Acting on a mix of principle and caution, Justice Department officials under former President Joe Biden made a series of decisions that significantly delayed and ultimately may have hampered the federal criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, according to a new book.
The slow decision-making at the top of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department affected two major probes into Trump after he lost the White House in 2020: whether he illegally possessed and obstructed the retrieval of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, and whether he conspired illegally to overturn the 2020 election.
This is why I’m harder on the Democrats than the Republicans. Their incompetence and corruption helped get us here, and fixing them seems like the best way out. The Republican party is beyond repair.
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They’re saying the (current) justice department’s allegations that the case was politically motivated is undermined by how slow the investigation went, AND that some insiders at the time thought it was moving too slowly. It can be both, and we’re stuck with the consequences of not holding Trump accountable for at least 3 more years.
I stand by what I said. They act like they’re above the law because Democrats are too corrupt and incompetent to apply the law to them. With this kind of opposition, they are above the law.
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Being overly cautious and therefore failing to enact justice is incompetence. They weren’t just following the rules, they were creating a wide fence around them so no one code possibly claim they weren’t following them. And in the process they didn’t enact justice, allowing corruption and fascism to fester and grow, and still didn’t insulate the investigation from political attacks of “bias” that have never been based on actual actions in the first place.
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So someone who’s driving an organ across town for a transplant and takes 10 minutes leaving the parking lot to wait for a completely clear road without a single car in sight and then slows approaching every intersection in case the light turns yellow and then finally triple checks with management that all the forms have been received and validated, leading to the patient dying, isn’t incompetent?
No, just no. Unwarranted caution is incompetence just as much as insufficient caution, and this was egregious. And this is assuming the story and actions were errors in decision making rather than political direction (which would then be corruption). There’s no possible way an error of this magnitude over this long a time with this great a consequence can be described as just a competent and upstanding civil servant trying to do a good job.
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incompetent - not having or showing the necessary skills to do something successfully.
They were unable to succeed in the task.
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The kind of apologetics demonstrated in this comment is why we can’t look towards politics for solutions towards the problem we as a people face.
There will always be a useful idiot ready to come in and make excuses for the failures of the Democratic party, of Democratic strategy, of the normalcy which is modern corporate cargo-cult neoliberalism. Democrats are never failures; they can only ever be failed.
And the acceptance of the normalization; this quaint framing that the Democrats are the good guys, goodie-twoshoes, rule followers (when the “rules” are largely just made up), and “just trying to do the right thing”; this constant willingness to excuse their perpetual failure: Its this kind of response to utter and complete vacuous nature of the modern Democratic party that makes political solutions to the problems our planet faces impossible to solve through political processes.
We’re past the point where we can continue to blame Democrats for being failures. Its time to start focusing on the people willing to excuse and make excuses for their failures, since they are the barrier to making a sufficiently meaningful change to the Democratic party; this is necessary such that we can carve a political path forwards to creating meaningful positive change in the world.
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Does that sound familiar?
Oh, you do sound familiar.
You sound like some of the most resounding failures of the Democratic party which have consistently and unrelentingly ceded both the conversation and the ground on which we fight to fascism. You sound like the “we know better” corporate Democrat who refuses to fight.
You also “sound” like someone making an intentional and bad faith strawman as their side has entirely lost their grip on the conversation.
You guys have lost your credibility, making arguments like these.
This “sounds” like one of those accusations which is actually a confession. The liberal/ neo-liberal contingent of the Democratic party, and of parties globally is who has lost credibility by handing the entire government to fascism, and so they want to threaten the people, who for the past 25 years, have been apologetically saying speaking about the consequences of groups like the Democratic parties acquiescence into fascism.
Liberals and Neoliberals sacrificed their credibility on the altar of insisting that Biden run again. The sacrificed their credibility for the “norms” that the Biden administration “must follow” for us to have “political normalcy” post January 6th 2021.
AND YOU in bad faith, interpret that as an advocator for’ crime, or god knows what-else hand-wringing you are implying.
The fact is that liberal and neoliberal apologists sleepwalked us into fascism and then blamed the ref when they chose not to act to purge it entirely from our system from 2021-2025. At this point its no longer about the politicians, but their defenders in online media, social media, and traditional media. Those apologists are the ones responsible for where we are, and need to be purged on sight.
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I mean I’ve already given you far more grace than you deserve. You are the apologist who paved the road for fascism.
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The problem with that strategy, was that Republicans were not doing that.
So it was a bad strategy. End of argument.
If you are actively strategizing, planning around what your enemies are NOT doing isn’t strategy, it’s stupidity. And it is what Dems have been doing for decades. They just want to blame Republicans for their complete lack of foresight rather than ever be accountable for letting the GOP cuck every single policy of theirs. Now to the point of undoing hundreds of years of legal precedent and progress.
