It’s one thing when some sourpuss scribe or partisan pol accuses our nation’s chief law enforcement officer of “corruption.” But it’s quite another when a constitutional law professor known for his moderation and evenhandedness does the same.

To be fair, George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley didn’t accuse Merrick Garland of taking bribes to protect the Bidens. But he did use the word “corruption” to describe Garland’s legal treatment of the first family. Which is close enough. “There is a certain corruption of judgment,” said Turley, “that is evident from [his refusal to release the audiotape of Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur] and other decisions by Garland since he became Attorney General.”

Garland has invited this criticism even as he denounces it. Last week, he took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post to whine that the “unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end.”

Fair enough. But what about all the founded attacks? What about the DOJ’s targeting of concerned parents, pro-life champions, and “radical-traditionalist” Catholics everywhere? What about the two-tiered system of justice that describes the deeply disparate treatment currently being meted out to our former president compared to our current one? Think about it: Donald Trump was recently convicted on 34 felony counts for a nondisclosure agreement that a rankly partisan judge and jury said was incorrectly entered as a legal expense. Thus, Trump is now a convicted felon due to an improperly located bookkeeping entry, while Biden has for years led an international influence-peddling crime family and now enjoys zero accountability. And Garland seems somehow mystified by the outrage.

Turley, though, isn’t mystified at all. He writes:

I have long been a critic of Garland’s failure to order a special counsel to look into the extensive evidence of corruption surrounding the Bidens. As I stated in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, there is ample evidence that Biden lied repeatedly about his knowledge of this corruption and his interaction with these foreign clients.

As for that audio recording of Hur and Biden, it’s clear that Garland is hiding it behind a phony “executive privilege” standard that doesn’t exist — not when the printed transcript has already been made available to the American people. That printed transcript should be just that — a faithfully printed transcription of the two men’s conversation. But Garland’s behavior betrays that it isn’t. Otherwise, why not just release it? Why allow yourself to be held in contempt of Congress unless there’s much more at stake?

What we can reasonably intuit, then, is that Garland is keeping from the voting public an audiotape that is obviously devastating; an audiotape that no doubt puts Biden’s dementia and decrepitude on full display; an audiotape that he knows would be a death blow to Biden’s reelection prospects.

In this respect, it’s a New York Post bombshell by other means. The Biden-Hur audiotape is the 2024 electoral version of Hunter’s laptop. And Garland’s refusal to cough it up is akin to the FBI’s collusion with Big Tech and Big Media to suppress the laptop story just before the 2020 election. In short: It’s more election interference from a weaponized Department of Justice.

Regarding Garland’s rank partisanship — partisanship that became apparent to us long ago — Turley offers a bit of a confession:

Since his appointment, Garland has repeated a mantra that he is apolitical and would never yield to the pressures of politics or the White House. When he was nominated, I believed that claim and enthusiastically supported Garland’s confirmation. He was, I thought, the perfect man for the job after his distinguished judicial service as a moderate judge.

I was wrong. Garland’s tenure as attorney general has shown a pronounced reluctance to take steps that would threaten President Biden. He slow-walked the appointment of a special counsel investigating any Biden, and then excluded from the counsel’s scope any investigation of the massive influence peddling operation by Hunter Biden, his uncle and others. However, it is what has occurred in the last six months that has left some of us shaken, given our early faith in Garland.

To this better-late-than-never realization, we say to the Good Professor: Welcome to the party, and keep up the good work.