Sure looks like Garland blew it....
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/trump-legal-probes-biden-justice-department-garland-rcna240342Acting on a mix of principle and caution, Justice Department officials under former President Joe Biden made a series of decisions that significantly delayed and ultimately may have hampered the federal criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, according to a new book.
The slow decision-making at the top of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department affected two major probes into Trump after he lost the White House in 2020: whether he illegally possessed and obstructed the retrieval of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, and whether he conspired illegally to overturn the 2020 election.
Far from rushing the Trump cases, FBI and Justice Department officials chose to move cautiously and slowly over concerns about the implications of investigating a former and possibly future president, taking pains to insulate the probes from even the appearance of politics.
Details of the debates inside the Justice Department — and their impact on the Trump investigations, which both sputtered for different reasons — were revealed as part of a new book, “Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department” by MSNBC investigative correspondent Carol Leonnig and Washington Post reporter Aaron C. Davis. MSNBC obtained excerpts of the book before it was published.
~snip
Nothing new here. We all followed the blow by blow on this on a daily basis for four freaking years. But seeing the reasoning behind the delays going from DU speculation to black and white in a book is… another kick in the face.
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's damn absurd to me. 
for trained scientists? 
Fuck Merrick Garland.
There was absolutely no excuse for letting Trump walk from any of the above. IIRC, at the very same time these document pics were being published someone else was was handed quite a harsh sentence for having a few classified docs. Our side worries way too much about appearances & here we are.
where have they all gone
Small but dedicated, the reality based Garland Society aims to celebrate and preserve the legacy of America’s greatest, bestest, most groovy and unfairly maligned DOJ official. Argle bargle!
For political reasons. 
Hell, justice was delayed and ultimately denied because Garland wanted to avoid political motivations at all costs.
Ironically, it was this political consideration that resulted in Trump’s 2nd term rather than a full time gig in prison.
Well, neither did I.
Just one more time ... one last time ... I'd like to see Garland get in front of the national news cameras and tell us that "no one is above the law."
It was always so inspiring. 
and rude bullies.
Last edited Thu Oct 30, 2025, 01:12 PM - Edit history (1)
SMITH BROUGHT CHARGES 15 MONTHS BEFORE WE VOTED.
Anyone claiming more time would have resulted in a Trump prosecution, are ignoring the Supreme Court which delayed the trial until right before we voted giving Trump immunities from prosecution not in the Constitution, and assuming that interference was the only delay they could engineer.
The Supreme Court interference prevented Trump from going to trial right before the election, not the prosecutors.
I mean, what is this shit blaming people who were working to prosecute Trump? Acting all superior to the several dozen career prosecutors who fought to get Trump to trial through all of the historically withering challenges to every piece of evidence, subpoena, and testimony; Basically advantaging this screed against the Garland team with the delays the Trump team engineered with compliant courts setting dates of hearing as far into the future as they were able.
And this shit about bringing some lesser charges earlier is the most ignorant bullshit that comes with this fuckery, supposing that a lesser set of charges would survive the court gauntlet better than a well-established prosecution.
Tell us, great internet Garland critics working on your fantasy prosecution, How you get a prosecution without the testimony of his top attorneys and deputies who all filed privilege claims which went through several successive courts packed with republican and Trump appointees, successfully stripping them of their claimed privileges and forcing their testimony.
Hell these fucking Garland critics don't even tell us what they would charge him with, much less explain what evidence and what the state of it was in appeals. But people read their rookie shit and go, oh yeah Garland definitely fucked up.
Here's something, TAKE A GODDAMN MINUTE AND EXPLAIN TO EVERYONE WHAT THE STATE OF EVIDENCE WAS AT THE TIME YOU CLAIM GARLAND SHOULD HAVE HAD TRUMP IN COURT.
DO THAT, OR JUST ADMIT YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT THE ACTUAL PROSECUTION.
SPECIFIC EVIDENCE, AND WHERE IT STOOD AT THE TIME ON APPEAL, BECAUSE IT DAMN SURE WAS ON APPEAL.
Besides all of that, charges Merrick Garland delayed or dragged his feet on the investigation are proven false in the Smith report They persisted because most of the substantive details of the investigation initiated by AG Garland's prosecutors in 2021 were kept secret by DOJ, except for court filings and what the perps revealed.