The time for integrity and thoroughness had long since passed before Biden took office, so using it to defeat Trump was about as effective as using a fax machine to share memes. Being anything but aggressive after an active coup attempt that miraculously failed is astronomically naive at best.
But Biden was handed a literal democracy destroying shotgun with one barrel labeled “complete legal immunity” and the other “infinite executive authority” and he looked at that gift from the Supreme Court and decided it was best left to the next president to use. Oops wasnt Kamala. So now instead of Biden expanding the executive branch to control congressional decisions such as how many members of the Supreme Court there are, Trump is doing it to consolidate complete power and authority.
Our Supreme Court built a political Nuclear Bomb, that was 100% going to be used by Trump to destroy this country, and they gifted it to Biden first. His decision to not benevolently use it to destroy the holes in our Democracy MAGA has infested doomed us to be a corpse eaten by those MAGAT’s.
This article is PR for those who failed to protect our country to feel better about it. They failed. They sucked at their job by using clearly outdated strategies, and they did it despite our literal democracy being on the line. I do not blame the unstoppable force that is the MAGA GOP, I blame the Democrats who acted as tin cans for decades when they swore they could be immovable objects. Glad this article clears up the fact they literally never could be.
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You’re not making a bad argument. Just the wrong one.
The system we have is now whatever Trump wants it to be. Going back to the system we had previously would now be just as radical as changing it into one that actually benefits us.
The system we had lead to Trump. Period. Why would you want that again?
Ask yourself: when should we go back to exactly?
Back to before the Patriot Act robbed us of our constitutional right to privacy?
Back before no child left behind made our graduating high schoolers functionally illeterate?
Back before Citizens United allowed corpate power to influence every single election for decades denying you minimum wage, universal Healthcare, or literally anything that would detract from corporate profits over public welfare?
Back before Reaganomics then?
Maybe further back before the business plot of 1933 to overthrow the government in place of business nepotism?
Or maybe before all the Tariffs we passed in the 1920’s that accelerated the great depression?
100 years later we literally have the same problems. Just without the benefit of actually stopping them from destroying our government.
Half the white house is missing. An elected congress person isn’t being sworn in. Our own military is in our cities and it’s to protect masked police deporting some citizens with no due prosses.
This is not a future we reached by mistake. It is a future that was inevitable given the limitations of our existing system, combined with the centuries sociopaths have had to game it. We should not go back to it. It will just lead us here again.
It would be far better to use as a model for a better system. Certainly many other countries already have. But do not let nostalgia blind you to the fact that the problems in the system we have are inherent, and they are not fixable from within using the systems tools. They allow for exploits to grow, and after a hundred years, fail entirely in containing them effectively.
During WW2, a very difficult decision was made to use nuclear weapons. Killing hundreds of thousands to stop millions from dying. If they were not dropped the losses in the south pacific would be well over 8 million dead.
The argument you are currently making, given the WW2 context, is for us not to drop the bomb. Despite us already being at a point where Orange Hitler is about to destroy Snap benefits killing millions more than USAID closing and COVID already have.
There is no more normal course of action given the current situation. And there hasn’t been for quite some time. Just because Democrats haven’t noticed that in decades, doesn’t mean they ever will. This article confirms they won’t, and was written as PR for people like you to believe otherwise.
When the results clearly show incompetence, don’t fall for the administration’s mouthpieces that it was actually “integrity and thoroughness”.
Democrats use adherence to protocol to shield them from doing what they don’t want to do, and their primary motivation has always been shielding powerful people from consequences.
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I don’t for a second believe the DOJ was scared of disappointing Biden. The choice of Garland alone is a signal to not go too fast or too hard. He’s almost uniquely the worst choice you could make if you wanted Trump to suffer consequences, both in terms of temperament and optics. And on top of that we’re to believe Biden, who explicitly campaigned on restoring normality and healing the county, gave no counsel at all during the selection process or any time over the two years before Garland passed the buck.
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according to a new book
This political era is making me hate books and book writers.
I’d like them a lot more if they didn’t sit on evidence for long periods of time only to release it long after it might have helped Taco lose.
Was the Biden administration capable of any pace beside the slow walk or standing still?
If he had chosen anyone other than a heritage foundation speaking guest, McConnell’s choice for a Democrat nominated Justice as the AG, yeah…
“Liberals” just want to be right - or at least want to be seen as doing it in the right way. The Conservatives believe that the end justifies the means
The justice department is supposed to be independent for precisely this reason. I can appreciate Garland was trying to avoid partisanship and appear to be impartial. But he failed. Dismally. Both of these investigations should have been fast tracked and much more open to avoid any appearance of bias. That would, of course, lead to the problem of a fair trial….
File this under “No shit, Sherlock”.
Also: water is wet.
