Dereliction of duty: How Merrick Garland failed America

Merrick Garland's failure to protect us from the anti-American madman who attacked our country, and now wants to finish us off, has been a catastrophic dereliction of duty unmatched in American history.

I am not here to needlessly pile on or distract us from our important work of making good and damn sure Kamala Harris is elected next month, but I do think it is vital we understand that our attorney general’s — the most powerful law enforcement officer in the world — refusal and/or inability to do his job upon his appointment in 2021, has put this country in tremendous danger.

He is without a doubt Joe Biden’s greatest mistake, and we must now hold our breaths for the next 30-plus days hoping that that mistake won’t be a tragic footnote to the story about America’s once-great democracy.

In light of the eye-opening and much-anticipated filing from special counsel Jack Smith Wednesday, I feel it important to spend just a minute detailing for the record the breach of public trust in his office, and the terrible angst that Garland has inflicted on the American public.

Smith’s filing includes details of the horrific events surrounding one of the darkest days in American history, January 6, 2021, and Donald Trump’s intent to steal the election. It puts into stunning view the extreme threats on that day to law enforcement officers, HIS VICE PRESIDENT, and our vote.

We have learned among other things, that when Trump was informed of the threats to Mike Pence’s life from his violent mob, his reaction was simply and literally, “So what.”

As I typed in February, instead of moving with alacrity after his appointment to AG in March of 2021, and leveling the full weight of the law against the disgusting, orange traitor, Garland made the decision to avoid the whole thing like Trump avoids vegetables.

He said little to nothing about it.

We waited.

It literally took the guy well over a year to give us even the slightest hint he was at all interested in doing his job, by bringing Trump and his lieutenants to justice.

Finally, on November 18, 2022, nearly two years after the attack on America, Garland, the alleged grandmaster law-and-order expert carefully considered the board, and deftly put himself in check by pawning off his responsibility to somebody else.

There was never any damn reason for a special counsel. Trump running for office to avoid prosecution might have been the most predictable thing ever, but Garland either didn’t see it coming, or was pathetically blind to its hyper-predictable chances.

By waiting to act, Garland allowed the entire morally bankrupt Republican Party “leadership” to spin all this like some political persecution for the past three years. Many of these very same “leaders” of course came out hard against Trump in the days and weeks following the attack, figuring like we did, that Trump had gone too damn far.

Surely, Biden’s new AG would bring the America-attacking Trump to justice.

Now, with but 33 days until the most important election in American history, there are no guarantees that there ever will be a trial, and that Trump will be held accountable for his high crimes.

All of this doesn't excuse Republicans’ abominable actions throughout the past three-plus years defending their traitorous leader, but all of that should have been anticipated by Garland the very day he was sworn into office.

If we are able to weather the storm that is sure to follow the election in November, no matter who wins, we must demand that Harris makes dumping the pathetic Garland one of the first things on her agenda. We must demand that she replaces him with a person who understands that he or she works for us, the American public.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough