Merrick Garland speaks out and makes clear he’s had enough of the media’s bullshit
Earlier this week MSNBC aired a breathless story suggesting that an obviously harmless two month old standard fare DOJ memo somehow meant that the DOJ had decided to allow Donald Trump to avoid prosecution by announcing a 2024 presidential campaign. Numerous legal experts immediately destroyed the story. The next day, DOJ leadership publicly stated that the memo says no such thing, and reiterated its position that nothing will stop the DOJ from taking its January 6th probe all the way to the top.
Remarkably, this was the fourth time this year that the DOJ leadership has had to publicly reiterate this stance, and each time, it’s been because the mainstream media had made up yet another ratings-driven false narrative about the DOJ having decided to let Trump off the hook.
Even with all of pushback, and MSNBC itself having sorta kinda partly walked back its own phony story in a segment here and there, social media is still ablaze with wild eyed claims that the DOJ has indeed decided to let Trump off the hook.
Now it turns out Attorney General Merrick Garland has had enough the media’s bullshit, and is spelling out in the most emphatic terms possible that nothing will stop the DOJ from investigating Donald Trump:
Merrick Garland has officially had enough of the media making up phony doomsday stories about him and the DOJ:
— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) July 20, 2022
Most notably, Garland said that Trump’s status as a former President is not stopping the DOJ from investigating him for “attempting to undo a democratic election.” Again, this is after the DOJ already spelled out this week that Trump’s potential status as a 2024 candidate for President won’t keep the DOJ from investigating him.
Given the timing, it’s pretty clear that while Garland hasn’t seen fit to waste time correcting the media’s every phony ratings-driven doomsday narrative about him and the DOJ over the past year, he now feels that the media’s ongoing bullshit about the DOJ is now harming the public discourse.
From what we can tell, various doomsday pundits on social media can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to take credit for having supposedly pushed Merrick Garland into investigating Trump, or whether they pretend Garland didn’t really say what he just said so they can continue bashing him.
But in reality, nothing that Merrick Garland said today was anything that he should have had to say. If the media and pundit class hadn’t spent the past year collectively pushing fictional narratives about how the DOJ has supposedly decided to let Trump off the legal hook, the general public would just presume that the DOJ is still closing in on him. Garland is only having to speak directly to the public about this in order to undo the damage the media has done.
It’s still stunning that the media and pundit class has been able to watch the DOJ carry out search and seizure warrants against Donald Trump’s top co-conspirators like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, and still claim with a straight face that there’s no indication the DOJ is investigating Trump. Eastman and Clark aren’t being targeted for unpaid traffic tickets. The DOJ’s Trump investigation is right there in front of our eyes. Garland is only having to speak up because nearly the entire mainstream media has spent all year telling the public not to believe its own eyes.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report