Acting on a mix of principle and caution, Justice Department officials under former President Joe Biden made a series of decisions that significantly delayed and ultimately may have hampered the federal criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, according to a new book.
The slow decision-making at the top of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department affected two major probes into Trump after he lost the White House in 2020: whether he illegally possessed and obstructed the retrieval of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, and whether he conspired illegally to overturn the 2020 election.
If you come at the King, you best not miss.
Biden’s DOJ could have not investigated Trump and let him retire to Mar A Lago in obscurity.
Or they could have effectively investigated Trump and either convicted him or lost the case years before the 2024 elections began.
But the DOJ were cowards. They feared to prosecute Trump for political reasons, but they were also afraid to tell Biden they wouldn’t prosecute Trump. So they hemmed and hawed and hid their cowardice behind the veil of principle.
And they gave themselves the worst of both worlds. They made themselves look corrupt and compromised by politics without actually accomplishing anything. They chased Trump for four years and gave him nothing but free publicity in the process.
It amazes me, over and over, how blessed Trump has been by the incompetence of his enemies. Everything he is and everything he has was handed to him by the Democrats.
I don’t for a second believe the DOJ was scared of disappointing Biden. The choice of Garland alone is a signal to not go too fast or too hard. He’s almost uniquely the worst choice you could make if you wanted Trump to suffer consequences, both in terms of temperament and optics. And on top of that we’re to believe Biden, who explicitly campaigned on restoring normality and healing the county, gave no counsel at all during the selection process or any time over the two years before Garland passed the buck.
Restoring normalcy would have meant pardoning Trump the way Ford pardoned Nixon.
No, I think Biden knew he only won because Trump fucked up on COVID. He was terrified of facing Trump in another election and wanted Trump ruined. But I think he was also afraid too many principled Democrats would cross the aisle and vote with Republicans to impeach him, if he was too blatant in his political prosecution of Trump.
So he picked Garland, who was more concerned with covering his own ass and not rocking the boat than anything else, and told Garland “get Trump but cover our asses first”. And Garland surrounded himself with people more concerned with covering their own asses than anything else, and they fucked up the investigation over and over again because they were both too scared to challenge Trump and too scared to challenge Biden.
And so we got four years of headlines of “FBI tries to do this to Trump” and “FBI tries to do that to Trump” without any actual effect, and Trump got to call himself a victim of political persecution without ever suffering any consequences.
God, I hope Trump revokes all Biden’s pardons. Garland deserves jail time for sheer incompetence.