Merrick Garland and Jack Smith were always going this route
Now that Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly rejected Donald Trump’s request to meet ahead of his indictment, I’m seeing a fair number of people across social media expressing surprise at this. It’s as if they were expecting Garland to somehow help Trump or throw him a lifeline. Frankly that’s bizarre.
Let’s be clear here. There was always zero chance that Garland would take the Trump meeting, or help Trump avoid indictment, or hinder Jack Smith’s case in any way. If you were expecting otherwise, it’s only because you were being fed a fictional version of Garland by the media and pundit class. They’ve been using that fictionalized version of Garland to spur defeatist outrage and drive ratings for a long time, and I’ve been trying to warn you not to fall for it.
When Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, it was plainly obvious that it was for the purpose of criminally indicting Donald Trump in whatever manner Smith saw fit. Given that Smith is a serious and relentless prosecutor who came from the Hague to run the Trump case, and given that there’s overwhelming evidence for getting a conviction against Trump, it was always obvious that Smith would indict Trump. And it was always obvious that Garland would support Smith in that indictment process.
This is somewhat similar to when Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg decided several months ago that he wouldn’t indict Trump on a specific kind of charges, but publicly made clear that his probe into Trump was ongoing. There was all this hyperbolic, baseless, often conspiracy theory-laden vitriol hurled at Bragg for months. Then Bragg indicted Trump, just like he was always going to, and the anti-Bragg crowd just sort of forgot how wildly anti-Bragg they’d been, and started acting as if they’d always supported him.
Once Merrick Garland’s DOJ indicts Donald Trump, perhaps we’ll see a similar falling in line from the anti-Garland crowd, and a similar situation where they start acting like they loved Garland all along. After all, the anti-Garland hysteria was always based on the premise that “the DOJ would never indict Trump no matter what” – and that’s obviously turning out to have been a false premise all along.
