Merrick Garland's Fraught Legacy

[Celerity]

https://www.notus.org/newsletters/merrick-garlands-fraught-legacy



Our conversations with Dem-friendly legal observers over the past few weeks have found a lot of Merrick Garland defenders. His role as sacrificial SCOTUS lamb in 2016 earned him points among these Democrats. And as Donald Trump 2.0 gets closer, people have been more focused on Garland as a standard-bearer than on the political failures of the Trump investigations.

That was until this week. After the DOJ announced Wednesday it would not publicly release the classified documents portion of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, we’ve heard a lot of bafflement. DOJ has said it won’t release that part of the report while the classified documents case against Trump’s associates remains ongoing. (On Thursday night, an appeals court cleared the way for the DOJ to release the report.)

Some of Garland’s strongest critics saw the move as an I-told-you-so moment. “The unforgivable delay was Merrick Garland waiting two years to launch an investigation,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo told NOTUS of the end of the special counsel’s cases. Smith’s team “did everything they could,” she said. She’s a former Manhattan prosecutor, Democratic-leaning legal analyst and high-profile defense attorney (among her current clients is Luigi Mangione). She holds the attorney general responsible for why Smith’s case will now go nowhere and why his findings likely never see a public release.

“This case went fairly quickly from indictment to trial. [The Trump legal team] got a few delays — a couple of weeks here and there — and in the end it made all the difference,” she said. Even Benjamin Wittes, a prominent Garland defender in legal journalism who penned a defense of the AG as recently as November, is scratching his head over the report release decision. “In real world terms, not releasing the report while the litigation is pending means not releasing it all,” Wittes wrote. He called the DOJ’s move “the wrong decision.”

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[Fiendish Thingy]

1. More mythologizing from ignorant "experts"

They keep regurgitating easily provable lies like “waited two years to start investigating” and expect to be taken seriously.

[Celerity]

3. 'ignorant "experts':

Karen Friedman Agnifilo served as Chief Assistant District Attorney under Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Friedman_Agnifilo

Friedman Agnifilo spent the majority of her career in public service in New York City's criminal justice system. She worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for over two decades, holding several senior roles. From 2014 to 2021, she served as Chief Assistant District Attorney, the second-highest position in the office. In this role, she oversaw more than 500 attorneys and a $120 million budget, and played a significant role in high-profile cases, including the prosecutions of Harvey Weinstein and Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Friedman Agnifilo also served as Deputy Chief of the Sex Crimes Unit for four years.

During her tenure, Friedman Agnifilo was instrumental in establishing specialized units, including the Human Trafficking Unit, Hate Crimes Unit, Antiquities Trafficking Unit, Cybercrimes and Identity Theft Bureau, and the Terrorism Unit. She also helped develop Manhattan's first Mental Health Court, focusing on addressing underlying mental health issues in criminal cases.

snip


Benjamin Wittes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Wittes

Benjamin Wittes (born November 5, 1969) is an American legal journalist. He is editor in chief of Lawfare and senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, where he is the research director in public law, and co-director of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security.

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[Blue Owl]

2. Fuck that milquetoast hand-wringer who gave us the gift of tRump

[thebigidea]

4. Imagine the kind of wonderful life you'd have if the main concern was Merrick Garland's legacy

Who the hell has time to waste on such inane bullshit? Other than his vanity press biographer?

All I know is, I'm never going to Marcy Wheeler to condescendingly explain how the DOJ works ever again.

[gab13by13]

5. Even the members of the J6 committee

Said that Garland waited 2 years before investigating Trump and his inner circle.
Garland’s pyramid strategy was an excuse to not investigate the higher ups.

Garland got criminal referrals from the J 6 committee for Ken Chesebro and Mark Meadows and Garland shit canned them.