Forget Matt Gaetz, Merrick Garland is already America’s worst Attorney General!

Garland failed our nation!

People can debate all day whether Donald Trump’s headline grabbing pick of Matt Gaetz as his Attorney General will turn out to be good, bad or really ugly. But there is no debate that Merrick Garland was the greatest failure of an Attorney General in our lifetimes. His failure to swiftly hold Trump accountable for his attempted coup and Jan 6 attack paved the way for Trump to return to the White House.

We all saw Trump attempt his coup in real time after the 2020 election from pressuring officials to overturn the election to calling his supporters to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to help “Stop the Steal” with the promise of a “wild” time. As the Jan 6 House committee that investigated both concluded, “The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”

Garland’s focus from Day One should’ve been Trump. Instead, as we learned from reporting from both The Washington Post and NY Times, Garland in essence stopped any investigation of Trump until mid-2022. As The Washington Post reported in June 2023, after Garland took office, “more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election.” Why? As the Post noted, “A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace.”

Backing this up was NY Times reporting in July 2022 that DOJ was not actively investigating Trump until the blockbuster testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the Jan 6 House committee in June 2022. Cassidy electrified the nation with her testimony of Trump’s personal involvement in organizing the Jan 6 rally and inciting the crowd that day--which he knew was armed—over the advice of his own lawyers. It was this testimony almost 18 months after Jan 6 that—per the NY Times--finally “jolted top Justice Department officials into discussing the topic of Mr. Trump more directly.”

True, Garland’s DOJ did actively prosecute those who had physically attacked the Capitol claiming it was a strategy of working the way up from low level actors to higher officials. However, this was not an organized crime case where it’s unclear if there was evidence that connects the top leaders to the lower level criminals. In this case, there was no secret that Trump had led the effort to overturn the election after Jan 6 given we saw it play out very publicly in real time.

At the very least, Garland should have appointed a Special Counsel upon being sworn in March 2021 to investigate Trump.  This was especially demanded given that just weeks before Garland was sworn in, Trump made his first post-Jan 6 political speech at the conservative political gathering CPAC where he teased a 2024 run. At that point, Garland knew Trump was not going to disappear but potentially seek the White House again in 2024. Garland must have understood the urgency of this situation.

However, Garland did not formally reveal to the public that Trump was being investigated until November 2022 when he appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel. The real-world impact of Garland’s failure to swiftly prosecute Trump resulted in a few dire consequences for our nation.

First, Garland helped normalize Trump. The longer there were no charges, the more the GOP began to openly embrace him as the frontrunner for 2024. In addition, the failure to charge Trump allowed corporate media to normalize their cash cow Trump as well. However, if Garland had appointed a special counsel within weeks of taking office in March 2021, then the public—including GOP leaders—would’ve known Trump was being criminally investigated and would likely be charged. This was well before GOP leaders and the base had coalesced around Trump for 2024.

Secondly, Garland slow walking the case undermined all of us who were saying that Trump attempted a coup and was a threat to our democracy.  The longer no charges were filed, the more the message was being sent to our fellow Americans that what Trump did could not have been that serious.

Third, while Special Counsel Smith moved quickly, he still was not able to bring charges until August 2, 2023. By then, we were in the heart of the 2024 presidential race and Trump was far and away the frontrunner in the polls. This gave Trump ammunition to say the entire prosecution was an effort by President Biden to hurt his likely 2024 opponent politically.  Indeed, just weeks after Trump was charged, the first GOP presidential debate was held where even Trump’s GOP opponents slammed Biden for “weaponizing” the DOJ against Trump.

In January 2022, I wrote an article for MSNBC.com on the first anniversary of Jan 6 pleading with Garland to swiftly charge Trump. In that article, I wrote that the Jan 6 attack would not have occurred if Trump had simply accepted his loss. Instead, Trump waged a concerted and illegal effort to overturn the election that included the Jan 6 attack. 

I concluded with the line that if Garland didn’t move swiftly to hold Trump accountable, “I believe historians will count it among the key mistakes that ultimately led to the end of the United States as a democratic republic.”

And here we are.  Our Republic hangs in the balance because of Garland’s abject failure in holding Trump accountable. And what makes this worse is that after Jack Smith resigns—as is expected to happen in the next few weeks— he rightfully has to fear retribution from the incoming Trump administration. He may literally have to even go into hiding with his family for simply trying to protect our Republic by prosecuting Trump for his crimes.

Yet the man who failed our nation, Merrick Garland, will not face those threats or concerns. Instead, Garland can write books, hobnob with his friends at the Federalist Society and rake in big bucks as a partner in a big Washington, D.C. area law firm.  Forget Gaetz, Garland is already the worst Attorney General of the modern era.

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I made the very point of this article Saturday on MSNBC:

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