Forget Matt Gaetz.
Merrick Garland Is America’s Worst Attorney General.
His abject failure to hold Trump accountable doomed usLet people debate whether President-elect Donald Trump’s headline-grabbing pick of former Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz as his attorney general will be good, bad or really ugly. But there is no debate in my mind that President Joe Biden’s chief prosecutor, Merrick Garland, is already the biggest failure of an attorney general in our lifetimes.
We are where we are today because Garland failed spectacularly to act swiftly to hold Trump accountable for his illegal efforts to stay in power four years ago for inciting the violent Capitol insurrection that resulted in deaths, injuries, destruction of property and devastation to our democracy. By turning a blind eye to those crimes for as long as he could, Garland paved the way for the election of a disgraced felon who should not have been on the 2024 ballot. Thanks to Garland, Trump is storming back to the White House vowing revenge.
Garland’s focus from Day One should have been to appoint a special counsel to investigate the former president for an insurrection that everyone saw him incite. Trump – still ginned up from the Jan. 6 violence – had just spoken at the conservative political gathering CPAC and hinted he would run again. Garland should have realized – as the rest of us did – that Trump was not going quietly into the night.
Instead, Garland slow-rolled any Justice Department investigation, waiting nearly a year and a half after taking office before finally appointing veteran prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel in November 2022 to probe Trump’s mishandling of classified materials and his incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Why did Garland wait? “Wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace,” The Washington Post reported.
The Justice Department didn’t even start investigating Trump in earnest until former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s June 2022 blockbuster testimony to the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection “jolted” Garland’s office into discussions, according to The New York Times.
Garland helped normalize Trump. The longer the Justice Department stalled before investigating the former president, the more the GOP and the media embraced Trump as the Republican front-runner for 2024.
Finally, someone among the literati, or whatever they are, sees Garland the way I do. He is deeply corrupt and a traitor, pure and simple. I saw Garland's critical failure early on, in May 2021, as a matter of incompetence and timidity. But it wasn't until Sept. 2024 that I came to realize that Garland was neither incompetent nor timid. He was corrupt, complicit, treasonous, audacious and competent in destroying the rule of law and the DoJ. Garland did not fail to hold DJT accountable. He refused.
Well, now it's too late to do squat. Garland greatly helped DJT get back in power. He was arguably necessary for that. Sadly, there will be no accountability or penalty for him and his treasonous betrayal of the rule of law.
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Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary says
‘there is no climate crisis’
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy is fossil fuel executive Chris Wright — who has misleadingly claimed on LinkedIn that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”Wright is a staunch evangelist for fossil fuels who consistently rejects mainstream climate science. .... Wright is the CEO of Liberty Energy, a major oil and gas service provider that launched during America’s fracking boom more than a decade ago. Around 10 percent of total US primary energy production comes from wells fracked by Liberty, according to the company.
In a video posted by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation last year, Wright refers to “irrationally restrictive policies against the production of oil and natural gas” that “do nothing to change the demand for oil and natural gas,” he claims. “Our business today is the most profitable it’s ever been. As I say, I’m one of those people needlessly enriched by [the] bad energy policy environment we live in today. I don’t celebrate that. In fact, I adamantly oppose it.”Trump campaigned on a Republican platform that says simply, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
Keep your eye on the propaganda: Notice that Wright saying there is no “climate crisis” and regulations “do nothing to change the demand for oil and natural gas” is subtle, powerful radical right authoritarian propaganda. That dark rhetoric is designed to distract from inconvenient facts that (i) global warming is real, (ii) most Americans are concerned about it and want to do something about it, and (iii) there is demand for clean energy, but it is not yet available, in large part because people like Trump, Wright and the GOP vehemently oppose environmental regulations. In other words, Wright’s rhetoric is a pack of cynical, sophisticated misdirection intended to deceive the public to keep the profits flowing to elite authoritarians.
Serious erosion of environmental regulations by Trump was predictable, so I predicted it, accurately so far (“The Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted and neutered by then [11/1/26]. International climate agreements will be terminated.”)
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It looks like the guy who has made it perfectly clear he doesn’t care about federal law is violating federal law. Oh, and also he’s about to be the president of the United States.
Donald Trump and his campaign are currently in violation of the Presidential Transition Act, a federal law that coordinates and funds the transition of power from one administration to the next.
The PTA has a few components that must be submitted by the Trump campaign—and so far, the president-elect’s team hasn’t handed over a single one.
Trump has yet to submit a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration, which would theoretically articulate an ethics policy pledging not to hire individuals with conflicts of interest to assist with its transition. The document would provide $7.2 million to fund Trump’s transition, and was due at the beginning of October.
It’s become increasingly clear the president-elect has no intention to submit one. That’s possibly because the PTA also requires candidates to disclose all of their private donors, and places a $5,000 cap on individual donations to the transition.Trump has also failed to submit security clearance requests for members of his administration, with each appointment more disturbing than the last.
Last week, the Department of Justice said that it was ready to “process requests for security clearances for those who will need access to national security information.” Trump’s top advisers have previously suggested that the president-elect hand out security clearances without FBI vetting.
Further erosion of the rule of law by Trump was predictable, so I predicted it, accurately so far.
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In retrospect - it’s not prescience, it’s common sense
Looking back on my predictions, there’s not much prescience in them. Honestly. Trump is just (1) continuing to do the things he clumsily tried to do the last time he was in power, and (2) repeatedly told us he would do it again before the 2024 elections. It’s not a mostly matter of predicting the future. It is mostly a matter of knowing what Trump did and listening to him saying he will do it again. But this time he will do it again with less clumsiness and more ferocity.
Q: Do predictions of future actions and outcomes based on solid evidence of (i) current political circumstances, and (ii) Trump’s past behavior and intent constitute, mostly prescience/intelligence or mostly old-fashioned common sense?
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