining moment of his mandate: holding Donald Trump accountable for trying to steal. the 2020 presidential elections.
The traits that bar experts saw as Garland's strengths — deliberative caution, modesty, judicial temperament, indifference to politics — turned out to be weaknesses for the Justice Department chief in these times.
Garland was so determined to restore the department's independence and integrity (after Trump, in his first term, openly sought to weaponize it against his enemies) that the attorney general initially avoided investigating and prosecuting Trump for his role in the subversions. post-elections that culminated in January. January 6, 2021. By all accountsGarland feared that the Justice Department would turn its legal powers against the man President Biden had just defeated at the polls.
Of course, Trump, the master of projection, was going to, and did, accuse the attorney general of what Trump himself was guilty of: weaponizing the Justice Department. However, in a nation based on the rule of law, it was necessary to pursue the case against Trump.
Garland managed to revive the department's post-Watergate rules restricting contacts between law enforcement officials and the White House, rules that Garland, as a young Justice lawyer in the Carter administration, helped develop in response to the Nixon-era abuses. But that's the end of Garland's achievement: Trump, saved by his choice to answer for January 6 or a separate federal indictment for stealing classified documents, will return to power next week, more emboldened than before and backed by appointees. willing to do their vengeful bidding at the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Last week, there were small victories for accountability, if not for Trump's alleged federal crimes. On Friday he was sentenced for his only conviction, in New York state court in Mayfor falsifying business records to cover up money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. Judge Juan M. Merchán did not impose any penalty on the president-elect, but at least the sentence underscored Trump's distinction as the only criminal president. Separately, garland indicated would make public special counsel Jack Smith's final report detailing the evidence of Trump's January 6 guilt.
The 72-year-old attorney general soon leaves office having angered all sides: Republicans for going after Trump, Democrats for not going after him quickly and hard enough. California Senator Adam B. Schiff, a former member of the House January 6 committee, was one of the first Democrats to publicly make blame to the Justice Department, at least partially, for allowing Trump to avoid trial before the 2024 election, complaining on CNN that the department had focused too much on “the foot soldiers” who attacked the Capitol “and refrained from look… at the inciters.”
A recent CNN retrospective on the Trump prosecution called 2021 “the lost year.” At a time when the former president was still on the defensive around January 6, the Justice Department pursued a bottom-up strategy targeting more than 1,500 troublemakers in his major criminal investigation ever. Prosecutors insisted they were pursuing leads involving Trump and close allies as they resolved the legal complexities of trying a former occupant of the Oval Office.
By 2022, questions about Garland's deliberative procrastination became inevitable. In March, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled in a civil case that “the illegality of the [fake electors] The plan was obvious.” The following month, FBI Director Christopher Wray authorized a criminal investigation into the scheme. Then in June, the House January 6 committee held its televised meeting. audiencesessentially a daytime drama about Trump's many efforts to stay in power, starring Republican witnesses.
That event finally prompted Garland to take the man upstairs seriously. In November 2022, Garland named Smith as special counsel. As quickly as Smith seemed to work, it wasn't until August 2023, two and a half years after the insurrection, that Trump was criminally accused. Months of legal challenges from Trump's team followed, delaying everything and making what seemed like a wild claim: that Trump should have presidential immunity.
However, pointing the finger solely at Garland for letting Trump off the hook displaces blame from those who deserve it even more. McConnell, for example, who engineered Trump's acquittal in the Senate in February 2021 after his impeachment trial for inciting the insurrection; The conviction could have been combined with a vote that would bar Trump from running for federal office. And the right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court, which took seven months before mostly on the side of Trump's claim that he and future presidents are immune from criminal charges for supposedly official acts.
Even if Garland had moved aggressively, there is a good argument that all the delays available to Trump would have made a trial and verdict before the election unlikely. And this fact remains: the final jury (the voters) had more than enough incriminating data available to decide that Trump was unfit to be president again. A plurality decided otherwise.
Still, Garland's performance makes me doubly sad because it ended in Justice instead of becoming to justice.
@jackiekcalmes