But now we have a report in which Jack Smith defends the AG against those charges, outlining how delays which the myriad appeals and challenges made by the perps subpoenaed for evidence and testimony often stretched out for months and years, not always overlapping, and stretching out for years, well into the Smith appointment with Garland prosecutors defending those key pieces of evidence and testimony in courts well into his term.
Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.
The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.
Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.
And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.
read: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
Politico touched on this:
You have to wonder what journos and pundits like Carol Leonning are thinking today, trying to decide whether to double down on their false reporting that there was some delay or indecision from the AG about proceeding to prosecute Trump and his henchmen, or equivocate.
Many people inside DOJ strongly believe this . As one told us - “without the Jan 6 committee I’m convinced there wouldn’t have been a DOJ investigation into Trump’s role.”
Like most of Garland's critics, she should actually read people like Marcy Wheeler who has spent the years since that intrepid WaPo reporter wrote the article that was repeated and embellished by countless people to subvert and demagogue the efforts of the AG, including notables like Weissmann who spouted off those exact lies about the Garland's efforts as if he had some inside knowledge of a secret investigatory process; he just read from her article and embellished her misinformation with derision and hyper-concern.
here's Marcy:
(Critics) complained today that DOJ pursued the money trail and suspected communications with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers immediately, both of which theories had solid evidence (likely arising from the mishandled Brandon Straka prosecution and the Owen Shroyer arrest) behind them. The money trail ended up being a dry hole; the comms angle ended up being inconclusive. But that’s the kind of thing Goodman and his ilk were demanding in real time — multiple prongs to pursue the case. Follow the money!
Instead, prosecutors’ most productive 2021 efforts appears to be getting an SDNY judge to allow DOJ to use the existing Special Master review for phones seized from Rudy Giuliani in April 2021 to prioritize obtaining the January 6 content. DOJ started with Co-Conspirator #1, and did so in a way that Trump had limited ability to obstruct. And from there, they seized one after another phone: John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark in June 2022, Scott Perry in August 2022, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman in September 2022, all of which would have had delays (not reflected in Jack Smith’s report because none of those have been unsealed) because of attorney-client, Speech and Debate, or technical exploitation issues, yet all of which would have been necessary given their reliance on encrypted apps. (This post argues that Smith likely didn’t get the content of Roman and Epshteyn’s phones until after he first indicted Trump.) You were never going to avoid getting the co-conspirator phones, because this coup was planned on encrypted apps and all of them fought disclosure. It appears that DOJ opportunistically seized the first of those on the first day there was a confirmed DAG to approve doing so. It is also clear that that wasn’t enough.
But if you’re going to make these complaints about what you read in Jack Smith’s report, you should note what else Smith said. The January 6 Committee work “comprised a small part of the Office’s investigative record,” but before Smith could use anything from J6C, prosecutors first had to “develop or verify those facts through independent interviews and other investigative steps.”
The Office’s investigation included consideration of the report issued on December 22, 2022, by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, as well as certain materials received from the Committee. Those materials comprised a small part of the Office’s investigative record, and any facts on which the Office relied to make a prosecution decision were developed or verified through independent interviews and other investigative steps. During the prosecution of the Election Case, Mr. Trump alleged that the Select Committee and Special Counsel’s Office were one and the same and sought additional discovery about the Select Committee’s work. The district court rejected the claim. See ECF No. 263 at 47 (concluding that Mr. Trump has “not supplied an adequate basis to consider the January 6 Select Committee part of the prosecution team”). Regardless, the Office provided or otherwise made available to Mr. Trump in discovery all materials received from the Select Committee. See ECF No. 263 at 47 (“the Government states that it has already produced all the records it received from the Committee”).
We know from the immunity appendix that Jack Smith had productive follow-up interviews with Bill Barr, Ronna McDaniel, and Jason Miller, among others, to say nothing about more extensive cooperation with Eric Herschmann and Mike Pence’s privilege-waived interview(s).
But validating what J6C did could not start until J6C released transcripts in December 2022, after a 3-7 month delay.
more:https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/01/15/what-jack-smith-didnt-say-about-the-january-6-investigation/
thread:
Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
NEW: Jack Smith defended Garland’s pace, laying out DOJ’s frenetic, secretive efforts to win privilege fights with recalcitrant witnesses — Scott Perry, Mike Pence, John Eastman — that took months.
More takeaways from the Smith report. w/ @joshgerstein
https://politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
related:
Merrick Garland is Getting a Bum Rap
The claim that he is responsible for Trump’s evasion of accountability is clearly wrong.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/merrick-garland-is-getting-a-bum
'The Situation: In Defense of Merrick Garland'
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--in-defense-of-merrick-garland
...one more thing.
