Garland: Think twice before walking in Mueller’s shoes
Does Merrick Garland want to wind up like Robert Mueller?
In 2019, when Mueller concluded that his special-counsel investigation into allegations of Trump-Russia “collusion” during the 2016 presidential campaign did not establish that “the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Democrats and other opponents of then-President Donald Trump united in outrage. A couple of months later, after Mueller testified before Congress, his shaky performance further deflated those who saw in Mueller an avenging angel.
In a Washington Post column poignantly headlined “Robert Mueller failed to do his duty,” Ron Klain, now President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, summed up the disappointment of many on the left. “The oft-repeated wisdom that Mueller ‘knew things we did not know’ turned out to be vastly overestimated,” Klain wrote, adding that “if expectations were too high for Mueller’s report, the inevitable disappointment was exacerbated by how Mueller fell short in what he delivered.”
Attorney General Garland should imagine Klain’s words above with his own name swapped for Mueller’s. Before completely succumbing to calls to put Trump in the crosshairs of a Justice Department probe for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Garland might remind himself of the enmity aimed at Mueller when the lack of substantive evidence poured cold water on two years of speculation and media hype.
After the televised select committee hearings, numerous prosecutions of individual rioters and 1 1/2 years of exhaustive media reporting on the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, it should be clear to all that such a probe would be nothing but a political exercise designed to assuage Trump’s haters. What was apparent on Jan. 6, 2021, remains apparent today: Trump’s behavior after his defeat was often reprehensible. But the argument that it was criminal remains weak.
If the Jan. 6 committee had anything close to the slam-dunk criminal evidence that would, and should, be necessary to convict a former president, it would have built one of its highly scripted prime-time presentations around it. Instead, it presented hearing after hearing of innuendo and conjecture, asking Americans to connect the dots to reveal a conspiracy that just hasn’t been shown to be there.
The better course for everyone — including Democrats — would be to lower expectations rather than subject the nation to a monthslong overdose of media conjecture based on a murky brew of leaks and background reporting, as happened during the Mueller investigation.
But Garland is only human, and he might well succumb to pressure to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump, using the committee’s slick repackaging of events as his road map. It’s a fool’s errand. The committee’s fatal flaw was in not presenting an alternative view of events to counterbalance its one-sided narrative. As a result, Americans who followed the hearings and perhaps focused for the first time on the details of the riot were led to believe the case against Trump is ironclad.