One of my best friends in high school had a habit of saying "Damn, son" when he thought one of our crew did or said something particularly spectacular — by high school standards, of course.
I had the same reaction to George Washington Law School professor and Fox News legal analyst, Jonathan Turley, and a new column in which he absolutely filleted embattled Attorney General Merrick Garland.
That is, if one can fillet someone with a meat cleaver.
In the Saturday column, titled "The Corruption of Attorney General Merrick Garland," Turley explains how he first "enthusiastically supported" Garland’s confirmation, only to come to the realization that after the Biden nominee was confirmed as AG, he was no more than another partisan political hack:
When he was nominated, I believed that claim and enthusiastically supported Garland’s confirmation. He was, I thought, the perfect man for the job after his distinguished judicial service as a moderate judge.
I was wrong. Garland’s tenure as attorney general has shown a pronounced reluctance to take steps that would threaten President Biden.
He slow-walked the appointment of a special counsel investigating any Biden, and then excluded from the counsel’s scope any investigation of the massive influence peddling operation by Hunter Biden, his uncle and others.
Turley also laid out the differences, as he sees them, between Garland's handling of Trump's criminal indictments involving classified documents in Florida and election interference in Washington D.C. and Hunter Biden's so-called "gun trial" in Delaware.
Regarding the differences in the way Special Counsel Jack Smith approached Trump's cases versus Hunter's, Turley observed (emphasis, mine):
Garland ... allowed Special Counsel Jack Smith to maintain positions that seem diametrically at odds with past Justice Department policies. This includes Smith’s statement that he will try Trump up to (and even through) the next election. It also includes a sweeping gag order which would have eviscerated free speech protections by gagging Trump from criticizing the Justice Department.
While Garland has said that he wants to give the special counsels their independence, it falls to him to protect the consistency and values of his department.
[...]
Garland’s most brazenly political act has been the laughable executive privilege claim used to withhold the audiotape of the Hur-Biden interviews. The Justice Department has not claimed that the transcript is privileged, but only that the audiotape of Biden’s comments is privileged. This is so logically disconnected that even CNN hosts have mocked it
Yet in Biden's trial, said Turley:
Garland’s tenure as attorney general has shown a pronounced reluctance to take steps that would threaten President Biden. He slow-walked the appointment of a special counsel investigating any Biden, and then excluded from the counsel’s scope any investigation of the massive influence peddling operation by Hunter Biden, his uncle and others.
However, it is what has occurred in the last six months that has left some of us shaken, given our early faith in Garland.
[...]
Special Counsel Robert Hur found that Biden knowingly retained and mishandled classified material. However, he concluded that Biden’s age and diminished faculties would make him too sympathetic to a jury.
It was less sympathetic than pathetic, given that this is the same man who is running for re-election to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. More importantly, Garland has not made obvious efforts to reach a consistent approach in the two cases by dropping charges based on the same crimes by Trump in Florida.
I'm not an attorney but is not a jury's job to decide how to vote in a trial and based on what factors — not a prosecutor's? And isn't it a prosecutor's job to ensure justice is served, by prosecuting individuals accused of crimes? Yes, and yes.
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Finally, Professor Turley said he has long been a critic of Garland’s failure to order a special counsel to dig into the extensive evidence of corruption surrounding the Bidens — AKA "The Biden Family Business":
As I stated in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, there is ample evidence that Biden lied repeatedly about his knowledge of this corruption and his interaction with these foreign clients.
Yet when it comes to Trump, it's almost like Garland's Justice Department has a 24x7x365 crack, special-alert unit dialed in on all things Donald Trump or anyone near him does, says, or tweets.
Nah, the arguably most corrupt attorney general in the history of the United States wouldn't do that, would he?
Would he? Hello?
Update: This article has been edited for clarity.
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