“Merrick Garland” Is a Dirty Word Around the White House These Days: Report

As you’ve probably heard by now, special counsel Robert Hur last week issued a report declaring that he would not bring charges against Joe Biden over the president’s handling of classified documents—and also describing Biden, in his opinion, as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Shockingly, that characterization did not sit well with Democrats, who’ve called the report a politically motivated smear job, or the president himself, who responded, “My memory is fine,” and asked, “How the hell dare he raise that?” in regard to Hur’s claim that Biden could not remember exactly when his son Beau died.

But Biden and people on Team Biden aren’t only pissed at Hur. They’re apparently also livid with the guy who appointed him as special counsel, who himself was appointed by the president: Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Per Politico:

Joe Biden has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties, according to two people close to the president, as White House frustration with the head of the Justice Department grows…. Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.

According to Politico, Biden has not “weighed in on Garland’s future,” but many of the president’s top advisers believe the AG would be unlikely to keep his job in a potential second term. In addition to reportedly believing that Garland only appointed a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden due to outside pressure, Biden has recently “grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former president Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded,” according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for the DOJ declined Politico’s request for comment, though a former senior Justice Department official pushed back on Team Biden’s contention that Garland could have handled the situation differently, saying that if the AG had edited Hur’s reports, he would have had to explain why he did so to Congress.

Supporters of the president, however, disagree. “I had refused to criticize him, but appointing Hur, who is obviously a Republican tool and who issued what I think is an irresponsible report which violates DOJ standards, was a mistake,” Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant, told Politico. “I think Garland will be criticized by historians. We’ve had some terrific attorneys general and some not-so-good attorneys general. And I think he’s going to rank in the not so good.” And according to one Biden donor, Garland is trying too hard to maintain the appearance of impartiality. “What Democrats do is they bend over backwards not to look partisan, and then they end up hiring people that are partisan but in the other direction,” this person said. “There’s no question in my mind that the villain here is Merrick Garland.”

Meanwhile, as Robert Kuttner, cofounder of The American Prospect, noted, this whole thing is bigger than just the president and his AG. “If Biden goes down the drain because Garland has mishandled the investigation of Trump and gave Republicans a weapon…then the country pays the price,” he told Politico. “It’s not just that Biden gets punished for the stupidity of appointing Garland.”

Trump defender Alan Dershowitz says the Hur report on Biden was horses–t