Merrick Garland’s new Special Counsel shuts out the Republican House – and makes clear Donald Trump is being indicted
On Wednesday morning, I suggested that we all stop giving the Biden classified documents story further oxygen by even talking about it. My point was that because this wasn’t a real scandal and the mainstream media is going to lose interest in the lack of a story, it’s not going to become a thing.
Of course just a couple hours after I posted that article, Attorney General Merrick Garland turned the whole thing on its head by announcing that he was appointing a Special Counsel to handle the Biden documents thing. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced we really should just move on from this non-story. I’m also fairly well convinced that Garland just put the whole thing to bed. How’s that, you say?
Consider what Garland just did. He just set things up so that when the DOJ indicts Donald Trump for espionage and obstruction of justice, no one can say “but Biden did something with classified documents and no one even looked into it!” That argument is out the window now. No one can accuse the DOJ of playing favorites. And when this new Special Counsel quietly announces months from now that Biden (obviously) did nothing wrong, that’ll be that.
But there’s more to it, and if you want to understand it, just take a look at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s reaction to the news. Shortly after Garland announced a Special Counsel for the Biden docs thing, Greene began angrily complaining about how everything House Republicans ask the DOJ for will be denied on account of being “under investigation.”
If the DOJ hadn’t made this latest move, House Republicans would spend the next two years trying to force the DOJ to turn over all kinds of related and unrelated Biden stuff, under the guise of Congress investigating Biden’s supposed documents scandal. But now the DOJ can just say to the Republican House, “sorry, that’s all part of an ongoing special counsel probe, we can’t give you anything related to Biden.”
No one saw this move coming. But now that it’s happened, it’s so immediately obvious how clever it is, House Republican ringleaders already feel defeated to the point of publicly whining about the move. They don’t even know how to pretend this is a win for them.
By the way, this also means something else. If the DOJ were planning to let Donald Trump off the hook, it wouldn’t have bothered to appoint another Special Counsel to look into the Biden non-scandal. In other words, this is the surest sign yet that the DOJ has indeed decided it’s prosecuting Trump.
