There is no shortage of political pundits and legal scholars voicing opinions on Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s decision to appoint a special counsel to continue the criminal investigations into Donald Trump. Most have given the Attorney General a pass out of respect, even after several this week urged him to not hand off the investigation to a third party.
Garland on Friday announced that former DOJ official Jack Smith, a federal prosecutor on loan to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, will take over two criminal investigations into Trump.
The Nation’s Justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, in an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber Friday evening, however, did not hold back his fury over the appointment, asking, rhetorically, if Garland is an “idiot” or “insane.”
Mystal made three essential points.
Point one: Why didn’t Merrick Garland appoint a special counsel 18 months ago, or after federal agents retrieved classified documents in August from Mar-a-Lago?
Point two: The claim that only now do we know Donald Trump is running for president is inaccurate. “This idea that Trump was going to be a candidate for office is not a new development.”
Point three: DOJ prosecutors have always investigated and prosecuted elected officials. For example, they are currently investigating Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, and did so during the midterms.
“There’s not a single argument that I have heard in defense of Merrick Garland’s self-serving pearl-clutching press conference that he gave this morning that answers the critical question,” Mystal told Melber, “if he was going to do this, if you believe that this is in the public interest, then why didn’t he believe that it was in the public interest 18 months ago, when he easily could have done the exact same thing?”
Mystal says Trump running for president is not new.
“All the facts that he laid out today are things that were known quantities 18 months ago. People will say, ‘Oh, but Donald Trump wasn’t running for president 18 months ago.’ Wasn’t he? As far as I can tell, Trump still thinks he is the president. So this idea that Trump was going to be a candidate for office is not a new development in the case. Nor is the idea of quite frankly, that Joe Biden was going to be a candidate, is a new development in the case.”
He says if Garland thought his prosecutors couldn’t handle Trump he should have made this decision 18 months ago.
“We know that politicians running for office has been investigated by the Department of Justice in the regular process, of the Department of Justice before. Now Garland thought that his Department of Justice just wasn’t up to snuff, just wasn’t going to be able to bring it all the way home because of the extraordinary situation of prosecuting a president, as opposed to a governor, then he should have made this handoff, he should have made this announcement 18 months ago when everything was just as obvious it was today.”
“At the very least you should have made the announcement in August when they seized the documents that Trump stole from the White House,” Mystal charged.
And then he blasted all the reason why the DOJ says Trump can’t be prosecuted at any given point in time.
“We have been told by this Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. We have been told by this Department of Justice that a person now running for the office of President can’t be prosecuted. We’ve been told by the Department of Justice that a person who isn’t actually running in the midterm elections also can’t be prosecuted.”
“If Merrick Garland thinks that Jack Smith from The Hague is going to take down the partisan pressure on him and make the right wing feel like this is a fair process, he’s an idiot, right?”