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.
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.