'Biden's biggest mistake': Columnist rebukes Merrick Garland for 'dithering like a deer'

A newspaper columnist took Attorney General Merrick Garland to the woodshed over what he expressed was Garland's failure to hold Donald Trump accountable.

The former president was impeached on his way out of office and eventually indicted four times for alleged crimes committed while he was in office, but The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch said President Joe Biden's attorney general failed to meet the historical moment by prosecuting him sooner.

"Garland, in dithering like a deer in the F-150 headlights of the American Taliban for 20 months on even investigating Trump’s Jan. 6 involvement until that House select committee laid out his case, seemed to misunderstand something fundamental about the American Experiment," Bunch wrote. "That a democracy capable of embracing a demagogue isn’t truly free without the companion of justice. And the justice too long delayed by Garland and his failures was a terminal case of justice denied."

The columnist faulted Biden for misreading the room and choosing Garland in the first place instead of Doug Jones, the former Alabama senator who prosecuted the last Ku Klux Klan members who killed four Black girls in a 1963 bombing at a Birmingham church.

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"In those first heady days after Biden actually took office, a craven Garland clearly hoped to burnish his reputation for nonpartisan, down-the-middle fairness by assuming that the twice-impeached, election-losing Trump would fade into political oblivion," Bunch wrote. "He wasn’t alone in that wildly wrongheaded calculation, as other cowards like then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — who declined to vote or sway others to convict Trump in his post-Jan. 6 impeachment — made the same terrible bet."

The world will never know what would have happened if Garland had named a special counsel to immediately investigate the disgraced former president, who somehow managed to revive his political fortunes, win re-election, and grow so emboldened that he tapped former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to follow Biden's attorney general. A damning House Ethics Committee report accused him of paying a 17-year-old girl for sex, ending his nomination.

"That small victory won’t be nearly enough to salvage the legacy of a 72-year-old icon of old-fashioned jurisprudence who won’t only be remembered by the history books — at least the ones that haven’t been burned by his successors — as President Joe Biden’s worst cabinet pick or even his biggest mistake, period, but as someone whose fecklessness and failure to meet the moment may prove the spark that blew up the American Experiment," Bunch wrote.

In the end, the clock ran out on three of the cases against Trump, who was convicted of 34 felonies in the New York City hush-money case, and he will enter office with broad presidential immunity given to him by the Supreme Court. Bunch blamed Biden and Garland for their failure to act sooner.

"Biden has every right to be bitter that Garland’s noble-sounding mantra of fairness allowed, in reality, for Trump to freely run against him while his son was convicted of a stand-alone gun crime not typically prosecuted," Bunch wrote. "But in the end, Garland was just the leading edge of a cadre of Congress members, elite newsroom editors and publishers, and others who believed that the magic of democracy could fix everything without having to take a stand. He will be remembered as the worst Neville Chamberlain-level of appeaser in a nation that turned out to be chock full of them."