Merrick Garland Finally Confirmed As Attorney General – Now Prosecute The MAGA/QAnon Insurrectionists

More good news today! Judge Merrick Garland was finally confirmed as Attorney General after unreasonable delays by obstructionists in the Sedition Party.

The Washington Post reports, Merrick Garland confirmed as attorney general:

Merrick Garland, a longtime federal appeals court judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court Republicans famously refused to consider, was confirmed as President Biden’s attorney general Wednesday.

Senators voted 70-30 to approve Garland’s nomination. The 30 nay votes represent the majority of the 50 Sedition Party Senators.

Garland will take over a Justice Department which saw its reputation battered as President Donald Trump sought to use its power to benefit his friends and hurt his enemies, and which is overseeing several high-profile cases that could be politically perilous.

As a judge, Garland earned a reputation as a moderate consensus builder, and Biden selected him because he was viewed as someone who could restore the Justice Department’s credibility and independence from the White House on criminal matters. He enjoyed bi-partisan support. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said before the vote that Garland had a “long reputation as a straight-shooter and legal expert” and that his left-leaning views were “within the legal mainstream.”

Garland has vowed to make decisions on criminal matters without regard to politics, and that the agency on his watch will be dedicated to fighting discrimination and domestic terrorism. He has said his first briefing will focus on the investigation into Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — a sprawling, nationwide case that already has produced charges against roughly 300 people.

Garland will be taking office later than his recent predecessors. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was confirmed on Feb. 8, 2017, and President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, was confirmed on Feb. 2, 2009. But their nominations were announced earlier during the presidential transition than Garland’s was. [The Trump administration delayed the presidential transition while asserting the Big Lie that he has won the election].

Even before Garland was in the job, the Justice Department had been steadily rolling back policies adopted during the Trump administration and changing its position in civil cases. But with Garland in place, officials are expected to do even more.

Garland, for example, will have to craft a new criminal charging policy for the Justice Department, after Biden’s acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, took what he called the “interim” step of revoking the Trump-era directive that prosecutors should seek the most serious, provable charges.

Garland also will likely have to decide what posture the Justice Department will take on implementing the federal death penalty, which had been paused in the Obama administration but resumed under Trump. Garland has signaled he is open to a pause, and that it would be within Biden’s purview to order as much.

Garland also has suggested he would favor a relaxation of the department’s pursuit of marijuana cases in states where the substance is legal, and has suggested he favors again using court-enforced consent decrees to spur changes at local police departments, a tactic the Trump administration had all but abandoned. Such changes would push the department leftward and likely draw some conservative criticism.

The Washington Post adds:

When he last worked in the Justice Department in the 1990s, Garland supervised two high-profile domestic terrorism cases: the investigation of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 and injured hundreds more, and the investigation into the Unabomber, who carried out 16 mail bombings over 17 years. Analysts say Garland is uniquely qualified to supervise the prosecutions stemming from the Capitol riot and the department’s broader effort to crack down on domestic terrorism.

* * *

Some Republican lawmakers have questioned whether the department is appropriately respecting people’s civil liberties in its aggressive pursuit of rioters, and Garland could face particularly tough questions as the case grows.

Fuck them! The MAGA/QAnon traitors who committed treason against their country by engaging in sedition and insurrection against the United States government seeking to overthrow American democracy and to install a GQP authoritarian tyranny of the minority led by America’s first tinpot dictator of a banana republic are entitled to no special treatment, and should be “roughed up” a little as their “Dear Leader” once said. A failed coup d’etat in other countries around the world results in either imprisonment, execution, or exile. They should count their blessings that they only face imprisonment.

The FBI has been investigating whether high-profile right-wing figures — including Roger Stone and Alex Jones — may have played a role in the attack and is considering the possibility, as some Democrats have alleged, that there may be ties between some conservative members of Congress and the rioters. Stone and Jones worked to amplify Trump’s false election fraud claims, but they have denied breaking any laws. Authorities have not [yet] accused any lawmakers of wrongdoing.

Garland also will have to take on supervision of two politically sensitive cases: special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump’s presidential campaign, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, for possible tax crimes. At his confirmation hearing, Garland notably declined to offer a firm guarantee that he would allow either matter to reach its conclusion because he had not yet been briefed on the cases, although he said he saw no reason to believe he would shut them down.

* * *

Nancy DePodesta, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice at the Saul Ewing ­Arnstein & Lehr firm, said Garland needs to let the Durham and Hunter Biden investigations “run their course,” and perhaps disclose more of prosecutors’ thinking than is typical for a criminal case to assure the public that the matters were handled without interference.

“You’ve got see where the evidence leads, and then be able to support or provide a basis for why charges were or were not brought,” DePodesta said. “I think transparency is important, but typically when a U.S. attorney’s office declines to charge a case that’s not something that they’re used to doing — is defending why they did not charge a case.”

But almost no matter what he does, Garland’s actions probably will leave some portion of the country unhappy if the outcome doesn’t comport with their political views, DePodesta said.

“You can’t win,” she said. [Like the Election Truthers who believe the Big Lie That Donald Trump won.]

Democrats and other legal observers have complained that Republicans have taken steps to [unreasonably] delay Garland’s confirmation, leaving the Justice Department without a Senate-confirmed leader for months into the new administration.

“You’d think with a 15-7 vote . . . that this would be a nomination so important to this nation, of an attorney general, that it would be given expedited treatment on the floor of the Senate. No,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week.

[During] the interim, acting attorney general Monty Wilkinson, a Justice Department human resources official who previously worked as an aide to Eric Holder, has been running the department. The administration also has installed politically appointed principal deputies to run divisions that are awaiting Senate-confirmed leaders, allowing Biden to put his stamp on policy matters across the department.

Two of those whom Biden wants to be Garland’s top deputies — deputy attorney general nominee Lisa Monaco and associate attorney general nominee Vanita Gupta — had their confirmation hearing Tuesday. Biden also has nominated lawyer Kristen Clarke to run the Civil Rights Division, although she still needs to be confirmed.

A Justice Department official noted that officials were pressing on with law enforcement and other work in the interim, citing charges against Capitol rioters, indictments against North Korean hackers and the rescinding of Trump-era guidance “not aligned with department tradition.”

Not a week into the new administration, Wilkinson withdrew Sessions’s controversial “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal-entry offenses, which led to the separations of migrant parents from their children. He also retracted Sessions’s guidance requiring prosecutors to charge the most serious, provable offenses in criminal cases, which drew criticism as being too heavy-handed, and rescinded Attorney General William P. Barr’s controversial directive giving prosecutors more leeway to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified.

The department also urged the Supreme Court to uphold the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, reversing its position under Trump, and dropped a lawsuit that accused Yale University of discriminating against Asian and White applicants [among other cases.]

Analysts say that although much of the department’s work continues no matter who is in charge of the department, it’s helpful to have a Senate-confirmed attorney general and assistant attorneys general decide on the most consequential moves.

“It is easier and more efficient to reach decisions and to take positions on significant matters when the administration’s appointed official, who is politically accountable and can speak for the administration, is in place,” said Jody Hunt, who served as Sessions’s chief of staff and led the department’s Civil Division in the Trump administration. “It is not uncommon at the outset of a new administration, for example, for the Department of Justice to ask the courts for more time before taking a position on a potentially controversial litigation issue in order to afford the new administration an opportunity to assess the matter; a decision is then best made when a confirmed attorney general is in place with authority to speak for the executive [branch].”

In many areas, officials are awaiting Garland’s input.

Indictments and prosecutions and convictions, oh my! Let’s get to work.