Biden’s DOJ Targeted Trump From Day 1

Attorney General Merrick Garland is in trouble. Not just with Republicans, but with Biden.

While Republicans are unhappy that AG Garland had been going after Trump and other conservatives, Biden and other Democrats are unhappy at his ineffectiveness.

A Politico report from last month cited White House insiders claiming that if Biden wins, Garland won’t get a second term because he didn’t do enough to insulate the Biden family from investigations and that he didn’t move the Trump investigation along fast enough.

Biden’s people wanted a Trump trial before the election and Garland failed to give them one.

In response to the attacks, AG Garland and his allies have begun releasing information about their Trump efforts in a bid to save their jobs. While that isn’t likely to work, it does show that the “independent investigation” was a myth and that getting Trump had been the DOJ’s top job.

A New York Times report reveals that AG Garland “gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups” after “being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021”.

The topic was Trump.

Garland urged a J6 investigation that would “follow the connective tissue upward” and “follow the money” even if the “evidence leads to Trump”. Indeed it would appear that the unusually aggressive nature of the J6 investigation and the pressure on defendants to strike deals had less to do with the events or the defendants, but was part of a failed plan to get Trump.

The Biden DOJ had followed a “dead end”, believing that by going after the J6 defendants it could “follow the money” to Trump and his people, and indict the former president that way, but the entire campaign of investigations and arrests showed no actual financial links. The lack of results likely spurred more aggressive actions by the FBI and the DOJ who were under pressure from AG Garland and the Biden administration to produce results. Only to come up with nothing.

While plenty of J6ers were arrested, indicted and convicted, none of this gave the DOJ Trump.

The attorney general was involved in these efforts and the “meetings often lasted hours as Mr. Garland rattled off questions. One early query: Had Mr. Trump made incriminating statements during an Oval Office meeting in December 2020 when his team discussed overturning Mr. Biden’s electoral victory?”

While the prosecutors breathed down the necks of the FBI and their juniors, and Garland breathed down their necks, the White House was breathing down Garland’s neck.

“The investigation itself has determined the timing?” 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley asked Garland.

“Yes. Exactly right,” Garland lied.

The investigation did not determine the timing, the timing actually determined the investigation.

In June 2021, AG Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco “frustrated with the pace of the work” created a special team to go after Trump and his allies, and since “they did not want too many people knowing about it”, they “gave it a vanilla name: the ‘Investigations Unit.'”

Four months after taking office and with a crime wave rocking the country, the DOJ had two teams going after Trump. The second secret team was meant to be more aggressive.

And it was this team that was spun off into the Jack Smith indictments.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom was put in charge of the secret ‘Investigations Unit”. When Trump announced his candidacy, Garland was forced to follow the rules and appoint a special counsel. He picked Clinton ally Jack Smith who then brought in Windom so that his special counsel investigation was just a continuation of the DOJ’s secret ‘Investigations Unit”.

As the New York Times put it, the Investigations Unit. “team would lay the groundwork for the investigation that Mr. Smith would take over as special counsel a year and a half later.”

The Smith investigation, the DOJ investigations, the House Dem J6 Committee and the prior Mueller investigation were all part of an interconnected effort by Democrats to go after Trump.

The Times describes Garland giving directions to the DOJ campaign against Trump through L. Rush Atkinson, a former Mueller investigation prosecutor now serving as “a senior counselor to Mr. Garland whose work for the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III offered valuable insight.”

The official narrative that the Trump indictments were the product of a non-partisan investigation that followed the evidence where it led has been entirely discredited. The Jack Smith investigation was actually the work of a secret unit within the DOJ that formed because Biden and AG Garland were unhappy that the investigation that followed existing laws wasn’t working.

The Biden administration and congressional; Democrats turned up the heat on Garland. Even as the secret team targeted Trump, House Dems created the J6 Committee to explore even more speculative options for indicting him. The extremely speculative legal theories of the J6 committee would then be used to create the legal justifications for the Smith indictments.

“Prosecutors, special counsel, they follow the facts and the law where they lead,” Garland had told 60 Minutes. “When they’ve gotten the amount of evidence necessary to make a charging decision and they’ve decided that a charge is warranted, that’s when they bring their cases.”

In reality, Garland and the DOJ were not following the facts and the law, they were inventing them. When the facts and the law failed to show any evidence by following the money, a second team was put on the case to begin inventing crimes and creating speculative laws.

When their inventions failed, they turned to a wholly partisan J6 Committee to find a case.

And none of this had anything to do with the law.

Efforts to find a legal basis for indicting Trump, which had begun in March 2021, had collapsed later that year. Everything that followed, leading up to the current indictments, was illegal.

Last October, Garland had told 60 Minutes that “I would resign” before agreeing to political pressure from Biden to go after Trump. Garland had told the CBS News show that Biden had never pressured him and that “Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations.”

That story quickly fell apart as the media filled up with leaks about Biden’s anger at Garland for not getting Trump quickly enough and Garland’s protestations that he really was getting Trump.

Garland claimed in October that Biden “has never tried to put hands on these investigations.” Four months later, we learned that Biden wanted Garland gone for not doing what his boss wanted. And five months later, we learned that Garland personally was all over the investigation.

Stories about the bad relations between Biden and Garland describe the attorney general’s alleged “vaunted independence” (Wall Street Journal) or “Democrats close to Biden fear Garland has become too consumed by that instruction to appear impartial” (Politico), but AG Garland wasn’t being independent or impartial, he just had trouble doing the impossible.

Garland had been tasked with manufacturing a baseless indictment of a presidential candidate that would stick. The DOJ spent years exhausting its legal options before being pressured by Biden, Garland and the J6 Committee into ignoring the law and coming up with something.

But Jack Smith’s “something” is no more likely to stand up to scrutiny than Steele’s did.

The trouble dates back to the Steele dossier in which people in the Clinton campaign paid an ex-spy for hire to find a basis for their conspiracy theory. The dossier fell apart the moment people saw it. The Mueller report proved to be no better. And the Jack Smith indictments will go the same way. What all three had in common was that they were not based on facts or the law, but on ridiculous conspiracy theories sourced from email chains between influential party figures, donors and eventually social media trends that could not hold up to serious scrutiny.

The law is the difference between ‘knowing’ something is true and actually proving it.

After getting the thankless job of trying to embarrass Sen. Mitch McConnell as a fake Supreme Court nominee, Attorney General Merrick Garland got the even more thankless job of trying to manufacture an indictment of Trump based on what the party hierarchy already “knew”.

And that will be Garland’s corrupt legacy.

Most attorney generals are forgotten and those who aren’t are usually the infamous ones.

Attorney General Merrick Garland will be remembered for wasting years, while thousands died in a massive surge of crime and violence, faking an indictment of a political opponent to please his boss and rig an election, and offering humiliating apologies while being purged for his failure.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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