It is almost certain that Donald Trump is going to run out the clock on facing real legal consequences for his myriad 2020 election related crimes before the 2024 election occurs. Consequently, many are blaming Attorney General Merrick Garland for being too slow and cautious in his prosecution of Trump. By taking so much time before bringing his case, Garland enabled Trump's various delaying tactics -- aided, of course, by loyalist judges at both the trial level and Supreme Court -- to stretch the cases out until after election day. Had he moved faster and more aggressively, things would have been different.
Maybe. But the thing about alternate futures is that we can't live there; and if we did live there, we wouldn't know here. Suppose that Garland did move fast and aggressive on Trump right at the outset of Biden's term. And suppose that right-wing judges such as the current Supreme Court majority, or Judge Cannon, issued the same rulings that they did in our timeline -- providing broad immunity to Trump designed to shield him from legal accountability. I suspect that, in that timeline, there would be a lot blame cast at Garland for moving too quickly -- he rushed things, he let political expediency get in the way of methodically building a case, and so he gave the courts an excuse to slow things down or even to cast his investigation as a witch-hunt rather than a genuinely legalistic inquiry. Had he been more temperate, things would've gone differently
Now, since we live in our timeline, we know that a more temperate and methodical approach would not have led to a success story. But the point is not just that it's always easy to speak with the benefit of hindsight. It is that we actually don't know what alternative paths-not-taken would look like, and if we did know we wouldn't know what was happening in our path. This is a ubiquitous problem, and while it is entirely reasonable given what we know now to say that Garland made the wrong judgment, it is not hard to imagine a very plausible timeline where Garland made the judgment we (in the prime timeline) say is clearly "right" and it is widely viewed (in the alternate timeline) as a terrible and eminently avoidable miscalculation.
2 comments:
Left unstated by you is the obvious fact that the charges were politically motivated. Had Trump not run for President in 2024, or had Trump not maintained his broad political support, there would have been no charges. That is why Garland did not bring charges in 2021--at that point, the idiot leftists assumed that political support for Trump would just wither away.
You're missing an obvious third way. Bring federal charges on one simple, easy to prove thing, like the phone call to Raffensperger. I remain baffled and infuriated by the sheer incompetence of the Fulton County DA (doubly so when you read about their conduct in the Young Thug case.)
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