See,
1) “Merrick Garland should indict Trump today. If he dosn’t, Democrats should impeach Garland tomorrow,” The Trenchant Observer, January 3, 2022;
2) “Democrats should impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland–UPDATED December 24, 2021, The Trenchant Observer, December 24, 2021;
3) “Should Trump be indicted? REVISED — A comprehensive evaluation of the arguments,” The Trenchant Observer, August 2, 2021;
4) “When will Trump be indicted?” The Trenchant Observer, May 2, 2021.
If Democrats don’t goad him into action, Merrick Garland will go down in history as the Attorney General who granted Donald Trump impunity and who effectively decided that he was above the law.
That decision may allow Trump to continue to build his fascist movement to take or seize power in 2024.
If Trump succeeds, no man will be more responsible for the demise of the rule of law in the United States than Merrick Garland.
The 10 cases of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller Report cry out for the indictment of Trump. The news commentators’ narrative that it’s not “politically tenable” to prosecute Trump for those crimes is just that, a political judgment. Attorney General William Barr mischaracterized the Mueller Report even before its redacted contents were published.
Mueller did not reach a conclusion on indicting Trump because there is a DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president. He did go out of his way to say, however, that if he had concluded Trump had not committed obstruction of justice he would say so, and he pointedly asserted that he could not say so.
Mueller had one other DOJ policy to overcome. Ordinarily, if the DOJ investigates someone for the commission of a crime and does not indict that person, they are not to release any information from the investigation.
Mueller brilliantly threaded this needle, and got his Report past Barr, who could have blocked its publication, to Congress and the public.
Mueller obviously hoped Congress would take up his report and conduct appropriate proceedings. Instead, Congress dropped the ball. Most members probably never read the report, which was long, dense, and full of legal technicalities.
Congress should have held hearings in which they explained to the American public, clearly and in layman’s terms, the contents of the Report and the crimes it described. This they did not do. Instead, they called Mueller for one day of hearings, putting the entire burden on him while failing to do their own jobs.
This is when the pundits, who don’t seem to have read Mueller’s report either, glibly concluded that it was not “politically tenable” to proceed with prosecuting Trump for the crimes described in the Mueller Report, in great detail with cogent summaries of the evidence.
Now, Merrick Garland has apparently not only failed to open a serious DOJ investigation of these crimes, but also seems determined to allow the five-year statute of limitations for the federal crime of obstruction of justice to run out.
The five-year statute of limitations for crimes Trump committed in office begins to run out on January 20, 2022.
Merrick Garland has been sworn to uphold the Constitution, to enforce the law, and to prosecute crimes. This he is not doing in the case of Donald Trump.
For this dereliction of duty, he should be impeached and removed from office.
While such an outcome is hardly likely given Democratic control of the House and Senate, at least some House Democrats could move to initiate hearings into whether Garland is preparing to prosecute Trump and whether he should be impeached and removed from office if he is not.
Such actions by some House Democrats would at a minimum call attention to the issue of impunity and the non-prosecution of Trump, and could conceivably goad Garland into launching investigations, on an urgent basis, that could lead to the prosecution of Trump for obstruction of justice and other crimes before the statute of limitations runs out.
There is no reason why Trump should not be prosecuted for all of the major crimes he committed while in office, including the crimes committed during the Ukraine affair and his witness tampering and retaliation during the impeachment proceedings and Senate trial.
Garland should indict Trump, or be the subject of impeachment hearings himself if he does not.
The Trenchant Observer
