Merrick Garland is making legitimacy with his special counsel appointment
Why the backlash is wrong.
Photo by Tara Winstead
News:
WASHINGTON—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a former federal and international war-crimes prosecutor as special counsel on Friday to oversee Justice Department investigations into former President Donald Trump.
Jack Smith, who once led the Justice Department unit that investigates public corruption and since 2018 was the chief prosecutor at The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, will be the third special counsel in five years to examine issues involving Mr. Trump.
And boy are people on the left mad:
This seems misguided.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand why Garland’s move might seem like yet another delay in finally holding Donald Trump accountable for his sins against American democracy. We’ve seen this movie a number of times already haven’t we?
But the tweets by Mehdi Hasan and Jill Wine-Banks appear to take as their foundation the idea that there are two — and only two — groups of people in America: Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters. And that the only possible reason for appointing a special counsel is to try to persuade the Trump supporters that a prosecution would be legit.
That’s not quite true.
There’s a third group. Folks who could go either way. The people who voted for Obama then voted for Trump. The people who voted for Trump, then voted for Biden. It’s astonishing to believe that such people exist, yet they do. Perhaps not in very large numbers — but perhaps enough to sway elections. They’re the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy. And they’ll probably need to be convinced that any prosecution of Trump is something more than, well, a Trumpistly political abuse of power.
So let’s put aside for the moment the idea that Garland is appointing a special counsel in a case involving a former president and current presidential candidate because he thinks it is the right and ethical thing to do. Instead, consider that the appointment of that counsel might confer some legitimacy on whatever charges Trump might eventually face — not because Trump supporters would like it, but because sometimes-sometimes not Trump supporters would take it as a sign of good faith. It’s not the big constituencies Garland is pitching this to, but a tiny one that just happens to be pretty important.
Overall, if we estimate the raw totals using these percentages while working off of Trump’s nearly 63 million votes and Clinton’s almost 66 million votes, the ANES data suggest that about 8.4 million 2012 Obama voters backed Trump in 2016 and 2.5 million Romney voters supported Clinton.
Whether that actually works, I don’t know. But it seems like a reasonable idea to me.
In any case, this seems like the correct take to me:
I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
The correct take, I think. Wasted ammunition aiming for the nearly unpersuadable on either side.
I’m also spitballing, but if Garland thought he had enough evidence to indict *and all-but-guarantee a conviction*, he would have done so a week ago, after the midterms but before Trump announced. Garland has plenty to use, I’m sure, but he has one chance and he can’t blow it.