Legal Advocates Call For Merrick Garland To Resign For Not Prosecuting Trump

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54. I have several concerns with Garland's DOJ.

First of all, by not enforcing the House January 6 Commission’s subpoena on Bannon, Garland is taking away Congress’s Constitutional power to hold people in the government accountable.

Second, the full Mueller Report (barring release of any real versus embarrassing national security issues) should have been released months ago.

Third, Mueller laid out evidence of the crime of obstruction of justice against Trump. Those crimes should have been prosecuted already. This lack indicates that criminal behavior by a president is acceptable and will carry no consequences.

Fourth, the DOJ has treated the January 6 insurrectionists with slaps on the wrist. The crime of insurrection carries heavy fines and multiple years of imprisonment, not a few days. The definition of insurrection seems pretty clear, and I would agree that those who never entered the Capitol did not commit insurrection—those who did enter did so with the stated purpose of preventing Congress from certifying a fair election and thus overturning a branch of government and illegally keeping a losing president in office. How is that not insurrection?

Fifth, the DOJ seems to be relegating any investigation into the funders and planners of January 6 to Congress, yet it has so far refused to enforce subpoenas against people who refuse to testify. We do not know whether Garland’s DOJ is investigating January 6, but after 10 months one might conclude that a grand jury would have been impaneled if they were. Mueller was appointed in mid-May 2017 to investigate Trump’s Russian connections to the 2016 election. He impaneled a grand jury less than three months later.

Garland is a moderate, and he may well be of the same school of thought as Joe Manchin who says that bipartisanship is necessary to the functioning of government. In today’s Republican world, bipartisanship and the wish to avoid being partisan just gives Republican criminals a free pass to do whatever they want, including committing crimes with impunity.

I did not believe that Garland was up for the task of rebuilding the DOJ after Barr totally politicized it, and I still hold that belief today. When Garland was last in the DOJ, Republicans did not use any means necessary to overthrow a fair election. Garland’s past history may be predisposing him to inaction now.