Worst AG Ever?

As the Biden administration winds down to its final week, Many People Are Saying™ that Merrick Garland turned out to be the worst attorney general in all of American history.

Well, I’m here to say that’s not true — but only because the competition for that particular dishonor is incredibly fierce.

The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America, but a couple of Garland’s predecessors were literal criminals. Most notably, Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, the “law and order” champion who helped mastermind the Watergate break-in, was convicted on charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice and sent to federal prison for nineteen months.

And a close second place in the realm of criminality was Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who spent his time in office lining his pockets with the profits of various acts of graft, bribery and corruption. He was so brazen in his contempt for the law that his personal bootlegger delivered clearly-marked cases of liquor to his house during the depths of Prohibition. Daugherty only escaped a similar stint in prison thanks to two hung juries.

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While some of the worst AGs were crooks, some of the other were overzealous cops.

Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer helped launch the first Red Scare with a massive witch-hunt against suspected anarchists and communists in the wake of a series of mail-bombings against prominent figures (including Palmer). The so-called “Palmer Raids,” with its warrantless searches and forced deportations, represented the most wholesale violation of American civil liberties since the Civil War.

In a similar vein, George W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales enabled some of the worst excesses of the “war on terror” era, including warrantless surveillance, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known as “torture), and a purge of some principled US Attorneys who refused to wage political prosecutions.

So, no, I don’t think we can call Merrick Garland the “worst attorney general ever,” given how low some of them set the bar.

But it’s clear that his term as AG was an utter failure. An institutionalist to a fault, Merrick Garland failed to meet the most pressing demands of the moment.

Though the federal department he led is literally dedicated to Justice, he actually did very little to advance that cause. He refused to press the cases against Donald Trump and the January 6th insurrectionists aggressively enough. Instead, he let himself be hamstrung by his understanding of his imagined “norms” of his position and by the obstacles thrown in his path by partisan judges who had no qualms about abandoning the “norms” of their own roles.

The slowness of the prosecutions was bad enough, but Garland’s utter reluctance to appear “political” in the slightest fashion also meant that he didn’t take advantage of the public platform provided by his office to make an aggressive case in the court of public opinion as well as the courts of law. As a result of his many shortcomings, Trump was allowed to regain his political footing and to avoid any serious consequences for his many actual crimes.

The fact that some of his predecessors were corrupt criminals and reckless zealots saves him from the dishonor of “worst ever,” but make no mistake, Merrick Garland was a failure.