Explain This, Merrick
While we’re furious at former President Donald Trump’s “stolen election” claims, he’s been utterly right these last six years about the “witch hunt” that was the Russiagate investigation: It’s now plain that the Justice Department turned Clinton campaign-commissioned disinformation into a probe that kneecapped his presidency.
So Attorney General Merrick Garland has a clear duty to address the nation and explain Monday’s unprecedented FBI raid on a former president’s home. Hiding behind the “need to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation” will fuel over-the-top speculation on all sides. Transparency can at least ground the debate in reality.
For now, Andrew McCarthy lays out a likely scenario: While the warrant cited concerns that Trump still has documents that should’ve remained in Washington when he left, the raid was really a hunt for anything that might incriminate him regarding
Jan. 6.
Multiple sources confirm that’s all the warrant said, which is an outrage in and of itself: an armed raid on an ex-prez’s home over that?
Certainly, Garland faces huge pressure from the Democratic Party base to indict Trump for something on Jan. 6. The House hearings are a national TV ad to that end. But they have yet to show any clear evidence of real crimes, and a political prosecution would be at least as baneful to the republic to Trump’s “stolen election” nonsense.
So Republicans are entirely right to sound alarms about possible fresh weaponization of the FBI. After all, the agency’s reputation is already in tatters.
And Garland’s own rep has been battered by his actions as AG: siccing the bureau on parents who speak out at school-board meetings, pretending all political violence comes from the right (when the left rioted in 2020 all across America) and giving at least the appearance of slow-walking (and maybe softwalking) the Hunter Biden investigation.
Trust in federal law-enforcement is at rock-bottom for at least half the nation, for good reason. Garland needs to address that elephant in the room, and explain what in hell he’s doing. What were they hoping to find as they rifled through his private residence for more than nine hours?
Plus, he telegraphed the raid in his interview with Lester Holt last month. How can he not explain it now?
As one expert told Politico, if the raid was merely “to find classified documents [Trump] took from the White House,” then it’s all too likely to help Trump win in 2024, and so “prove to be the greatest law-enforcement mistake in history.”
Trump is already fundraising off this raid, and will do more off every other “legal” attack up to and including any actual trial — and one that fails to convict probably wins him a second term.
Unless and until Garland goes for full transparency, telling us all exactly what he’s investigating, we have to fear he’s simply taking a huge roll of the dice — hoping to find a Trump-slaying mother lode of evidence at the great risk of turning the ex-prez into a martyr and the next president.