General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Enough Of This Goose-Cackle About Garland Being Impervious To Political Considerations [View all]bigtree
(86,023 posts)...but the Biden SC is consistent with the reasons he gave for the Trump SC.
I don't personally believe DOJ needed a SC to remove the Biden DOJ from consideration of conflict of interest in Trump's case. But I also can't see where it hurts anything. Criminality will be outed where its found, and nothing looks criminal in the Biden doc recovery, so I'm not really understanding the uproar.
Special counsels, in both investigations, will buttress the impartiality of either prosecutions or exonerations. The political consequence is the mostly same as without, but the quick appointment may well put a ceiling on any suggestion Garland was ignoring potential crimes or favorable to the President.
One final point. The length of time it's taking to move the investigations of Trump and pals from grand jury to prosecution is mostly dictated by the number of challenges and appeals to the evidence gathered, like cell phone content, and whether conversations with the president are privileged and protected. In that effort, the courts set the dates of hearings, subject to defense objections, as well.
Indeed, the delays are a direct function of the financial ability of the defense to mount those challenges. From the standpoint of folks who are accustomed to greased prosecutions of people without legal means, this looks like privilege, and it is, but not some special dispensation from Garland.
When folks who aren't relying on their pessimism to gauge the progress of Garland say that indictments are a month or two away, it's those court challenges and court calendars they're referring to.
Conversely, when folks complain that Garland is taking too much time and should just leap forward, those court challenges don't factor in their complaints, as if Garland controlled court scheduling, or has some flawed understanding of how the evidence he's gathered (or ostensibly should have gathered) will be regarded by juries.
Most interesting to me is how fact-free these complaints against Garland have been, not bothering to inform about the state of appeals, or even the state of the 'Oath Keepers' or 'Proud Boy' trials which, if you accept the Jan.6 committee findings, are an integral link to the WH culpability in the Capitol riot.
It would transform the complaints about Garland from apathy to informing if critics would tell us how they view the actual state of the investigations, including GJ actions and court challenges. Instead, almost all of these are absent any discussion of even the most basic developments in the DOJ effort.
I'm left either abandoning reason for angst, or just regarding the haranguing as just more anti-Garland noise, evidently not the exclusive ground of our political opposition.