The matter of Steve Bannon’s criminal contempt prosecution is getting decidedly strange. What is causing the delay? There was a press conference at the Department of Justice Monday and it was logically assumed that the matter of Steve Bannon’s prosecution for ignoring a subpoena by the January 6 Committee would be addressed. Nope. Garland and Christopher Wray discussed the July 4 ransomeware attack, which is well and good but it’s not nearly as urgent an issue as Bannon’s refusal to comply with a subpoena to testify about efforts to overthrow the United States government in a coup d’etat.
This is getting worrisome. The best guess is that the DOJ is prosecuting the lower level offenders first. At this point, guessing is all anybody can do. There’s little information to work with. Here’s some cogent speculation.
The only other speculation that has been made, and this makes a bit of sense, is that Garland is waiting to see how the other people subpoenaed on Monday perform. If Michael Flynn, John Eastman, the lot of them refuse to comply then the DOJ will go after them all at once. Or something.
It’s also possible that Garland didn’t want to announce anything about Bannon at his press conference because he didn’t want to take the limelight off the fact that Bennie Thompson had just subpoenaed six other Trump allies.
Who knows? Speculation is a drag. It’s a lot better to have solid facts to analyze and take a stance on, either for or against. We don’t seem to be getting that here. At least not now.
The worrisome part is that there is a very real deadline. This investigation HAS to be completed, finished, tied up with a bow before next November or forget about it, it will have been an exercise in futility. The clock is ticking and there is an immense amount of work to be done.
Garland is taking a lot of heat right now, understandably, for dragging his heels, but maybe he’s got some plan to deal with all this that no one has intuited yet. In the meantime, your guess is as good as anybody’s.
From what I’ve read and heard his entire career Garland has been a low-key, by the book straight shooter who has worked hard to be a neutral jurist. And non-political. Sometimes it would seem to a fault. It was this that led Obama to, in quiet consultations with key Senate Republicans nominated Garland to SCOTUS. Of course, McConnell being what he is turned around and reneged. But through it all and the aftermath Garland remained true to form, reserved and non-political.
In a sense, that would make him an ideal person to restore the credibility of DOJ. If the GOP was willing to admit to the damage that’s been done to that institution and the country as a whole perhaps Garland would be the best person for the job. However, I think it should have been obvious to all, especially in the face of January 6 and Trump accolytes following his lead that the support for him (Trump) in Congress would grow rather than abate.
So we are left with a highly qualified, and in normal circumstances excellent person to run DOJ, even in perilous times such as the aftermath of when Nixon was forced from office. DOJ was one of the key parts of government that needed its reputation shored up then as well. Alas, as is so often noted that was then and bad as he was Nixon wasn’t as bad as Trump.
While I had some positive reaction and even hopes that Garland would turn out okay in his current job I feared one thing about him. That deeply ingrained by the book, make sure to not only play things straight but be SEEN and perceived by the public to be doing so would cause him to bend over backwards to accomplish that goal. That I think is why an open an shut case of Bannon not showing up after being given due notice to appear hasn’t resulted in DOJ acting on the criminal referral. Garland doesn’t want himself or the DOJ to be attacked as being “political.” Of course it doesn’t matter how fairly Garland’s DOJ handles the Bannon case. There WILL be howling from conservatives about using the government for political retribution. Even the village idiot knows that hypocrisy hasn’t stopped them in the past and sure as hell won’t now.
Worse, Garland with his instinct for maintaining his “non political” reputation got fucked over by McConnell and the GOP. Someone else should be AG because Garland should be over working in the building SCOTUS occupies. He should be a Justice instead of Attorney General. That means he’s in a n-win position because the attacks have long since been written against him – that he would be/is using what McConnell and the GOP did to him to “settle scores.”
From where I sit Garland is in the classic “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation. I’ve been there myself when literal life and death was at stake – the first time was in college when I had to make a decision regarding my father who was dying. Then, and since I’ve taken the “do” option as the way to go. (Dad survived that surgery – my faith in the doctor’s diagnosis made in a little community hospital over forty years ago without CAT scans or MRIs which weren’t even tools in big city hospitals was justified)
Garland is going to be attacked no matter what. He might as well be attacked for doing the right thing by which I mean his job in ensuring the rule of law is upheld and that even powerful people are subject to it. He should have known when he was offered his current job that cleaning up DOJ, and allowing investigations that had been shut down under Sessions and Barr would be restarted and that he should allow career prosecutors to do THEIR jobs. And let the chips fall where they may and fuck the political attacks.
If he didn’t realize that politics would intrude on his job then he was incredibly naive and shouldn’t be in the job he holds. Frankly, I suspect that Biden (who we should remember once Chaired the Judiciary Committee) laid out to Garland why and how he’d be attacked no matter how he did his job, and instructed him to do what I suggested earlier – ignore political considerations and restore the DOJ by empowering it’s personnel to do their freaking jobs.
Sadly, I think Garland believes he can still hold respect with conservatives who once would have accepted, if not like him being a Justice of the Supreme Court. So he’s trying (and harming our country in the process) to go out of his way to appear fair and impartial. But he has a prima face case of Criminal Contempt of Congress sitting on his desk. Sitting. There’s been plenty of time to review the particulars. And it’s past time for this to be taken up in front of a judge in court!
To put it crudely, Garland needs to shit or get off the pot. On this and other matters. If he’s more worried about maintaining the image that almost (and should have) gotten him on to SCOTUS then he needs to resign and allow someone else to start getting done what HAS to get done.
So true. Remember Bob Mueller? That was brutal when everybody could see Trump obstruct justice over & over & over. U know…like we all get to. These asswipe lawyers & their hypocrisy.
Scott unfortunately Mueller came from the old school where you identify the crime impartially but accurately and then trust on the Dept. of Justice to act in accordance to the law. But, the honest Bob Mueller handed the case over to perhaps the most corrupt AG in US history, Bill Barr, So at the point in time where the Lone Ranger rides up Capital Steps and arrests Butch Cavanagh, The AG Bill B sent out the pissey posse to F things up and pretend there was no crime committed or that it was Bob and the Lone Ranger who were committing the heinous crime of upsetting the President It sucks Scott but there you are?
That is my point. How can the so called LAW claim any authority when their top guy committed perjury & was a co-conspirator of trump’s crimes? Is he now disbarred & in prison? Hell no. He’s not a black kid caught smoking weed. My mistake.
Has it occurred to anyone he might be old and slower to think and act? It happens to all of us and the position he holds in Justice is one, particularly now, that deals with some very fluid situations which are becoming more so every day. Perhaps he needs to retire…or be retired. I’m not saying he’s demented like former guy but rather he is just slowing down. The mind doesn’t work a quickly as it once did.
The stereotype of age doing that to somebody is vastly overrated. I worked for a brilliant retired lawyer once, who did some consultation out of his home. The man had written treatises on his area of law and even in his 80’s he was totally with it mentally. Physically, Lou Gehrig’s Disease killed him or he might have practiced law into his 90’s. Garland is nowhere as old as what we’re talking about and this theory just doesn’t fly. No disrespect intended.
i agree Garland needs to do something about Trump and all his peeps. Like right now how much more evidence do you need.