Merrick Garland's last task and the explosive evidence that could save America

As we sit on the cusp of letting a year that was steeped with so many wonderful and heady possibilities go off and quietly die in some corner, I am here for a final request:

The Department of Justice, with the blessing of a president cloaked by our Supreme Court with obscene powers needs to immediately release everything it discovered during its belated investigation of the attack on the United States of America on or about January 6, 2021.

As we descend into the muck and mire of an administration headed by the revolting man who attacked us, we are owed at least that much as a nation.

And if you are scoffing, “Well, that will never happen …” Congratulations. You can add an attempted coup, and the worst attack on our Capitol in more than 200 years to the list of horrible things you have helped normalize the past eight years.

We are not a serious country if we are willing to casually sweep a violent attack on our Democracy witnessed by hundreds of millions of people around the world under the rug like this.

And before going further, I am going to admit I don’t much care how this information is released, or leaked, or served up cold on a platter, just as long as we see it. We paid for the damn thing, and have a right to see just how close we are to losing everything right now, because of the criminal incompetence of Attorney General Merrick Garland the past three-plus years, and the incomprehensible stupidity and recklessness of so many American voters just 52 short days ago.

Everybody who watched that heinous attack on our country has a right to know who and what was behind it. You don’t get to just quit, wash your hands of the whole damn thing, and go off into a comfortable retirement in the countryside made possible by taxpayer money, while the nation you roundly ignored slowly burns.

I cannot stop being angrier than hell about this, and for the life of me, can’t believe more people who profess to love this country aren’t, too.

We cannot just let this go, good people. Donald Trump is a traitor, who with help from members of his anti-American Republican Party tried to violently overthrow an election. Cops were stomped and beaten in our streets, lawmakers ran for their lives through the halls of our Capitol, a vice president was threatened with hanging, and the monster responsible for all of it, did nothing to stop it for hours.

Only when the attack seemed due to fail did Trump call off his thugs hours later — but not before telling him that he “loved them.”

Answer me this: If you still somehow think the repugnant Trump wasn't responsible for all this, then why did his thugs only retreat when he ordered them to?

And if you are still contending all this not to be true, well, then let’s just see the damn evidence that special Special Counsel Jack Smith has accrued, so we all can decide for ourselves.

To those legal scholars who have made handsome livings littering our airways the past eight years, and will lawyerly pronounce with pinkies out, that the evidence of the attack needs to be protected for future trials, or that this is not how the Justice Department comports itself, I will ask you to finally, and once and for all, slap some sense into yourselves.

We have to finally be done listening to people like you. You need to sit down, shut up, and listen to this: The real hard truth here is that we are a country where people with money enjoy their lives 30,000-feet above the law, and people without money are dragged along gravel runways toward our overflowing jails in record time.

Our legal system is a damn, corrupt mess.

The rich shop for judges, like the rest of us shop for groceries. The America-attacking Trump, and the orcs in his crooked orbit like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon have spent their lifetimes making a mockery of our “justice” system.

And if you still aren’t laughing yet, I’ll give you just two names: Bill Barr and the aforementioned Garland.

Barr faithfully served the America-attacking Trump in his first term as his attorney general, and most famously white-washed the Mueller Report that had so much dirt on the Trump-Putin Criminal Enterprise, a nuclear-powered firehose couldn’t have washed it all off.

Except as Trump’s consigliere, Barr was allowed to do just that.

Even when we finally got to see the “full report” three years later thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filing, it was so heavily redacted by Garland’s Justice Department in order to protect privacy and alleged ongoing investigations, it was almost unrecognizable.

“Alleged ongoing investigations …” Like I said, “a complete joke.”

As for Garland, well, regular readers will know my disdain for the do-nothing weakling has no limits. I admittedly operate at a simmer where my politics are concerned, but when that January 6 attack comes up, or Garland’s name appears literally anywhere, I go into full boil.

Here’s but a small portion of a piece I filed three months ago, getting into Garland’s malfeasance:

It literally took the guy well over a year to give us even the slightest hint he was at all interested in doing his job, by bringing Trump and his lieutenants to justice.
Finally, on November 18, 2022, nearly two years after the attackon America, Garland, the alleged grandmaster law-and-order expert carefully considered the board, and deftly put himself in check by pawning off his responsibility to somebody else.
There was never any damn reason for a special counsel. Trump running for office to avoid prosecution might have been the most predictable thing ever, yet Garland either somehow didn’t see it coming, or was pathetically blind to its hyper-predictable chances.
By waiting to act, Garland allowed the entire morally bankrupt Republican Party “leadership” to spin all this like some political persecution for the past three years. Many of these very same “leaders” of course came out hard against Trump in the days and weeks following the attack, figuring like we did, that Trump had gone too damn far.

Garland’s failure to act with alacrity, and bring the full weight of the law atop Trump’s fat head, will be among the most grievous things I have seen in my lifetime. He has lost all benefit of the doubt.

At best he is incompetent. At worst, he is completely corrupt. At the minimum, he owes us some damn accountability.

Right now, I have zero confidence that our justice system works on behalf of the people of this country, because when they had to step up and protect us they massively failed.

The most dangerous person in the world is about to walk into the most powerful job in the world. We are but weeks from losing it all. The son of a b---- who attacked us, is now primed to finish us off.

But before he digs in anew, we all need to know what he did four years ago in his criminal attempt to hold onto power. The families of the brave souls who were beaten to a pulp or lost their lives during the attack, are owed at least that much.

Lady Liberty is owed that much.

We need to see what Garland and his Justice Department have on the America-attacking Trump, and Joe Biden needs to use the enormous powers granted to him sadly and ironically by Trump’s Conservative United States Supreme Court, to ensure this happens.

It’s not the justice system most of us want or deserve, but it’s the only one we have, and for once, they owe us the damn truth.

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.