Merrick Garland Is Damned If He Does & Damned If He Doesn't
And He's Got Nobody But Himself To Blame For The Fix He'll Soon Find Himself In
Unlike the sham January 6 Committee, which was never able to find a real crime to refer Trump or his close associates for and ended up making a shallow and pretty much worthless referral of the former President to Attorney General Merrick Garland on it’s way out of power and into the dustbin of history, these new House Committees are investigating real and actual crimes.
Understand: these new House Committees don’t have to do months of investigations to determine whether chargeable crimes occurred or not; they’ve already been HANDED the documentary evidence of the crimes thanks to whoever ‘let that sink in!’ when Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
And then promptly embarked on a spree of documentary revelations via the Twitter Files, revelations that led **directly** to these hearings in this new House by these new Committees. As well as directly strengthening the case of the plaintiffs in Missouri vs. Biden.
I cannot stress how **unusual it is** for a serious Congressional investigation into real and actual malfeasance by government agencies and officials to **begin** already having in its possession damning documentary evidence. Usually most of the investigation is spent trying to **pry** the evidence from uncooperative government witnesses who are doing their enthusiastic best to HIDE the key evidence from the committees.
Many people are watching a vast sea change that’s been started by the most unusual events surrounding the launch of this new House. The 15 rounds of voting for new Speaker Kevin McCarthy was followed by a radical new rules package that is already causing ripples across the fruited plain of these United States.
Is Garland really about to engineer for himself a national scandal in which he gets called out for having very publicly refused to prosecute Democrats for the exact same crimes for which he very ENTHUSIASTICALLY prosecuted two key Republicans?
Of course, I’m talking about the recent trials of Trump associates Steven Bannon and Peter Navarro. Bannon’s already been to trial while Navarro’s has been delayed indefinitely.
Both men very publicly defied subpoenas for documents and for their testimony under oath before Rep. Bennie Thompson & Liz Cheney’s January 6 investigative House Committee. After months of court wrangling, the DC court confirmed that the J6 House Committee’s subpoenas carried legal force and that defying them was a criminal act. Attorney General Merrick Garland then agreed with that finding and had both Bannon & Navarro indicted & arrested and sent to trial.
Bannon was tried by a Washington DC jury and - according to the legal precedent established by the DC federal court - was convicted of defying the House subpoena. He was sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine. [Bannon is currently appealing his conviction and is free on bond while his appeal is pending]
Its commonly assumed in Conservative and MAGA news media that when the new House Committees begin issuing subpoenas to witnesses who will not voluntarily appear to testify, these committees will send referrals to the Justice Department and then…AG Garland is going to very publicly ignore those referrals. It’s expected that even as Bannon appeals his conviction & Navarro’s trial approaches, Garland will stall and delay taking action on any new criminal referrals sent to him by the now-Republican-controlled House committees.
I don’t think this is going to go as many of these political commentators expect it to. After all, these are the same commentators who didn’t see the 15 rounds of voting for House Speaker coming, or the new rules package, or new Speaker Kevin McCarthy zealously following through on the promises he made to the newly powerful and vocal MAGA/AF wing of the GOP.
Does Jim Jordan strike you as a PASSIVE person who’s just gonna roll over and take a ‘no’ from Merrick Garland on any criminal referrals he sends to the DOJ on people who defy subpoenas from his House committee? Comer, the guy who’s chairing the Oversight Committee, I don’t know much about him, but I’ve had my eye on Jordan for quite awhile.
The second Garland decides that defying a House Committee investigative subpoena is in fact NOT A CRIME after all, Jordan is gonna move the House to IMPEACH his ass. I believe this without a single doubt.
Garland taking such a position would also automatically place the ongoing prosecutions of Bannon & Navarro in serious legal jeopardy.
Such a blatant, in-your-face and clearly demonstrated double-standard would place Garland in an even more vulnerable position than he’s already in. This is what most of the people assuming Garland will do this are missing.
Garland taking the position that it was a crime to defy subpoenas when Bannon & Navarro did it for a Kangaroo Court looking for fake crimes like the January 6 Committee was, and then turning right around just a few months later now that the control of the House has shifted to the GOP to proclaim it’s **suddenly not a crime after all** to defy a Congressional subpoena does not strengthen him or raise his status in any way. It dramatically weakens his position as the Attorney General.
Garland has **already** had to do several things that have him under sustained attack from both directions.
He has **refused** to fire or interfere with Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax & how it affected the 2016 Presidential election. Might I remind everyone that Garland’s boss, Joe Biden, played a key role in the criminal conspiracy to pursue Gen. Michael Flynn? It’s actually highly embarrassing to the Biden administration that Durham’s been allowed to expose so much of what the Obama administration & it’s partisans inside the DOJ, FBI, CIA, State Dept. were doing during the run-up to that 2016 election and then what they continued to do once Trump took office.
