The Patriot Post® · House GOP Grills Garland on Weaponization

By Douglas Andrews ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/107391-house-gop-grills-garland-on-weaponization-2024-06-05

Merrick Garland never did get that Supreme Court seat he so wanted, but to his great discredit, he’s become the most vicious, most vindictive, most hyper-partisan attorney general of our lifetimes.

Mostly, he’s been able to act with impunity, but not yesterday. No, yesterday, our Framers’ vision for the separation of powers was on full display as Garland was hauled before the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee for five hours of testimony. Not that swearing an oath to testify truthfully means anything to Garland, but still. And not that the sort of Gosh, Merrick, you’re just the dreamiest! questions being asked by the committee’s lapdog Democrats were really questions at all, but still. The committee’s Republicans did their constitutional oversight duty, and Garland was the worse for it.

As the Washington Examiner reports: “Garland, 71, was asked about everything from gun control to the potential for terrorist attacks stemming from record levels of illegal immigration, but most of the questions sent his way centered on court cases involving former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and embattled first son Hunter Biden.”

And rightly so. For nowhere — with sincere apologies to concerned parents, pro-life champions, and “radical-traditionalist” Catholics everywhere — is our grotesquely politicized two-tiered justice system more on display than in the deeply disparate treatment currently being meted out to our former president compared to our current one.

Think about it: Donald Trump was just convicted on 34 felony counts for what amounts to an incorrectly labeled bookkeeping entry, while untouchable Joe Biden heads an international influence-peddling crime family and enjoys zero accountability.

As Fox News funnyman Greg Gutfeld sardonically observed, “Most Americans see the contrast. Trump got nailed on a made-up law because of who he was, and [Hunter] Biden was able to escape real laws because of who he was,” adding, “The Bidens are the Corleone family but with hair plugs.”

Jim Jordan, though, isn’t laughing. “Justice is no longer blind in America,” said the Judiciary Committee chairman to Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “Today, it’s driven by politics. Example number one is President Trump.” Jordan continued: “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said, ‘I cannot see a world in which I would indict Trump and call Mr. Cohen as a prosecution witness.’ But that’s exactly what he did after President Trump announced he was running for president.”

Another big takeaway from yesterday’s proceedings, according to Jordan, was when House Judiciary members tried to determine whether there was any communication or coordination between Garland’s Justice Department and Fulton County DA Fani Willis or Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Garland says he doesn’t know whether there was communication between the offices, but he refuses to cough up or even acknowledge the existence of any such communication. One might interpret that as a confession.

Then there’s the matter of the audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents interview with Joe Biden. Garland won’t cough that up either, even though he’s already shared a transcript of the interview. Why is this important? Because, as Jordan notes, “We’ve already seen the White House alter the transcripts. The transcripts are different than what President Biden may say when he’s out giving a speech, reading from the teleprompter. We have caught them making adjustments to that before. So we want the audio tape because we want the best evidence to do our constitutional duty to do oversight.”

Put less gently: The audiotape is obviously devastating. It no doubt puts Joe Biden’s dementia and decrepitude on full display, and sharing it with the American people would likely be a death blow to his reelection prospects.

Garland, of course, won’t be persuaded by Jordan’s oversight argument because Democrats don’t believe in the Constitution — at least not when push comes to shove. So, the audio recordings have been subpoenaed, but Garland will continue to stonewall.

What can Congress do with an intransigent AG? They’ve already held him in contempt of Congress but to no avail. Perhaps the next step should be incarceration. After all, as North Carolina Congressman Dan Bishop asked Garland, “What happened to [Trump advisers] Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon when they decided to defy a subpoena of the Congress?”

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz masterfully grilled Garland on another deeply troubling matter — a matter in which interest has grown since Trump’s hush-money conviction in Manhattan: The “remarkable downstream career journey from the DOJ in Washington, D.C.” to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office just in time to help oversee the prosecution of Donald Trump. “Bragg,” as the Washington Examiner continues, “plucked Colangelo from his post at the DOJ to help with white-collar prosecutions in December 2022. Colangelo had little experience in that field, but he did have a wealth of knowledge about Trump.”

No executive branch collusion here, folks. Move along.

This, of course, is the same Merrick Garland who, in a speech in early 2022, said, “We do not investigate or prosecute people because of their views.” Uh-huh.

“In their efforts to save ‘democracy’ — a concept that’s been stripped of any meaning — Democrats have justified deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies.” So wrote columnist David Harsanyi, who joins me in thinking that Garland should be impeached. Harsanyi added, “For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice but a way to exact political justice.”

Indeed. And to what avail, you ask, is all this grilling from House Republicans? Jim Jordan has proposed an appropriations package that would “defund the lawfare activities” of state and federal prosecutors leading “politically sensitive investigations,” such as those being conducted by Trump special persecutor Jack Smith and DAs Bragg and Willis.

Perhaps it’s not much, given the scope and scale of the outrages, but it’s not nothing.

Updated to include a telling exchange between AG Garland and Florida Republican Matt Gaetz.

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