The Garland Question- Did He Drop the Ball On J6?

Four Years Later, What Could Have Changed?

As we look back at the destruction of four years ago, we can’t help but be frustrated that they all pretty much got away with all of it. Even those already in jail are going to get off.

We can’t avoid the thought that somehow, the Department of Justice could have done more.

Okay, let’s look at that- what were they supposed to do, again?

Yes, we know, the FBI was supposed to arrest all of the coup conspirators. All of the insurrectionists. All of the sitting Congresspersons who participated in it. They were all supposed to be charged with sedition or insurrection, and become ineligible to ever serve in any office again.

Trump was supposed to be convicted on impeachment, barred from office, and arrested immediately after leaving office for insurrection and election fraud, as they already knew all about the fake electors.

Had any Democrat plotted and executed any of this, that’s what would have happened.

For US Attorney General Merrick Garland, though, the law is specific and binding. He had to tie actions to US legal code, and sedition and insurrection are not easy charges to make. They were able to make it stick for Proud Boys leaders, but pinning it on Trump was another matter.

But, we live in a world now where Republicans have carte blanche to do and say as they please, legally, socially, and publicly. With billions of dollars in donors and all of the major networks defending them and promoting their conspiracy theories about the Democrats, Republicans were given blanket permission to rewrite history and the Constitution, in real time, in front of everybody.

What if Garland had announced charges on Jan 21, 2021?

Trick question. It was a couple months later til he was in office. So, let’s say, had he done it by May 1st?

We wanted him to. He seems to have had enough evidence. There was plenty of credibility in the charges.

But, sadly, once Trump was acquitted for a second time by the wildly partisan Republicans, the pressure on the FBI and DOJ ramped up like nothing else we’d ever seen before.

And while Trump says it constantly- ‘like you’ve never seen’, it’s his actions and the Republicans party’s criminal complicity that we’ve never seen. And it has already corrupted the rule of law at the top of the government- the Supreme Court.

Specifically, the Federalist Society-placed majority, or, as we not so lovingly call them, the ‘FedSoc 6’.

Garland was not about to ruin his case by rushing it, but he had to deal with the completely new precedent of a blatantly criminal president being vehemently defended over publicly witnessed crimes by his political party, many of them involved in the planning and execution of them.

Garland would have had to arrest and indict so many of the Republican House and Senate that it would have given Democrats the majority in Congress.

This is the accusation and criticism that Garland had to face every day.

So, his strategy was to go after the top, first by following the money, which is a standard starting point, especially when your quarry is a crooked billionaire.

But, the investigation had begun. Not loudly, but seriously. If you paid attention to more liberal news outlets, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace, you heard about these developments. NARA publicly announced their discovery of the fraudulent electors, and their forwarding of it to the FBI.

Simply put, with the entire Republican echo chamber drowning him out, it didn’t matter what Garland was doing. Had he acted more quickly, no doubt he’d have been sued and the FedSoc 6 would have taken him down.

Waiting until the Jan. 6 Committee had reached its conclusion was not a bad idea in itself, but it was hampered by the fact that it took so long to form the Committee, due to Republican shenanigans, like trying to place people being investigated on the Committee.

Lord knows, if Jim Jordan had been on it, every question or comment out of his mouth would have been lies, propaganda and ridiculous accusations. We know this because he’s never said anything else out loud.

Remember, for a second, where Garland was supposed to be- on the Supreme Court. He was eminently qualified for that, as a successful appeals court judge, who had been confirmed unanimously for that post.

President Biden may have thought he was compensating Merrick for McConnell’s Supreme Court nomination block.

So, we can argue that Garland was a poor choice for AG, because, as a jurist by nature, he might be too cautious. However, that would require ignoring the fact that he was a federal prosecutor, and even oversaw the Oklahoma City bombing case. Not to mention the mountainous pile of shit that Trump and Republicans were dumping on everybody. Any Attorney General was in for a tidal wave.

With no evidence whatsoever to prove their conspiracy claims, and with an egregious amount of publicly known evidence proving their crimes, Trump, Republicans and the right wing media put as much pressure as possible on law enforcement and even more on Biden and the Democrats, accusing them of doing the cheating, being wildly criminal and stealing the election, all lies that they still tell every day.

But, what if it hadn’t been Garland? What if we had a different AG?

Same thing.

Once Mitch McConnell acquitted Trump by design for the second time, the onus was on the Democrats to prove, constantly, over and over, what everybody had actually seen.

You can’t make this shit up.

Trump and his cronies always knew that they would have to face repercussions. They had one plan- appeal everything to the Supreme Court where it was in the bag for them.

So, once Jack Smith was appointed as Special Prosecutor, the conga line to the SCOTUS began.

Now, this is the part that no one, including Garland, could control;

With the most insane level of public judiciary corruption ever seen in America, all of Trump’s charges came in some way under the unscrupulous authority of Federalist Society judges, placed for exactly this contingency, as everyone on the right knew that Trump was committing crimes, and was going to continue to commit crimes.

Sometimes the federal judge was honest, and it had to go to the FedSoc 6.

And while the SCOTUS FedSoc 6 were absolutely corrupt in their decisions, gutting the power of the 14th Amendment and placing Trump, personally, far above the law, we can’t forget or dismiss the poster girl for judicial corruption- Aileen Cannon.

Remember? 11,000 executive documents, over 300 of them classified, secret or top secret NDI, including 45 ’SCIF only’ files, nuclear info, deployment info, foreign ally secrets- and Cannon did fucking backflips to get him off.

But, the truly damning act- when we knew she was totally corrupt- was when Trump filed with the court that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to take the docs. The PRA says nothing like that, in fact, the exact opposite, and he had lied about it in an official court filing.

