Critics were right about Merrick Garland — and this new book proves it

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian got his hands onan advanced copy of a new book that claims to reveal the nature of deliberations inside the US Department of Justice after the 2020 presidential election that “may have hampered the federal criminal investigations” of Donald Trump.

In their forthcoming book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis report on former US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s principled, cautious and slow decision-making (Dilanian’s adjectives) in two cases: the one about state secrets found in his Florida mansion and the one about the conspiracy to use fake electors to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.

Garland moved with exceptional care for fear of establishing a “legal precedent” that might affect past and future presidents, according to Leonnig and Davis. What emerges from their book, Dilanian said, is a picture that “runs contrary to the GOP allegation that the federal indictments of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith were the product of a Democrat-led plot to weaponize the Justice Department. Instead, the book depicts example after example of the opposite happening.”

Dilanian goes on to cite some of those examples from the book. They are damning. They show time and again that Garland’s Republican critics were wrong. Leonnig and Davis write that Garland made sure the cases were free of even a hint of political consideration. He “had chosen to impose a very conservative interpretation” of DOJ policies. He froze the cases prior to the 2022 midterms in the belief that no action should be taken near or during elections. “Trump was not even on the ballot and had not yet declared his presidential candidacy for 2024,” Dilanian said. “But Garland nonetheless imposed the freeze.”

While Garland’s slow-walking of key decisions may have hampered the investigations of Trump, there’s still a smell of approval rising up from Dilanian’s piece (and perhaps from the book, too, though I have not yet read it) – despite the “handwringing,” Merrick Garland did things right.

He and Smith “faced criticism then from Democrats who wanted them to move faster, but no evidence has surfaced showing that anyone from the White House imposed that sort of pressure.” Moreover, Dilanian wrote, though we are months into Trump’s second term, his allies “have not produced evidence establishing that any decision in the cases was made for political reasons or that any White House official or Biden partisan had any influences over the investigations."

Just to be clear, Dilanian only suggests that Garland did things right. But even so, I don’t know how anyone could even accidentally suggest as much. It’s plain that Garland did not ensure cases were immune from the appearance of politics, because every choice appears to have been made with a single question in mind: “what will Donald Trump say about this?” or “what will the rightwing media say about this?”

Though it appears to be true that no one from the White House pressured Garland, he was still pressured. That’s clear. More precisely, Garland allowed himself to be, as he placed more importance on his reputation, and that of the Justice Department, than he did on justice.

I don’t know what the consequences would have been if Garland had gone all Judge Roy Bean on Trump, but I do know the consequences of the choices he did make. Due to the extraordinary delays that came from, as Dilanian said, “straining to give the former president every benefit afforded under DOJ norms and policies,” the US Supreme Court had time to strike down an early 2024 effort to keep Trump off state ballots. Colorado’s highest court had decided on 14th Amendment grounds that Trump’s role in the J6 insurrection disqualified him.

After the Supreme Court overturned that decision, it was clear that no court was going to stop Trump before the election and that voters were suddenly burdened with the responsibility of deciding his verdict on their own. As I said at the time, the court’s Republican justices put democracy on a collision course with the law. “If he loses, he’s guilty of all crimes committed against democracy. (Perhaps the justice system would then proceed.) But if he wins, he’s innocent. He will have been granted absolution for everything he’s ever done. Everything. There might never again be such a thing as a crime if the president does it. He could have his opponents murdered, safe in the knowledge that a majority approves. Democracy will have obliterated the rule of law.”

I concede that the rule of law has not been obliterated. It still applies to you, me and everyone we know. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that if the law can’t bring down a rich and powerful criminal who acts with total impunity for it, there’s no point in the law. This conclusion is so obvious that it’s somewhat surprising to see a big-foot reporter like Dilanian not only suggesting that Garland did things right but also falling into the same trap Garland fell into.

Just as Garland privileged Trump’s interests in how he chose to proceed with the two criminal cases, Dilanian privileges Trump’s interests in how he chose to write about Leonnig and Davis’ book. He decided to maximize how it proves Garland’s Republican critics were wrong while minimizing how it proves his liberal critics were right.

In doing so, Dilanian prioritizes lies – that Garland “weaponized” the law against Trump – while de-prioritizing the truth – that Garland’s public image as an impartial administrator of justice was more important to him than the impartial administration of justice.

It counts as political if it’s the left that’s demanding justice. It doesn’t count as political if it’s the subject of investigation who’s howling about “injustice.” And such allegations are not political, because they seem more or less normal, and they seem more or less normal, because the rightwing media complex has made them so. Long before Garland was even confirmed, Trump’s media allies had already begun establishing in the public’s mind a “truth,” thus making all subsequent efforts by the attorney general to reveal the truthseem political by comparison.

As with most political discourse, rightwing propaganda is nearly totally absent from the question of whether Merrick Garland did things the right way, which suggests he absolutely did not. It also suggests that future attempts to hold rich and powerful men accountable for their crimes must learn from his mistakes or be doomed to repeating them.

When the end comes, there must be a purge of the government. The guilty must be hunted down like the J6 insurrectionists were. Reforms must be made – abolishing ICE or packing the US Supreme Court, for example – to make sure no traitor is again able to hijack the republic. That’s a very tall order made much taller by the fact that rightwing propaganda will continue to work in the shadows if the impartial administrators of justice continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.