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Democrats have reportedly taken to blaming Attorney General Merrick Garland for President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power.

The thinking among Democrats, according to HuffPost, is that Garland “waited too long to appoint a special prosecutor, which allowed Trump and his legal team to stall [his legal cases] long enough for Trump to win the presidency a second time.”

And once Trump won the presidency again, all bets were off.

“Garland only started the prosecution after he was in effect forced to by the report of the Jan. 6 committee and the criminal referral,” former House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler said. “The evidence the Jan. 6 committee used was available from the beginning.”

“Had they proceeded with those prosecutions, I think he would have been convicted and we’d have a different president now. Merrick Garland wasted a year,” he added.

Reps. Bernie Thompson and Zoe Lofgren, two Democrats who served on the Jan. 6th committee, share Nadler’s frustration, as do Sens. Adam Schiff and Tina Smith.

“I didn’t realize that they were not looking at the whole picture,” Lofgren said. “I think they were taking a look at the foot soldiers.”

Schiff meanwhile complained that the DOJ “moved with expedition when it came to the people who broke into the building, but were those at a higher level, they waited almost a year on.”

“That was a fatal mistake,” he added.

Smith concurs.

“I think the department was so focused on being kind of by the book, and being so clear that there wasn’t any political interference,” she said. “I really worry that, you know, he’ll become president, and he’s going to pardon a bunch of people and [a] great sort of whitewashing of what happened will continue.”

President Joe Biden has been reported to feel similarly.

“In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump,” The Washington Post reported last month.

Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly didn’t indict Trump until August of 2023, over two years after the Jan. 6th riot. The DOJ then had to deal with the Supreme Court’s decision this past summer granting Trump immunity for actions taken as a sitting president.

And then of course Trump won the election.

“Trump won the 2024 election before the case could finish up and he could stand trial,” HuffPost complains. “Since longstanding Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, the DOJ dropped the case after Trump’s November victory, allowing him to escape responsibility and walk back into the White House.”

In fairness to Garland, he told his underlings in 2021 that they could pursue cases against Jan. 6th defendants “wherever the evidence led, even if it implicated the former president,” HuffPost notes.

But sadly for him, his underlings were unable to find any actual evidence linking the Jan. 6th rioters to Trump.

What Garland and his crew didn’t initially do is consider building a case based on Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was tarnished or based on his alleged attempts to coerce election officials into “finding” him votes. Not until special prosecutor Jack Smith entered the picture did this angle emerge.

HuffPost admits though that even if Garland had moved quickly, there’s a high likelihood the Supreme Court would have still protected Trump by slowing down the process.

Plus, there are some Democrats who don’t blame Garland at all, citing Trump’s popular-vote victory in the 2024 presidential election.

“This isn’t about the DOJ — this is about Trump being successful in rewriting history,” Sen. Peter Welch complained. “He’s validated the folks who attacked the Capitol, and I don’t think a month earlier, a month later, six months earlier, that would have made a difference.”‘

“The reality is the American people reelected him after that. Who would have thought that? Trump insisted that this was a peaceful demonstration, continued to insist that the election was stolen, he hasn’t backed down from that at all ― and he got reelected,” he added.

The amazing thing is that Trump won despite polls alleging that two-thirds of voters believe he had “a lot” or “some” responsibility for the Jan. 6th riot. Indeed, 70 percent of these voters still chose him anyway.

Vivek Saxena
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