The Hill/X Merrick Garland
President Joe Biden and other top Democrats think he erred in picking Merrick Garland for attorney general.
The reason: Garland didn’t wage enough lawfare against then former President Donald Trump to keep him from winning reelection.
The revelation in The Washington Post suggests that the White House orchestrated the lawfare to cripple Trump’s second presidential bid, but failed because Garland didn’t do enough.
In a related development, three far-left federal judges rejected Trump’s appeal of a lower court jury’s ridiculous $5 million judgment against him pursuant to columnist E. Jean Carroll’s dubious claim that Trump assaulted her in a department-store fitting room.
DOJ Too Slow
The Post’s offering opens with the strange idea that Biden had a “lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy,” as the headline said, despite Trump’s threat to democracy being the main narrative from Biden and Democrats for four straight years.
And “in his presidency’s final chapter, Biden has mused about whether he should have handled some decisions differently.”
One of those decisions was picking Garland, who apparently didn’t use the Justice Department as a privately run Star Chamber vigorously enough to destroy Trump. The startling admission that Garland blew it shows that Biden and the Democrats expected the new attorney general to do what conservatives have accused him of doing, albeit more slowly than the Democrats would have liked.
Biden and his party mates wanted Garland to destroy Trump. And they also expected him to protect Boy Hunter, he of the Laptop from Hell. Recall that Biden, the Democrats, and 51 former intelligence agents falsely said the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
“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, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments,” the Post reported:
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.
In other words, Kaufman and Gitenstein expected a viciously partisan Democrat to be attorney general so he could be pushed to go after Trump — never mind the law and judicial ethics.
Why Did Biden Pick Garland?
That raises the question of why Biden picked Garland. Answer: Because chief of staff Ron Klain believed picking Garland would be good for DOJ. His “sterling reputation for independence and fairness … would show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks,” as the Post put it:
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.)
Those facts comport with the “election interference” case in Georgia, a White House operation from which unethical prosecutor Fani Willis was removed last week. A source told Breitbart that a Biden puppeteer was “pulling all the strings” in that case.
Carroll Case: Federal Court Lawfare
The Post analysis of the final days of Biden’s disastrous presidency dropped two days ago, and before the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s appeal of the U.S. District Court’s verdict in the Carroll case.
Carroll sued Trump for sexual assault and defamation. Carroll claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at the ritzy Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. She sued for defamation because Trump called her claims a “hoax.”
A jury awarded Carroll $5 million. In a second defamation case, a jury awarded her $83.3 million.
In today’s ruling, three far-left judges appointed by Biden and President Barack Hussein Obama — two women and one Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong — rejected Trump’s claim that the lower federal court permitted the jury to hear inappropriate evidence.
Trump argued that the jury should not have been permitted to hear the infamous Access Hollywood recording of his claim that he grabbed women’s genitals without warning. He also argued that two women who claimed that Carroll told them about the assault should not have been witnesses. Plus, the lower court judge allowed the testimony of two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them.
However, the far-left judges wrote:
We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings. Further, he has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial.
Strangely, Carroll’s story sounds awfully similar to an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Carroll told The New York Times and CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump didn’t rape her. She told the Times that the encounter with Trump was a “fight.” She told Cooper that some people think rape is “sexy.”
The U.S. District Court judge, Lewis Kaplan, didn’t permit Trump to introduce the Cooper interview as evidence.
Though Carroll claims Trump assaulted her in 1996, she confessed in 2012 that she was a “massive” Apprentice fan referring to Trump’s reality program on NBC that ran from 2004 to 2017.
Trump received “an overwhelming mandate” from American voters on November 5, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said. Those voters
demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax, which will continue to be appealed.
Hate-Trump Democrat Reid Hoffman, founder of the little-used LinkedIn social-media website, funded Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump.