Don't just fucking ignore that there isn't ONE actual prosecutor who worked under Garland who has come out with anything close backing up ANY of the critics.
That should make sense to people who bothered to read the Smith report, or to people who should know better who are assuming the Supreme Court ever intended to let the trial occur before we voted again.
Also ask yourself why none of what I posted is ever discussed by critics who rely on the time passed to make their stupid claims without bithering to identify what was going on at DOJ at the time, what DOJ was pursuing, what the appeals and challenges involved; how many; the successful results; and what the evidence gathered and defended had to do with the actual indictments.
That clickbait sophistry from Dilanian is certainly an invitation to attack Merrick Garland along with the Trump administration. That's right. Attacking Garland with bullshit is no better than maga attacking him, assuming that Garland's delays were consequential to anything more than this invented narrative by people who had zero to do with the investigation, and don't even bother to report the details, much less the details of what they're alleging.
The contradictions in this book are stunning, but not unexpected, because you only have to traverse a short distance in this report to find fucking Carol Leoning at the heart of it. She doesn't actually know the details of what was occurring inside DOJ, got it completely wrong, contradicted her own reporting, and now is making money pushing this same false narrative - and you can bet there will be pushback whenever Smith and Garland feel like it.
The book in this report admits "it took more than a year after Trump was defeated for the Justice Department to convene a grand jury to hear evidence in the alleged criminal scheme by Trump to use fake electors to overturn the results of the 2020 election."
It then goes on to claim that "even after that grand jury was launched in January 2022, the FBI debated another 10 weeks before approving a memo formally opening that investigation, further delaying the gathering of evidence. After much “hand wringing” by FBI Director Chris Wray’s leadership team, the memo named the Trump campaign, but not Trump, as a subject of the investigation, the book says."
This gives a completely false impression that the investigation was halted by internal debates between Chris Wray's FBI and DOJ about how to proceed, falsely giving the impression that the investigation had stalled. There couldn't be better proof than that ignorant assumption that people outside the investigation didn't know, don't know shit about what they're gaslighting and clickbaiting people about.
Here's the specious claim in this report:
Even assuming this is true, this report doesn't say what evidence or subpoena, or interview was delayed, or how consequential anything supposedly delayed was to the investigation or prosecution. How the fuck do you make a determination that this supposed delay affected ANYTHING without that detail? It's just fucking bullshit.
Look at the evidence in the indictment and tell us all how any of that was delayed by any of what these authors are gaslighting about. Do that or just admit you don't know shit about what was delayed or what it meant to the prosecution. Don't just fucking bullshit people to kick Garland around. Come correct with actual facts about what the state of prosecutable evidence was at the time.
...here are actual facts in evidence about what was occurring in the investigation since the Fall of 2021:
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/us/politics/trump-investigation-thomas-windom.html
from December 2022:
source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/
...so the financial investigation began in earnest in late 2021. Garland took his oath in March of that year.
He not only handled the Capitol riot prosecutions which resulted in over 1200 convictions, but ran the Trump probe at the same time (is he to blame for the pardons, as well?)
He was already getting cooperation from the riot leaders before he formally turned to the WH, and none of that happened on the spur of the moment.
We need to be real about the challenges for the incoming AG, and stop assuming he cared any less about these crimes than any of us. Almost ALL of the evidence Smith used in the indictments came from his boss's team, and his DOJ defended all of it in myriad, successive courts to make it available to use in grand juries and in courts.
Smith reportedly came onboard a 'fast moving investigation' and inherited over 20 Garland prosecutors who had already gathered more evidence than Mueller had when he took charge of his own investigation.
...you want to know what was happening in the investigation and prosecution? Ignore people who bash Garland along with the Trump regime. Find someone who bothers to provide you with at least as much information about the actual case as I have.
Point blank. You get what's advertised from these anti-Garland screeds. I mean, who is invested in providing more copy bashing the prosecutors, rather than providing actual information about the actual prosecution?
Allowed themselves to be bullied. And not a teaspoon of gumption among them. 
Merrick & Co. may have assumed that after his first term full of lies, incompetence, and malfeasance TSF could never be elected again by a halfway sane electorate. Such an assumption would have meant that there was no rush as they would have had plenty of time to complete the cases before the statute of limitations would run out. Of course you'd have to ask them about it.
