Ramble On: Thanks for Nothing, Merrick Garland

Thoughts on where we are, how we got here, and what we must do if we make it out of this mess

Good morning! Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you are watching this, it’s Friday, June 13th—Friday the 13th.

The first Friday the 13th, in the colloquial, bad-things-are-going-to-happen sense, happened in 1307, when King Philip II of France decided that he didn’t want to pay back all the money he owed to the Knights Templar. And so the king had them all arrested on spurious charges, all in one fell swoop—all on the night, or maybe it was the early dawn, of Friday, October 13th, 1307. And a lot of them wound up being burned at the stake, and it was not very nice. And therefore we consider Friday the 13th to be bad luck, because it was bad luck for the Knights Templar.

I was born on a 13th. It was a Monday the 13th. So I don’t really feel the same superstitious way about Friday the 13th—but man, things are looking a little bit bleak as I sit here talking to you. It’s now Thursday, June 12th. It’s seven o’clock in the evening. It’s been quite a week for fascism encroachment, right? The slouching that we’re doing towards dictatorship seems to be picking up pace.

We just saw a senator from California, Alex Padilla, get detained by goons, for daring to ask Kristi Noem a question during her idiot press conference. Now, they let him go, but they still got him out of there, put him on the ground, handcuffed him.

DHS Just Said They're Liberating L.A. from Its Elected Officials

He is a United States senator from California. And Padilla himself made this point: if they will do that to a senator, what will they do to everybody else? This is literally a scene from Andor, by the way, when the stormtroopers go and grab a senator who represents the planet that they’re trying to destroy. And they carry him out of the chambers as he’s protesting that he’s done nothing wrong—because he has done nothing wrong. And now we’re there. We’re in that part of Andor, I guess.

I don’t want to make any predictions because my predictions are usually wrong. But the parade that’s happening in Washington, D.C. on Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon or whenever it is—it scares me.

We have to protest. I’m planning to go to a protest myself, here in New York on Saturday, because I feel like it’s important to do that, especially for the NO KINGS, right? NO KINGS and NO TSARS, I should say. I think we should also say NO TSARS. We don’t want that either.

But lots of bad things could happen. The fact that Trump’s got the Marines on standby, he’s got the National Guard, and now he’s got tanks in DC. Many people have made this point: Are the tanks just there for the parade? Or are they going to stay? Or is there some other nefarious purpose here? I hope it’s just for the parade. I was on The Five 8 1/2 on Wednesday as a guest. And we were talking about Benjamin Banneker, who designed the layout for the city of DC. And L’Enfant, who was the original architect, left, and Banneker basically redrew everything from memory and then added a bunch of stuff.

The reason why the streets of Washington, D.C. are so confusing, and it’s so easy to get lost, is so that a foreign army can’t just promenade right into the place, go right to the White House or the Capitol, and take the city. It was done intentionally. It’s intentionally confusing. So what Trump is doing, or trying to do, is have a military parade in a city that was built specifically to make it impossible for the military to have a parade. That’s what he’s doing. That’s how dumb he is.

I think that people protesting is good. And I think people are starting to realize what’s happening is bad. You know, little by little, we chip away. I think the optics of the Los Angeles stuff is terrible. The optics of the National Guard just hanging out there. There’s no protesters even. And people getting arrested by the cops, the LAPD.

Seth Musket did a great interview where he talked to a friend of his who was at one of these protests. She’s a professor of social science at a college in Southern California somewhere. And she was at the protest, one of the protests in LA. And it’s a peaceful protest. There’s music, there’s signs, nothing bad is happening. Then the cops came and—they call it kettling. That’s the term, I think, where they sort of surround the space where the protest is being held. And then they say everyone has to disperse, but then they don’t let everybody disperse. And instead they arrest everybody, which is what happened in L.A. to her.

Arrested in L.A.

And I’m sure if it happened once, it’s happened more than once, and will continue to happen. This is also very distressing. There were journalists in there, according to her report, that got arrested, rounded up—not by the National Guard, not by federal agents, but by the LAPD. They’re supposed to be working for the city and the state, i.e. the people of Los Angeles and the people of California. And they’re doing a disservice to those people.

So between that and not just her getting arrested and journalists getting arrested for protesting peacefully, but also that it’s the police that are doing it rather than the federales or the ICE agents. Plus the senator getting detained. This feels like a new Rubicon has been crossed. (This is all Trump does these days is cross Rubicons.)

So I don’t want to predict what’s going to happen. It could be that, you know, everything will come and go on Saturday and everybody will go home and that’ll be it. And I hope that that is what happens.

But what I’d like to do now is look back and—I don’t want to Jake Tapper this and assign blame. But I was thinking about Merrick Garland, whose name we haven’t heard for quite some time, and the utter failure of his term as Attorney General. And I don’t want to bring this up to blame him—although he is to blame for a lot of what we’re dealing with right now—but to give an example for what not to do, if we are lucky enough to survive this moment.

What happened was that Trump and the MAGA tried to overthrow the government. That is what happened on January 6th. That’s what they were trying to do. Lots of the people on the ground, basically the foot soldiers, were arrested. Some of the Proud Boys and these other groups—I get the names of these groups mixed up who were involved with it—also got arrested, got charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy. Were sent to prison for a long time.

