Garland Loses His Excuse For Inaction
Will he act against Trump? Or does he go down as Roger Taney 2, the second Attorney General to assist in the destruction of the republic.
From Bloomberg News today:
Merrick Garland Has More Than Enough to Investigate Trump
A federal judge’s clear-eyed assessment of the former president’s intent to overturn the 2020 election adds to the pile of existing evidence.
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Okay. Garland has to act. If not, he joins Roger Taney as the Attorney General who did the most to destroy the US republic. Meanwhile the clock ticks. If the GOP wins the House, as it almost surely will, it’s all over. Is that what Merrick is waiting for? Hopefully I am so wrong about this man. I mean, I am sometimes wrong. I spent a half-century venerating Bobby Kennedy. Now I kind of think the country would have been better off if Nixon won in 1960…except we’d never have gotten LBJ and civil rights. I was also wrong when I voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary. I have 100 others like that. Hopefully I’m wrong about Garland. And Biden too (not a fan). Time will tell. Too bad America doesn’t have time.
From Bloomberg: (not me). By Timothy O’Brien
A federal judge thinks that former President Donald Trump likely committed fraud — and probably knew it — when he and one of his lawyers, John Eastman, plotted to block Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election so Trump could hold on to power.
So how much longer will it take Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about that attempted coup?….
Perhaps Garland has already gone down that path. But there are no outward signs that he is investigating Trump with an eye toward a possible criminal prosecution. He has every reason to be circumspect, of course, but he has no reason to ignore the mounting evidence of Trump’s crimes. The latest reminder of what’s at stake came in Monday’s ruling from David Carter, a U.S. District Court judge in California.
“Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Judge Carter noted in his Monday ruling. “The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.”
While ordering Eastman to turn over relevant email correspondence with Trump to the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Carter was also clear-eyed about the scope of his and the committee’s powers.
“This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit,” he wrote. “At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of ‘legal theories’ gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs.”
The Jan. 6 committee is an investigative body, not a civil or criminal court. It only intersects with the court to adjudicate disputes over information or testimony it needs to complete its work. The committee can also make criminal referrals to Garland, but Garland doesn’t need their push to start his own investigation. He can do that if he thinks evidence supports it. Besides, the committee said in a court filing earlier this month that it thought Trump and Eastman committed crimes by plotting to obstruct congressional ballot counting and block the transfer of presidential powers after the 2020 election.