Amid news of DOJ grand jury against Trump world, legal pundit admits he was wrong about Merrick Garland
Political and legal pundits all know that if the DOJ is going to make a run at criminal charges against Donald Trump, it was going to have to flip one or more of Trump’s top underlings first. This meant flipping lower level January 6th participants against Trump’s top underlings first.
For some time it’s been clear that the DOJ has been advancing in that direction. It took down the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leadership. It cut a cooperating plea deal with Roger Stone’s Oath Keeper driver. The text of the Steve Bannon contempt indictment appeared to have been extracted from a much broader indictment still in progress. The delay in indicting Mark Meadows for contempt suggested that the DOJ was working on a much broader criminal case against Meadows. And so on.
Yet even as these and other signs have emerged over the past few months suggesting that the DOJ was indeed criminally targeting Trump world for January 6th, most (not all) prominent political pundits and legal experts have kept insisting that the DOJ was doing “nothing” about Trump world. Many of them specifically insisted that the DOJ couldn’t possibly be criminally targeting Trump world, because there would be signs of such a probe – even as these same pundits willfully ignored the growing signs of such a probe.
Anyone who’s been paying close attention to the publicly visible signs shouldn’t have been shocked at all last night when the Washington Post reported that the DOJ has had a January 6th grand jury running against Trump world for at least two months. But because most pundits and experts got caught up in the wave of doomsday hysteria about how the DOJ was doing “nothing,” most of the public was shocked to learn about the DOJ grand jury.
The question heading into today was whether the pundit class would acknowledge that the DOJ is clearly doing a whole lot of something to Trump world, or whether we would continue seeing more “DOJ is doing nothing” narratives. On the one hand, the claim that the “DOJ is doing nothing” is a disproven conspiracy theory. On the other hand, there are probably still more retweets, page views, and TV bookings to be had by continuing to falsely claim that the “DOJ is doing nothing.”
But at least one prominent political pundit is now admitting that he had it all wrong. Respected retired law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted today that his negative take on Merrick Garland of late “may have been misguided” – and that “if so, I’ll readily apologize!”
To his credit, Tribe is quickly admitting that he had it wrong. Unfortunately, some other legal pundits are still falsely insisting that Merrick Garland has been doing “nothing” (apparently a long running grand jury that’s been secretly targeting Trump world qualifies as “nothing” in their minds). Even more unfortunately, because the pundit class at large has spent months opportunistically whipping liberal activists into a pitchfork wielding mob looking for Garland’s head, numerous people replying to Tribe’s mea culpa are still falsely insisting that Garland is doing “nothing.”
The problem with baseless doomsday conspiracy theories like “Merrick Garland has decided to let Trump off the hook” is that once you trick the public into becoming that angry at their own side’s respected leaders for imaginary reasons, it’s incredibly difficult to unring that bell. Even as more respectable legal experts like Tribe are at least tacitly admitting that they got carried away in the wave of doomsday hysteria that the worst of legal pundits ginned up for attention, the worst of pundits are still pushing the disproven conspiracy theory that “Garland is doing nothing.”
The worst of pundits promote doomsday hysteria narratives because defeatist outrage is good for retweets, ratings, page views, TV bookings, and so on. Most pundits will just go wherever the biggest career rewards are. In other words, they won’t stop trying to manipulate your worst instincts, until you start pushing back against their doomsday conspiracy theories. There were signs for months that the DOJ was running criminal cases into Trump world over January 6th. The pundits who spent these past months opportunistically claiming otherwise, should be too embarrassed today to even show their faces. The pundit industry won’t change until you, as audience members, change the way you respond to the pundits.
