Rachel Maddow lectures Merrick Garland on bad decision to defend Trump: He must clean up Barr's mess
June 08, 2021
Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to uphold Attorney General Bill Barr's decision to use the United States Justice Department to defend Donald Trump against a defamation suit from a woman who said that she raped her.
"Under Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice is AWOL on all of the important stuff facing them right now," Maddow proclaimed.
The hope, she explained, was that Garland would rush into the DOJ and clean house after Barr essentially destroyed its honor and integrity. After all of the bad conduct at the agency and after the former president used the DOJ and law enforcement to do his bidding, Garland, she explained, has a duty to right the ship. Defending Trump doesn't do that.
"Under Donald Trump, the U.S. Justice Department was corrupted in multiple cases," she said. "Trump didn't just want to do that. He didn't just express a desire to do it. Under Bill Barr, he did it because there were Justice Department officials who did it, who went along, who took the calls, who took the instructions, who quashed the stuff that lawmakers wanted lawlessly quashed, who forced the things they wanted lawlessly forced. That can't stand. The U.S. Justice Department is too important. Its credibility is too irreplaceable. That misbehavior during the Trump era at the U.S. Justice Department has to be cleaned up, has to be found out, ferreted out, punished, cleaned up, and come clean to the American people about it. Or the Justice Department will be used that way again, and again, and again, by the next corrupt president who sees what happened under Bill Barr and the former guy as a legacy of corruption you can build on, and trust me, it will happen. The job of cleaning up a corrupted U.S. Justice Department is a terrible one and a really hard one. But it is a necessity for all the obvious reasons."
She went on to interview former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade who explained why Garland's decision isn't consistent with the law. The analogy she used is that if a U.S. postal worker accidentally was in an accident while delivering the mail, it was in the course of him doing his job. If the postal worker went off onto a speed race track, took the truck over a skateboard ramp, and landed on someone's car, that would not be in the course of his job and thus wouldn't be defended by the government.
Trump insulting a woman who said that he raped her isn't part of his daily job as president of the United States.
See pieces of the segment below:
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