The America of 2025 will be unlike any other in American history. It will be marked by further economic growth for the billionaire class, unprecedented public and political corruption within Trump’s White House, and further deterioration of the middle class and a continued push rightward. Amidst the search for a rational answer why this happened, there are numerous culprits; Democrats searching for a moderate road, the American populace’s misogynist and racist thinking, a failure at having an actual primary, and the billionaire class supporting Donald Trump. The potential reasons are endless.
However, there is another culprit; Merrick Garland and his failure to lead the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) through one of the most important and tense times in the nation’s history.
When Biden was selecting Attorney Generals to lead the DOJ in 2021, he had numerous possibilities. Top advisors were considering “former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick” in addition to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez and former Associate Attorney General Tony West. Of his choices, Biden chose Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland had immense experience coming into government; a graduate of Harvard Law, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brennan in the late-1970s before working in Big Law and the U.S. Department of Justice until 1995, being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 2016, he was nominated by President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court, yet this was blocked by Senate Republicans (despite such a choice being a win for them). Long seen as a centrist and moderate voice, historically being a moderator for The Federalist Society and a clerk for the longtime liberal voice of the court, Garland, in the eyes of some Supreme Court reporters and experts, “provided a remarkable contrast to the Trump way and demonstrated that a restorative agenda has begun”. Nonetheless, others lamented that Garland would be a “competent governance that is more moderate … bland and competent without being particularly interesting or progressive”.
In reality, however, Garland’s failures as America’s top cop cannot be more profound and arguably have helped usher in the second Trump administration that is upon the American people.
From the beginning, Garland’s DOJ was clearly not going to take a progressive or even center-left choice to justice, but a moderate, almost conservative view. Garland is immensely pro-business, his prior supervisors and benefactors at the DOJ being top litigators for companies like BP and Amazon or defending city police departments undergoing police brutality cases. This is reflective in Garland’s administration as they fought “student debtors in bankruptcy court and appealing rulings that erase or reduce borrowers’ student debts” only reneging after public outcry. Further, in the murder case of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, it is alleged that “federal charges came amid pressure from health insurance industry leaders to make an example out of Mangione”.
With other criminal prosecutions, Garland’s ineffectiveness becomes much clearer. With Matt Gaetz and the House Ethics Committee report, many criticized Garland for failing to charge Gaetz with any crimes despite “text messages and testimony” detailing the Republican Congressman’s penchants for illicit drugs, prostitution, and underage sex; instead it is likely that Gaetz’s profile as “a prominent ally of President-elect Donald Trump” aligned with Garland’s “desire to avoid a political firestorm”. With the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists, while that was immensely successful from the very beginning, investigators, prosecutors, and internal memos showed that;
“more than a year [passed] before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election … [with DOJ leadership, directed by Garland] charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him”.
Not only did Garland neglect to fully investigate January 6th’s connection to the Trump White House, but he also opened special counsel investigations into Joe Biden’s classified document retention to appease Republicans (who will never respect the rule of law regardless). Even further, despite his next Special Counsel (a Trump appointee no less) not finding any reason to charge Biden, Garland released the counsel’s investigative report which made “an armchair diagnosis of Biden’s mental acuity” in what some called a display “of political cowardice and poor judgment”. At critical moments of public outcry to investigate Trump and January 6, Garland instead cautioned staff “against making statements, taking actions, or charging anybody [in a way which may] advantage or disadvantage any candidate or political party”. On a more national scale, Garland neglected to aggressively or even moderately pursue charging red-state Attorneys General and their Governors with civil rights violations over their treatment of migrants, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary of such mistreatment. Finally, the fact that the New York Attorney General and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, not the DOJ, brought charges against Trump and the Trump Organization is a further indicator of Garland’s desire to not pursue justice against the now president-elect.
Dean Obeidallah, a former trial attorney and journalist, assessed in late 2024 that due to Garland’s inattention “it took [Special Counsel Jack] Smith until August 2023 to gather evidence and build the case against Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election” with the first charges only coming after “the first GOP primary debate”, effectively elevating dubious, baseless claims of corruption or malfeasance by Republicans. In towing the middle line so strongly and often, being incredibly sensitive about upsetting any Conservative voice regardless of the situation, it is no wonder that many individuals question if Garland was himself a conservative in disguise.
Elie Mystal, a former litigator and columnist for numerous political and legal news sites, wrote for The Nation that Garland “was always a pro-cop moderate institutionalist nominated by Barack Obama to replace Antonin Scalia in a bid to appease Mitch McConnell and get Republican votes … He was never for a second the kind of no-nonsense prosecutor needed to hold Republicans accountable and defend democracy”. Jesse Wegman, a lawyer and journalist on the Supreme Court, wrote similarly that under Garland “the Justice Department has treated Trump better, not worse, than everyone else” despite claims to the contrary by his supporters. Finally, perhaps most damningly, President Biden himself has said (behind closed doors) he regrets making Garland his AG due to many of the same issues highlighted by Obeidallah, Mystal, and Wegman.
However, some commentators defend Garland; Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of Lawfare and an admitted personal friend of Garland, wrote “the search for an explanation for Trump’s election in the individual decisions of law enforcement figures is wrongheaded … The sooner we stop looking for investigative “but for” explanations in the justice system and start facing the reality of his attraction to tens of millions of people, the sooner we can hope to begin counteracting those attractions”. Brushing aside that Wittes is an admitted longtime friend of Garland’s, Wittes’ argument using a hypothetical timetable brushes aside the fact that Garland was effectively avoiding the Trump issue for a substantial portion of his time in office. While Garland is not the cause of the second Trump administration, his actions and stances indicate he did next to nothing in countering the crimes of a former president.
Garland is not the worst Attorney General the U.S. has seen; for him to claim that title, he would need to contend with the likes of Alberto Gonzales, Bill Barr, and John Ashcroft, yet the level of inactivity and a lack of competent, forceful response to the most prescient dangers in American society displayed under his tenure will remain some of the most serious missteps in American jurisprudence. One can easily imagine how different the United States would be had Biden selected a more politically aware and astute attorney to lead the department, say Doug Jones or Sally Yates, veterans of receiving right-wing hate, understanding firsthand the Trump administration’s corruptness and lack of desire to follow the rule of law. Not only were they quite likely to be confirmed by the Senate, but any similar moderate or timid action with them at the helm is near unthinkable. In Garland’s tenure, he effectively helped to legitimize Trump’s actions as commonplace, seemed intent on appearing as apolitical as possible (which only served to help the extreme tendencies of the GOP and his own personal reputation), and was so focused on not making the DOJ not appear supportive of Biden, that he abandoned the pursuit of justice in all corners.
In early 2023, journalists, working to uncover more about the Attorney General’s life, interviewed some twenty individuals who knew Garland writing the man is “cautious but decisive when the time comes, moderately liberal but not dogmatic, politically engaged in private but neither partisan nor outcome-oriented in his professional life”; this is not the kind of individual that America needed in the aftermath of Donald Trump and January 6th. Garland’s tenure as the Attorney General will not be judged kindly by historians and will quite likely be a prominent death nail in America’s coffin.
