Looking Forward Into The Abyss

David Montgomery gives us a long read at Washington Post Magazine on why Merrick Garland won't fire Trump cultists in the Justice Department, but all you really need are the first three paragraphs.

Merrick Garland, now more than four months into the job of attorney general, is on a quest to slay a monster — a monster that he won’t name and he pretends doesn’t exist. On March 11, his first day, he stood in the Great Hall of Justice Department headquarters and addressed the agency’s 115,000 employees, most watching virtually. It was a homecoming of sorts for Garland, 68, who started at the department as a 26-year-old lawyer in 1979, rising to lead major investigations including the Unabomber case and the Oklahoma City bombing prosecution in the 1990s before spending the last two decades-plus as an esteemed federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “The only way we can succeed and retain the trust of the American people is to adhere to the norms that have become part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee,” he said in his first speech as attorney general. “Those norms require that like cases be treated alike. That there not be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans, one rule for friends and another for foes, one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless.”

What he didn’t say — what he never says publicly — is that there are good reasons the department might have lost the trust of the American people in the past four years. During President Donald Trump’s administration, there wasn’t always one rule of law for all, as when presidential friends Roger Stone and Michael Flynn had their prosecutions massaged and softened; or when former attorney general Bill Barr launched an outside investigation of the investigators to see if Trump was unfairly targeted in the Russia probe; or when Barr spun findings by the special counsel and the inspector general in ways most advantageous to Trump; or when Barr changed procedures so U.S. attorneys could dive into Trump’s false claims about election results before the vote tallies were certified.

But when Garland is asked about questionable actions that took place at the Justice Department during the previous administration, he offers a version of a response that he gave during a Q&A session with reporters in June: “I am not going to look backward.”

 

Eric Holder and later Loretta Lynch did the same thing with Dubya, and here we all are now.

Even if you don't that the next Republican president will put his Democratic predecessor in prison, along with most, if not all, of their cabinet, believe that they will have no problem looking back after Biden, Harris, or whoever may follow them.

It won't be pretty.