You *are* the sucker, Merrick Garland edition
By 
Marcy on the rationalizations that caused the Attorney General to overlook the obvious fact that he was appointing a Republican hatchet man to investigate Biden:
When Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur to spend a year reading through Joe Biden’s diaries, he emphasized that Hur was a career prosecutor, even while describing the role his appointee had played as Rod Rosenstein’s Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (PADAG) and then as a Trump-nominated, Senate-confirmed, US Attorney…
n my opinion, the vast majority of Merrick Garland’s critics mistake this — Garland’s naive belief in the good faith of people who have been DOJ employees — for a kind of caution or partisanship. Garland simply believes, I think, that something about working for DOJ rubs off on people and stays there, even the people who did scandalous things during Trump’s term. This is not the only time that faith has or could result in really grave consequences for DOJ’s ability to hold people accountable.
The problem is, with Hur, Garland should have known better, and not just because Hur was obviously a senior member of Trump’s DOJ.
At the end of last week’s Jack podcast (YouTube; Simplecast), Allison Gill and Andrew McCabe discussed the role Hur played in Trump’s DOJ. Gill replayed McCabe’s warnings, a year ago when Hur was appointed, about the former PADAG’s willingness to engage in politics. McCabe pointed to Hur’s role in imposing limits on the Mueller investigation (to which, I’ve noted, Hur didn’t adhere in this review) and participation in a gang arrest press conference staged at the White House, breaching the separation between the White House and DOJ.
But Hur had a more specific role in carrying out a partisan hit job for Trump.
Just after 1:02 on the podcast, in the stuff recorded last week, McCabe described that Hur played a key role in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.” McCabe claimed that Hur violated his due process to fulfill Trump’s demands to fire the former FBI Deputy Director rather than let him retire on schedule.
A lot more very damning detail at the link.
What’s particularly ridiculous about this is that there’s no way that Garland thought there was any chance that Biden had committed a prosecutable offense. The point of appointing a special prosecutor was to preempt public perceptions that he had gotten away with something, and appointing a Republican Daddy would mean that the failure to prosecute can’t be dismissed as partisan. But this doesn’t work if the guy you appoint is going to follow Comey’s lead and engage in a whole bunch of partisan editorializing dicta almost as damaging as a criminal indictment! I wonder how many times our Elite Lawyer Brains can fail to learn this lesson.