I was surprised when I first saw
this article from MSNBC and CNN contributor Dean Obeidallah declaring Garland to be “America’s Worst Attorney General.” Had it finally dawned on someone in our corporate press that smearing parents as “domestic terrorists” and prosecuting political opponents of no less stature than a president might have been a bad idea? (No, it hadn’t.)
The failure for which Garland deserves infamy, according to Obeidallah, was
not trying hard enough to throw his boss’s presidential opponent in prison. For that insufficient zeal, he says Garland is “the biggest failure of an attorney general in our lifetimes.”
Raiding a Former President’s Home
One of the most outrageous moments of those prosecutions was the FBI’s “unannounced” 9-hour raid on the Trumps’ personal home at Mar-a-Lago, in which around 30 agents who were authorized to use “deadly force” descended on the residence and dug through everything from Mrs. Trump’s
closet to the president’s safe. A few days later, Garland
admitted he had “personally approved” the raid. Two years later, Smith’s team admitted to
tampering with the evidence they seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Covering for Biden’s Classified Docs Scandal
At the same time Smith was trying to throw Trump in prison for misuse of documents, Garland’s DOJ helped Joe Biden get away with the improper retention of classified records. When records from Biden’s tenure as vice president were found in his garage and at the Penn Biden Center, the FBI played nice. Not only were none of Biden’s residences raided, but the FBI let Biden’s attorneys go through the documents first
without agency supervision. A special counsel selected by Garland to investigate Biden
declined to charge him because he was a
sympathetic “elderly man with a poor memory” whom it would be difficult to convince a jury had committed a crime that “requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Ignoring a Congressional Subpoena …
When Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden for his likely crimes involving classified documents, his reasoning — combined with Biden’s public exhibition of dementia symptoms — increased concerns about the mental capacities of the man ostensibly running the country. Facing demands to release the audio tapes from Hur’s interviews with Biden, Garland
refused to make them public to the American people. Even when Congress issued a subpoena to Garland for the audio, he ignored it.
… While Imprisoning Trump Officials for Ignoring Subpoenas
Meanwhile, the Garland DOJ successfully sought jail time for Trump officials Peter
Navarro and Steve
Bannon for refusing to answer congressional subpoenas. Announcing Bannon’s indictment, Garland crowed that the charges “reflect the department’s steadfast commitment” to the “rule of law.”
When the House of Representatives voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress for ignoring
his subpoena, however, Garland’s own Justice Department “quickly said it would not prosecute Garland for contempt,” as Axios
reported at the time without a hint of irony.