In my Sunday Smiles essay, I riffed on this Washington Post retrospective on Joe Biden's presidency and how it soft-pedaled Biden's disastrous policies and all the important questions about who was really in charge over the past few years. 

I reserved for today the most important "revelation" in the story: Biden considers one of his biggest mistakes the choice of Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland, in his view, was not political enough. 

In his presidency’s final chapter, Biden has mused about whether he should have handled some decisions differently. https://t.co/j3HrEQ0kta

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 29, 2024

It may seem odd to normal people that anybody could think that Garland was anything but a political hack over the past four years, but seen through the eyes of Democratic Party operatives, you can see how such an absurd idea seems normal. 

During the 2020 presidential transition, Biden’s attorney general selection pitted some of his closest aides against each other. Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) and Mark Gitenstein, both longtime friends of Biden, advocated for the president naming then-Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) as attorney general, arguing that as a politician he would be better able to navigate the bitterly partisan moment.

But Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, pushed for Garland. He stressed that Garland — a federal judge with a sterling reputation for independence and fairness — would show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks.

Biden was persuaded, and some Democrats believe the decision had devastating results. Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election. (Others blame the Supreme Court and a Trump-appointed judge in Florida for repeatedly siding with the former president and delaying the cases; the Justice Department declined to comment.)

Biden's preference for a sitting Democrat senator over a judge with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court makes sense. Garland was not averse to playing politics, but he wanted everything to have at least the patina of being lawful. A politician whose elevation to the slot of Attorney General would have been less concerned about painting within the lines. 

What sticks out about this tidbit, though, is not Biden's regret but the reason for it: his strategy for defeating Donald Trump depended upon using the Justice Department to prosecute Trump to tie him up during the campaign and use allegations to undermine Trump. 

On the one hand, you could say, "That's obviously true," but on the other, this amounts to an admission that Biden's election strategy was to weaponize the Justice Department. 

🚨 BREAKING: President Biden is "furious" at Attorney General Merrick Garland, regrets choosing him, after the prosecution of Trump slowed down ahead of the election - Daily Mail

"Democrats believe that if the justice department moved faster on Trump allegedly trying to overturn… pic.twitter.com/8XkSjWiTbt

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 29, 2024

This is a grotesque abuse of power and the sort of thing The Washington Post would do endless investigative reports on if the president doing it was named "Bush" or "Trump." And frankly, they would be right to do so. One would be naive to think that the Justice Department is EVER apolitical, but one would have to be more cynical than I to shrug at the idea that the campaign strategy of a presidential campaign was to invent criminal prosecutions against a political opponent. 

Republicans have been arguing that the prosecutions of Trump were entirely political, and we keep being slammed as conspiracy theorists for saying so. Now, the Post admits it with a shrug. 

The Biden regime was corrupt from top to bottom, and the Pravda Media knew it all along and was pretty happy with the fact as long as the abuse of power worked in their ideological favor. This is so built into their DNA that such a factoid can be dropped into a story without it setting off the reporters' alarm bells. 

You would think that a series about the administration's lawfare campaign and the conspiracy to execute it would make for Pulitzer-level reporting, but in today's media environment, you would be wrong. 

Pultizers go to stories about pushing hoaxes, such as the Steele Dossier and Crossfire Hurricane. 

Garland will come out of this administration unharmed, having handed off the worst of the dirty work to Special Counsel Jack Smith. While Garland's hands are far from clean, his efforts to maintain a bit of distance from the lawfare will serve him well. Unlike Christopher Wray and other more obviously partisan hacks, Garland was just circumspect enough to survive the Biden fallout. 

Probably.