Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday press conference was a disaster. After keeping the press corps and the public waiting for almost 40 minutes, Garland delivered a three-and-a-half-minute speech laden with sanctimonious boilerplate and then headed for the exit without taking questions.
His performance sought to allay serious questions about the conduct of the Department of Justice in ordering 30 armed FBI agents to raid former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. It failed in its mission. Garland seemed to think that he could cross a constitutional Rubicon while pretending that nothing of consequence had happened. Yet about 48 percent of the American public believes that political hostility to Trump was behind the FBI raid (40 percent think it was the work of “the impartial justice system”), and large majorities of both Republicans (77 percent) and independents (54 percent) think the motivation for the raid was political. This is a stunning loss of public confidence in the integrity of federal law enforcement. It could inflict long-lasting damage on the rule of law, which depends on public faith in the equal enforcement of the laws.
Comments