Trump has pardoned everybody. So they’re all out. Also all out are the people that helped him in 2016 with regards communications with Russia and the election. People like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Mike Flynn. People who were convicted of crimes after being indicted by Mueller—Trump also pardoned them.

And it’s so dangerous to have mercy on these people. It can’t happen the next time. On our side, we’re decent people. We’re compassionate people. And I think that’s why we want to show mercy. But in a situation like this, it just comes back to bite you in the ass.

So I want to read a little bit from Merrick Garland’s farewell speech that he gave on his last day at the DOJ. As you may recall, because I’ve alluded to this previously, he talks about norms and how what he wants to do is uphold the norms, and he’s so proud of himself for that. So I just want to quote a little bit here:

But bearing true faith and allegiance to the Constitution is not the end of our obligation. It is just the beginning.

It is just the beginning because, as Attorney General Robert Jackson warned in this very hall 85 years ago, the same powers that enable the federal prosecutor to pursue justice also create the potential for grave injustice.

Although our Constitution and laws include important constraints on law enforcement, they nonetheless grant law enforcement considerable discretion to determine when, whom, how, and even whether to investigate or prosecute for apparent violations of federal criminal law.

To ensure fairness in the administration of justice, we must temper this grant of discretion with a set of principles that ensure we exercise our authority in a just fashion.

We must understand that there is a difference between what we can do — and what we should do.

That is where our norms come in.

Developed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and formalized over almost half a century, those norms are our commitment to constrain our own discretion – so that our agents will begin investigations only when there is proper predication; and so that our prosecutors will bring charges only when we conclude that a jury will convict beyond a reasonable doubt and that the conviction will be upheld on appeal.

In short, that we will make our law enforcement decisions based only on the facts and the law.

Our norms are a promise to treat like cases alike — that we will not have one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, one rule for friends and another for foes.

They are a promise to ensure respect for the integrity of our career agents, lawyers, and staff, who are the institutional backbone and the historical memory of this Department.

They are a promise to ensure protections for journalists in law enforcement [investigations], because a free press is essential to our democracy.

So that’s the quote. What that sounded like, even at the time, was Merrick Garland making excuses for not getting the bad guys.

He had one job. He failed to do it. And he can talk till he’s blue in the face about constraint and discretion. Trump left with classified documents that he wasn’t allowed to have. He stole them, brought them to Florida, left them in a ballroom, in a bathroom. Trump led an insurrection against the government and, per the third section of the 14th Amendment, is ineligible to hold office. This is something I learned about from a brilliant woman on BlueSky, Kaitlyn Bird, years after the fact. What was Merrick Garland doing, dickering around for four years, not coming up with this on his own? Like, the job of the Attorney General is to protect us from this stuff.

So yes, as he said later in the address, it’s important to adhere to the norms when the going is rough. But it was unprecedented, what was happening. It’s unprecedented that a criminal was in charge and they allowed him to come back. And yes, Jack Smith came. Yes, Alien Cannon screwed things up. Whatever. They failed in the mission. And that’s on Merrick Garland, who, by the way, I haven’t heard shit from since he left. I guess he’s fine with all of this because I haven’t heard boo from this guy.

I bring this up because if we make it through this, all of these fascists now—all of these stormtroopers who are carrying out the will of a cruel, greedy, selfish tyrant in Donald Trump—must be prosecuted, must be punished. Whether that means imprisonment, exile, or worse, that’s what needs to happen.

There is a reason why, for the entire history of humankind until about five years ago, every time there’s real treason, it’s punished severely. Usually with capital punishment. Not because we want capital punishment. Because if you don’t do that, then they go out and they treason again! And we can’t have treason, you know? We allowed treason by allowing treason. We abetted treason. We tacitly endorsed treason. And now we are in a situation where we’re feeling the effects of that.

And it pisses me off because I’ve been calling for this for a long time, right from the gate with Garland: punish the people responsible. And it just never happened, never materialized. And we’re all paying the price now. We’re all paying the price. We might not get through this intact with the democracy intact. But hey, Merrick Garland had his norms, so I guess it’s all good!

Anyway, that’s all I have to say this morning. I hope that if you go out to one of these NO KINGS protests, you stay safe. Please be peaceful. Please document if things get out of hand. Please wear eye protection. Put sunglasses on or something because, you know, they’re shooting rubber bullets at people and those can put your eye out.

If there’s a tear gas canister in front of you, take one of the cones, the orange cones, put it on top of the tear gas canister, pour water into the hole in the cone. That’s how you get rid of that thing.

And, you know, I think that the protest will be good. I think people will feel reinvigorated by it. And we’ll see what happens with Donald’s stupid parade. I really don’t like parades, certainly not this kind of parade. And I keep thinking of the end of Animal House, which is a parade like this and it is subverted by the guys in Delta House. I think we need D-Day and Bluto and Otter right about now.

Anyway, please be safe. Please have a lovely weekend. Please have a lovely Father’s Day if it applies. And until next time—we shall prevail!

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Please watch me and Stephanie Koff, aka LB, on The Five 8, at 8pm ET. Lots to discuss this week.