As what’s left of the Biden administration winds down, I’d like to offer an end-of-days reminder: Joe Biden wasn’t just a terrible president.
His Attorney General Merrick Garland was an equally terrible leader of the Department of Justice.
Garland, you may recall, was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly a few months before the 2016 election.
Republicans sat on Garland’s nomination, maintaining that the seat should be filled by a new president.
We were told that this was hideously unfair and partisan, especially because, as the Obama administration and its friendly media repeatedly assured us, Garland was a moderate, a nonpartisan straight shooter, a person with a first-rate judicial temperament: honest, just, fair and wise.
Garland didn’t get the seat, which wound up being filled by Neil Gorsuch. Four years later, when Joe Biden came into the Oval Office after Donald Trump’s (first) term, he nominated Garland to be his attorney general.
Consolation prize? Perhaps.
But Garland went on to spend his entire time as AG demonstrating to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he is anything but honest, just, fair and wise.
Let me be clear (to use an Obama phrase): Garland has been a dishonest, unfair, partisan hack. And none too wise, either.
As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told the AG in hearings about the FBI’s war on political opponents, “Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.”
Those hearings involved Garland’s inexplicable decision to hurl federal law-enforcement resources at parents who spoke against critical race theory and unpopular transgender policies at school-board meetings.
In response to a letter from the left-leaning National School Boards Association, which described those meetings with lurid language but scant evidence of any real threats, Garland ordered the FBI and the Department of Justice into action against these “domestic terror” threats.
It turned out the Biden White House was talking to the National School Boards Association about the matter before its letter was even sent, the Washington Free Beacon reported, raising questions of collusion between the administration and outside “activists.”
The FBI also infiltrated traditional Catholic congregations — all while leftist groups were promoting riots and terror in cities across America, unhindered by the feds.
Garland’s Justice Department showed less pity to grandmas praying outside of abortion clinics than to actual domestic terrorists who were inciting riots and trying to burn federal buildings.
Biden’s AG has also presided over the absurd “lawfare” prosecutions of Trump. He approved the FBI SWAT raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, where agents pawed through Melania’s underwear and left bogus classified-document covers lying around so as to produce photos that gave the false impression that Trump had, well, left classified documents lying around.
To add to the outrage, special prosecutor Jack Smith, who Garland sicced on Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, had to admit to the court that his office had . . . mishandled those very classified documents, mixing them up in ways that disadvantaged Trump’s defense lawyers, then falsely representing that the documents were exactly as they had been received.
Garland prosecuted former Trump official Peter Navarro and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, sending both to jail for months
But when Garland himself was held in contempt of Congress, he did not, surprisingly, bring charges against himself, or appoint a special prosecutor to objectively investigate.
Garland was charged with ignoring a congressional subpoena regarding its probe of Biden family business dealings.
Hey, ignoring a congressional subpoena is what he jailed Navarro and Bannon for! That doesn’t sound very judicious or fair.
Well, no surprise. Garland just followed the lead of Obama’s attorney general and “wingman,” Eric Holder, who also let himself off the hook when charged with contempt of Congress.
In a bid to polish up Biden’s rusted image, The Washington Post on Sunday reported on the president’s private complaints that Garland should have been faster to prosecute Trump, so that he could have staged a “politically damaging trial before the election.”
Funny, as I recall Trump had a lot of trials before the election — and they all seemed to drive his approval levels up, not down.
In any case, this seems like an admission, as law professor Ann Althouse observed, that “Biden intended to use the Justice Department to destroy his political adversary!”
Indeed. That now seems to have been Garland’s role throughout this administration, which — in the name of “protecting democracy” and our institutions — has only undermined our democracy and corrupted our institutions.
That’s Biden’s sorry legacy. And Merrick Garland’s, too.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
