'The villain here is Merrick Garland': White House upset with AG’s handling of Biden probe

09 February 2024

If President Joe Biden wins a second term in November, he's not likely to keep Attorney General Merrick Garland in his current role, according to a new report.

Politico reported Friday evening that sources close to Biden who spoke anonymously to protect their positions say the president is privately "grumbling" about Garland's leadership of the Department of Justice. He's reportedly particularly upset about Garland's oversight of special counsel Robert Hur's and his hands-off approach to Hur's report summarizing the classified documents probe. Even though Hur ultimately ruled that no criminal charges were warranted, the special counsel — who was initially appointed as US Attorney for the District of Maryland by then-President Donald Trump in 2018 — made several unflattering observations about Biden's mental faculties that Republicans have seized on.

"This has been building for a while," one of Politico's sources said. "No one is happy."

When Biden first appointed Garland to helm the DOJ, he did so out of a sense of duty to restore the DOJ's reputation as independent of the presidency, telling Garland that "you are not the president or the vice president's lawyer." However, some Biden aides say that in his decisions to select Trump-appointed prosecutors as special counsels in both the classified documents investigation and the probe into Hunter Biden (led by US Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss), Garland's attempts to go out of his way to not appear biased often led to over-correcting toward conservative prosecutors.

"What Democrats do is they bend over backwards not to look partisan, and then they end up hiring people that are partisan but in the other direction,” an unnamed Biden donor told Politico. "There’s no question in my mind that the villain here is Merrick Garland."

Other complaints about Garland centered around his hesitancy to launch an investigation into Trump, which Bidenworld said may have already concluded by now had he started sooner. However, the nail in the coffin for Garland may have been his decision to name Hur as special counsel in the classified documents investigation.

"I had refused to criticize [Garland] but appointing Hur, who is obviously a Republican tool and who issued what I think is an irresponsible report which violates DOJ standards, was a mistake," Democratic consultant Robert Shrum said. "I think Garland will be criticized by historians. We’ve had some terrific attorneys general and some not so good attorneys general. And I think he’s going to rank in the not so good."

Click here to read Politico's report in full.

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