Biden Angry That Lawfare Was Too Slow to Destroy Trump
Hot Air ^ | 30 Dec, 2024 | David Strom
Posted on 01/01/2025 5:34:53 AM PST by MtnClimber
In my Sunday Smiles essay, I riffed on this Washington Post retrospective on Joe Biden's presidency and how it soft-pedaled Biden's disastrous policies and all the important questions about who was really in charge over the past few years.
I reserved for today the most important "revelation" in the story: Biden considers one of his biggest mistakes the choice of Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland, in his view, was not political enough.
It may seem odd to normal people that anybody could think that Garland was anything but a political hack over the past four years, but seen through the eyes of Democratic Party operatives, you can see how such an absurd idea seems normal.
During the 2020 presidential transition, Biden’s attorney general selection pitted some of his closest aides against each other. Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) and Mark Gitenstein, both longtime friends of Biden, advocated for the president naming then-Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) as attorney general, arguing that as a politician he would be better able to navigate the bitterly partisan moment.
But Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, pushed for Garland. He stressed that Garland — a federal judge with a sterling reputation for independence and fairness — would show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks.
Biden was persuaded, and some Democrats believe the decision had devastating results. Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election. (Others blame the Supreme Court and a Trump-appointed judge in Florida for repeatedly siding with the former president and delaying the cases; the Justice Department declined to comment.)
Biden's preference for a sitting Democrat senator over a judge with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court makes sense. Garland was not averse to playing politics, but he wanted everything to have at least the patina of being lawful. A politician whose elevation to the slot of Attorney General would have been less concerned about painting within the lines.
What sticks out about this tidbit, though, is not Biden's regret but the reason for it: his strategy for defeating Donald Trump depended upon using the Justice Department to prosecute Trump to tie him up during the campaign and use allegations to undermine Trump.
On the one hand, you could say, "That's obviously true," but on the other, this amounts to an admission that Biden's election strategy was to weaponize the Justice Department. SNIP
TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: corruption
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1 posted on 01/01/2025 5:34:53 AM PST by MtnClimber
To: MtnClimber
Trump should show no mercy in going after the real crimes in the Biden administration. None.
2 posted on 01/01/2025 5:35:05 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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