A non-corrupt judge would have rejected the filing as invalid and considered sanctions for lying to the court. That’s because the first thing a real judge would do is read the damn PRA. It’s bloody obvious- everything goes to NARA and there’s protocols for what he can have back, when and how. Top secret docs belong to the agency that sent them, not the recipient. A real judge would have rejected all of Trump’s motions and tried this case inside of six months.

Cannon, however, accepted the false argument, even requiring Smith to write potential jury instructions that acknowledged it, in fact, hypothetically, telling the jury ‘we charged him but he’s allowed to do it, so let him free’.

[Post Pub Update] And she’s done it again, blocking the release of Smith’s Year End Report on the Trump cases.

You’re Smith and Garland, and you’re like ‘WTF- I can’t even!’

Because it’s already surreal and warped at the very forum where they have to validate their charges. They might as well be going after the Queen in Wonderland.

Had proceedings for either this or his insurrection charges begun in 2022, nothing would have changed except the FedSoc 6 would have immunized him earlier.

As of May, 2021, the FBI had already begun asking for the missing docs. Nothing would have changed unless somehow Cannon had not been chosen for the case. It still would have taken some time, but, it likely would have gone to trial by 2023.

Instead, it ended with Cannon dragging it out with facetious rulings and ultimately dismissing it by accepting yet another lie in a court filing- Trump’s false assumption that Smith had been hired illegally.

Again, did Garland drop the ball by not appealing and asking for recusal from the district?

We’d like to think that would have worked, but that circuit is overseen by Justice Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt of the FedSoc 6. Can’t blame Smith or Garland for not trusting that avenue.

Every Republican, every FedSoc judge, and every right wing pundit was already planning and working to immunize Trump from prosecution.

That meant fucking with every case from the top down, and they did. It meant demonizing Biden and the Dems as widely and frequently as possible and they did. It meant lying outright every day and they did.

And, it worked. They have beaten the law and pummeled the Constitution into submission. Trump returns to office unburdened by his crimes, protected from further charges, and more emboldened to do whatever the hell he wants than anyone since Nero and Caligula. (Whatever you do- no one is to tell Trump about Caligula and the statues.)

And, speaking of the Constitution, the GOP’s Project 2025 makes a shambles of it. Fascism is coming, and it wears orange makeup and a dead weasel on its head. (We’re not going through this weasel thing again, are we?) (The ASPCA said it’s okay as long as we didn’t kill it ourselves.) (Oh, ok, then.)

The upshot is this- we can be disappointed with Garland because he didn’t do enough, but it mostly seemed that way because he was reticent to expose himself and the case to the attacks from Republicans. Work was happening, but he seems to have been trying to keep the echo chamber from affecting it.

Would we be happier with him if he had publicly called Trump out as criminal? Yer darn tootin’.

Would a different AG have done more?

Impossible to know.

We like to think they would have, but the same circumstances would have pressured them to keep mum until they had the overwhelming proof needed to convict in court.

And, you may have noticed that when Smith got that evidence, he publicized it in his filings and charging documents. We’re now hoping that he or Garland will release all of that evidence because we all know damn well that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump and the Republicans are criminal beyond belief.

There is still room to criticize Garland, especially in regard to his allowing Weiss to handle the Hunter Biden case. He intended, like AGs and directors generally do, to appear unbiased by letting the previous administration’s SP handle it. Positions that transcend presidential administrations are often given this deference. Biden had given it to FBI director Wray, appointed by Trump, who is somehow not being held to task over this, as Garland is.

But, Garland should have been more involved, as it was evident from the outset that the minor felonies Hunter was being charged with had been atoned, and that the entire case was invented to create propaganda about imaginary Biden corruption.

And, unfortunately, we do have a strike two, though, in his allowing Robert Hur to do a malevolent hit piece on Joe Biden under the guise of ‘investigating’ the docs found in Biden’s former office and garage. While basically admitting that there was no criminal intent or action, he still nonetheless unnecessarily painted Biden as a demented old fool, unable to remember things like the date of his son’s death. It was all taken out of context and used as defamatory propaganda in right wing media.

Garland should have put a stop to both of them.

But, he didn’t, and President Biden had to pardon Hunter after FBI-nominee Kash Patel bragged that he would continue to go after him. Meanwhile, Trump is going to pardon all of the Jan 6 offenders that have been arrested, tried or sentenced.

We can be disappointed that Garland didn’t do more, and we can be apprehensive about whether Smith will publish, but the one thing that we cannot forget is that they were facing a political fascist takeover by Trump, Leonard Leo and the FedSoc 6, the Heritage Foundation, the Republicans, Fox News, Putin’s trolls and the conservative judiciary- an intentional upending and decimation of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the US government.

Criminals are going to run the country. They planned it, they cheated, lied and stole their way into it. They plan to cheat, lie and steal their way through it.

Billions of dollars have been spent to sane wash Trump and to vilify Biden, Garland, Smith and a host of other Democrats as comic-book level monsters. The last five years have seen the widest, deepest, most vicious use of deceit and propaganda since the 1930s in you-know-where.

We all thought the AG had more power to just jail people. Lord knows, Trump gave us the impression that they could. But, when Dems are in power, they have to stick to the law while applying the law, and when the defendants have unlimited resources to abuse the law against the prosecutors, constantly filing facetious motions and appealing them, contesting subpoenas, every trick in the book to delay or derail their cases, and all at some point enabled by FedSoc judges, even at the very top?

Neither Garland, Smith or even Biden could have been able to stop that.

But, somehow, though, we must.

C.2024 Cousin B