He just had to appoint his OWN Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden in Robert Hur, after Biden was discovered to have multiple caches of classified documents at a think tank and his home in Delaware. So not only has Garland been strictly hands-off of the Durham investigation he inherited, he now very studiously has to be hands-off with a second Special Counsel investigation of his boss that he was forced to initiate himself.
As I mentioned earlier, the J6 Committee, in it’s very last week of it’s almost 2 years of investigations, finally coughed up an absurdly weak criminal referral of Donald J. Trump and handed it off to Garland. Garland’s been sitting on that referral for almost 3 months now. And don’t think the rabid Left hasn’t noticed he’s stalling. But the fact is there’s no ‘there’ there, and Garland knows it. If he was going to **invent** a crime to prosecute Trump for, he’d have done it long before this referral from the J6 Committee landed on his desk. [See the Mar-A-Lago raid over supposedly ‘still classified’ documents, for instance. THAT is the kind of thing Garland could have helped engineer]
There are limits to what Garland can legally do to run interference for an increasingly frail & unpopular President in Joe Biden, who’s past is catching up with him as Donald J. Trump, the Teflon Don himself, has launched his campaign for the 2024 presidential nomination.
Garland must NOT get caught overtly obstructing justice, because that would open him up to the charge of having violated his oath of office to remain strictly neutral, and he would then face impeachment.
And obstructing justice is **exactly** what Garland would be doing if he refuses to act on criminal referrals from these new House Committees who are plainly seen to be investigating serious criminal conduct on the part of government officials who paid corporate proxies to engage in mass censorship of American citizens as a key part of a brutal and underhanded form of national narrative control on a variety of controversial and sensitive subjects. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the RussiaGate hoax, COVID-19 and related vaccine injuries, as well as the blatant theft of the 2020 election, among other subjects.
Garland would leave himself wide open to being impeached by a House that is currently gearing up to impeach the current Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Garland’s job as the top law enforcement official at the DOJ is to see the laws are faithfully and **impartially** enforced in this country. If he refuses to act on new criminal referrals sent to him, he makes himself an even MORE blatant target for impeachment than the DHS Secretary, who is very likely to be impeached for refusing to enforce the immigration laws at the US Southern border.
There is no question whatsoever that once these new House Committees finish their investigations, they are going to issue criminal referrals to the DOJ. People can talk up how useless they think making such referrals is to Garland, but such referrals will be coming forth nevertheless. These committees already have sufficient documentary evidence in their hands to support several criminal referrals, and during the course of their investigations, they very likely shall expose more evidence that will lead to an even greater number of referrals.
The key coming development is that during the course of these Committee investigations, we’re undoubtedly going to see defiance of several House subpoenas, which will trigger the sending of the first criminal referrals from the House to the DOJ that will end up placing AG Garland between a rock and a hard place.
No matter what he does at this point, Garland is in trouble. If he doesn’t act on the referrals, he exposes himself as a blatant partisan and faces impeachment as over half the country calls for his head. If he acts on the referrals, Democrats, the Fake News and the 1/4th of the country on the Left howls for his head for [checks card] following the established law & precedents.
The die was cast the moment Garland decided to proceed with indictments against Bannon and Navarro. There is no going back at this point, unless the DC federal courts suddenly are presented with a case that allows them to COMPLETELY REVERSE THEMSELVES on the question of if defying a House subpoena is a federal crime.
But such a reversal would place the court’s recent decision from just last year on center stage as both Bannon and Navarro would not only have to have their prosecutions dropped, they would have a very good case for suing for suing the DOJ. .
I simply don’t see both the DC federal court and Garland publicly reversing themselves on this issue this fast. . It would take enormous brass balls to weather the self-inflicted storm that would be unleashed by such a transparent partisan maneuver. Suddenly saying at this point, “Oh hey, never mind. Defy all the House subpoenas you want. Sorry about that, Steve & Peter, you’re free to go. No hard feelings, right?”
I have been observing Garland since he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama, and he does not strike me as a guy who relishes the limelight and getting his hands dirty in very public partisan fights. Far from it. He’s just another soulless bureaucrat who often takes the path of least resistance.
As demonstrated by his immediate retreat on being called out for having targeted concerned parents at school board meetings, this is not a guy who gets in people’s faces and slugs it out over partisan politics. He may be a snake, but he’s a snake that prefers the dark, not being forced into the light to do his dirty work.
He knows all too well these House Committees digging into this incredible censorship scandal within the US government over the past decade or more have the goods. They already have much of the real evidence to prove the crimes. Does he have the brass balls to stand in the House’s way and defiantly obstruct its investigations for the next two years?
We’re going to find out. My current take is that he’ll shrug helplessly and say “Gee folks I sure wish hadn’t established that precedent with the Bannon & Navarro cases, but I did, so what can I do about it now?” and then let the established process play out while he maintains he’s only a disinterested overseer.
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As a fan of good writing, I like how you went through the entire logic tree, nuked branches with receipts to verify the core (and title) of the article.
This was another article from Brian Cates that explained important nuances of the Federal processes which most people would not understand, and in a way that made the article interesting to read.. I enjoyed !