As limited information about the raid at Mar-a-Lago continues to be released, the Biden administration has remained tight-lipped, except for one press conference held by Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to confirm scant details about the DOJ's search of former President Donald Trump's "Southern White House."
During those remarks — after which he refused to take any questions from the press — Garland stated that "faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy," then offered his definition of the term. "Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor," Garland explained. "Under my watch, that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing."
How nice of him and the Biden administration's lapdogs in the mainstream media, plus D.C. beltway Twitter addicts who gushed about how nice it is to be living in an America where the Department of Justice is independent of the president and applies the law equally regardless of politics yada, yada, yada. Spare us the schtick.
Merrick Garland is no champion for the rule of law. He's the attorney general, in part, as a consolation prize for not being confirmed to the Supreme Court when Joe Biden was vice president. Garland is not somehow "above" politics as he tried to assert last week after the Justice Department's raid — personally approved by Garland — blew up in the Democrats' collective face.
In fact, Garland's supposedly impartial investigation of President Trump is hardly the first time his Justice Department exhibited a two-tiered version of the rule of law, one where there's a set of laws and a level of scrutiny applied to conservatives and another more lax set of limits that govern liberals.
In under two years on the job as America's top law enforcement officer, Garland has managed to almost entirely politicize the Department of Justice in a manner that might even make FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page blush.
Among the more notable examples was Garland's use of the Justice Department to go after parents speaking out against woke radicals on American school boards. In October, a DOJ memo from Garland's DOJ explained that "combating threats against school officials nationwide" was a priority for his agency as a result of parents making their voices heard.
As it turned out, combating those threats involved Garland using the FBI and its counterterrorism apparatus to monitor parents who spoke out against COVID closures, woke indoctrination, and other Democrat special interests. As was suspected at first and eventually confirmed, Garland was acting at the behest of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and Biden's Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. That's not exactly an "independent" DOJ unswayed by the whims of the rest of the Biden administration or Democrat politicians.
Before that, last June, Garland used the power of the Justice Department to begin launching challenges to election integrity laws passed by Republican legislatures and signed by Republican governors — that happened to be rabidly opposed by Democrats.
Garland sued Georgia for its law making it easier to vote and more difficult to cheat, even though the DOJ's case was seen almost immediately as a losing attempt to make a political point in support of the Democrats' bill that would have constituted a federal takeover of elections. Again, not so independent or above the political fray as Garland claims the Justice Department to be on his watch.
Showing similar political proclivities that go after Republicans while failing to hold Democrats to an equal standard, Garland's DOJ sued Texas over its redrawn congressional map but turned a blind eye to the gerrymandered maps for the blue states of New York and Illinois. In New York, the map ignored by Garland's DOJ was so egregiously partisan that the state's own high court struck down the map and forced new, fair boundaries to be drawn. Yet, Garland claims his Justice Department treats all situations equally "without fear or favor."
In a more recent example of the disparate manner in which Merrick Garland and the Biden DOJ treat conservatives compared to liberals, there's the Justice Department's handling of harassment aimed at Supreme Court justices.
After a draft copy of the opinion in the Dobbs case leaked, radical protesters took to the streets outside of the Supreme Court and to the private homes of justices that were voting to overturn Roe v. Wade in the draft. And while the streets of Capitol Hill near the Supreme Court are fair game for peaceful protests, agitators who showed up outside of justices' homes to shout, scream, and demonstrate in an attempt to intimidate them into changing their votes in Dobbs were in violation of federal law barring such intimidation. What did Garland do?
The sound you hear is crickets. The situation grew so dangerous that an individual from California traveled to the D.C. area and was steps from launching an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He choked in the moment and called 911 on himself before he even entered Kavanaugh's home, but the would-be killer was prepared with supplies, weapons, and an apparent goal of killing the originalist justice in a demented plan to give his life own meaning.
By failing to enforce federal law or stop the attempted intimidation of originalist justices who are honest enough to acknowledge and remedy the flawed legal reasoning of Roe, Garland gave them barely-implicit carte blanche to continue their aggression. If Garland had taken action, that would have meant punishing radical leftists and Democrats, something Garland has not proven himself willing to do even as he uses the muscle of the DOJ to harass and punish conservatives.
At nearly every opportunity to allow partisan politics to make decisions on who, what, and how the Department of Justice can act, Merrick Garland has favored Democrats and liberals while using the power of the Justice Department against Republicans and conservatives.
Merrick Garland is not above politics, he is the strong arm of politics, guiding his department in a manner that helps his friends and punishes his opponents. Garland has not led the DOJ in a way that has seen the law applied "evenly," as Garland claimed he was last week. What's more, Garland has allowed apparent fear of what the leftist mob might do to him to make his edicts favor the same leftists. "Faithful adherence to the rule of law" is the opposite of what Attorney General Merrick Garland is doing — though the facts of reality evidently won't stop him from shamelessly pretending to be some white knight for law and order.