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Public Realm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-attorney-general-merrick-garland_n_5fcea0d3c5b6636e09279a5b
Ryan J. Reilly reports for HuffPost:
President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly set to name Merrick Garland as his nominee for attorney general. If confirmed, Garland will take over a demoralized Justice Department that has abandoned bedrock principles and priorities, and come under withering attack from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Garland, a former federal prosector who lead the investigation into the Oklahoma City bomber, was nominated to the Supreme Court by former President Barack Obama following Antonin Scalia’s 2016 death. The Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a hearing on his nomination for months, citing the presidential election. His pending nomination died in early 2017, after 293 days.
Garland will take over a Justice Department that Trump sought to weaponize against his political opponents and use as his personal law firm. Trump has fired or pushed out a number of key department officials, most famously former FBI Director James Comey. Trump appointees have used the Justice Department’s power in an overtly political fashion, even if they’ve resisted Trump’s desire to wield the department’s prosecutorial power as a blunt political weapon.
The nominee will face the challenge of determining how the Justice Department will approach potential criminal investigations into Trump and members of his administration. They will also face the prospect of rebuilding components like the Civil Rights Division, which abandoned key issues like police reform and focused on controversial religious liberty cases and attacks on college affirmative action programs. They’ll also have to deal with the long-term consequences of Trump’s attacks on the FBI, which has gutted Republicans’ confidence in the nation’s premier law enforcement organization. Biden’s nominee may also have to figure out how to combat a rise in right-wing domestic terrorism cases, some of which have been directly inspired by the outgoing president’s rhetoric against his political enemies and Muslims.
In addition, Biden’s nominee will have to deal with the delicate question of how to handle the ongoing tax investigation into the new president’s son, Hunter Biden, which is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware. The nominee will have to reassure the American public that there won’t be political interference in the probe, perhaps by walling off the investigation. Republicans, the vast majority of whom were unconcerned with Trump’s repeated attempts to improperly interfere in Justice Department matters, might even call for a special counsel to assure the probe’s independence.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who had to rebuild the Justice Department after controversies during the George W. Bush administration, told HuffPost that Biden understands that he needs to give the attorney general “the space that he or she needs to restore integrity and the independence” of the Justice Department.
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Reread the rest of the article at the link.
I knew Judge Garland a little bit from the DOJ in the Carter Administration, eons ago. He’s obviously in a totally different class than his sleazy, White Nationalist enabling predecessors in the defeated regime. It should be a welcome breath of professionalism, re-infusion of ethics, and re-establishment of due process, the rule of law, and simple common sense and human decency at the “disaster zone” DOJ.
I just hope that fixing the totally broken and dysfunctional Immigration Courts and restoring fairness, due process, and independence by bringing in immigration and human rights experts from the NDPA is high on his “to do” list! Only time will tell. But, potentially, he appears to be the right person to rebuild and transition the existing EOIR mess into an independent Article I Immigration Court.
Obviously, unlike most of his predecessors, he understands what a “real court” should look like and how it should operate.
With the results from Georgia coming in, today the long-sought objective of Article I seems closer than it has ever been.
⚖️🗽🇺🇸Due Process Forever! Time for Judge Garland 👨🏻⚖️ to end the “EOIR Clown Show”🤡!
PWS
01-06-06