Most of today’s Wide World of News is fictional set of remarks that the United States Attorney General could give if he felt free to speak his mind.
I am not proposing that he comment on the facts of the Trump case or use the august platform he has to assert the guilt of unindicted Americans.
To be clear: These words are my fictional ones, cinematically put in the mouth of Merrick Garland, meant to be provocative and to provoke, but in service of The Presumption of Grace and to further the public debate about getting us out of the mess we are in.
Please read the below with that factual understanding and with an open mind.
To those readers who say I ruin all the fun when I spell out the (obvious) conceit of a particular edition of Wide World of News, well, (1) you aren’t the one who has to answer all the emails, and (2) sometimes, what is clear to you is not clear to all.
So we will have a brief commercial break, then hear from the fictional AGOTUS, then some essential reading, and then call it a morning.
In the face of so much chaos, isn’t it nice to have a little control every morning?
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Today, I am announcing that Donald John Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury, and soon will be arrested by the United States Marshals Service.
Mr. Trump is charged with violations of the Espionage Act of 1917, Seditious Conspiracy 18 U.S.384, and Obstruction of Justice 18 U.S.C 1503. As the case proceeds, there might indeed be additional charges.
This indictment is the right thing for America and for justice, but it is also a very dark day for our country. As the person who made the ultimate decision to go forward with a prosecution that some will surely say didn’t absolutely have to happen, I think I owe you an explanation of how I see this matter in full. And I don’t think a legalistic explanation will do the trick.
No, I need to go all Bulworth on you, as they say, to lay this out fully and correctly. In other words, I need to speak some truths that go far beyond anything I have ever expressed in public.
Think of it as part John McCain, part Dave Chappelle, part Barack Obama, and part Peggy Noonan. I’m going to say some things that are uncomfortable – that I wish weren’t true, but that are true.
And they help explain where we are, how we got here, and how I want the nation to see today as a bridge to a better future, not the ultimate spark that sets off a civil war.
This is not a by-the-book moment, even though I’ve lived my life by the book.
Half of you are too much pleased with my news today. You should not be.
That the former president has been charged is a calamitous disaster, albeit one long in the making, with historical roots from which no citizen of this country can feel fully resolved or absolved. Mr. Trump, while a malevolent actor on his own, is only the symptom, not the disease itself.
The disease is this: There is in each half of our country a form of self-righteous zealotry, a too-sure conviction that the truth sits only in the left or right hand. Each hand disdains the other.
While half of you well today with triumphant feelings, the other half of you are, symmetrically, outraged by my news, I say to you: As Blue America is too pleased, you Reds are too outraged.
You have hoped for salvation from an oppression felt from a left that has long disdained your values. Your outrage expresses your sense that Mr. Trump’s indictment is but further proof of that disdain, and that the left, through me, is attempting to bring Mr. Trump down to gain further power over you.
First, I’m afraid you misunderstand me, although not unreasonably, given recent history. You mistrust my predecessor’s handling of the investigations of President Donald Trump. There were some things that happened in the conduct of those investigations and other probes that the Department of Justice and FBI should not have done. And the left’s silence about these errors and its morally corrupt insistence on covering them up practically and rhetorically have been huge mistakes.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s conduct toward Mr. Trump was horrible, as is the failure of any leading Democratic Party figures to say so. Same with about one hundred things I can think of off the top of my head that James Comey has done. And the failure of the media to acknowledge any of this.
Mr. Comey’s blatant self-dealing, inconsistent behavior, and obvious favoritism have set the FBI’s reputation with the right back at least twenty years.
The lack of accountability for how the United States government handled the so-called Steele dossier is similarly an outrage regarding the underlying facts and how Democrats and the media have pretended nothing wrong has occurred, even in the face of the obvious truth.
Former intelligence officials – all Never Trumpers -- signing a public statement claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop looked to be Russian disinformation? Outrageous, as is – again, the silence of the left, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the press.
I could give countless other examples of errors, bias, coverups, silent duplicity, sometimes made by well-meaning officials of our government and sometimes made with malice towards Mr. Trump aforethought, demonstrating a disdain for the right that, I’ve come to believe, is every bit as insidious as Trump himself. And I don’t say that lightly, because Trump’s moral compass puts him somewhere between Satan and Eric Swalwell.
I acknowledge these errors by those here before me on behalf of the Department and the United States government.
But I am here now. And I serve neither right nor left, nor do I serve nor even talk about this case with the current president. I serve the law on behalf of the American people as best I can. That is all I can do.
Equally importantly, I am afraid too many of you misunderstand Mr. Trump.
He also is neither of the left nor right, although he pretends to be of the right.
He is in fact only for himself.
His interest in the law is to scorn it, manipulate it, put himself above it. I know this aspect of him excites many of you who see the law as only the left’s and not as yours, as something that has been used as a tool to keep the Deep State in place and in power.
But we all need the law. Without it, there is nothing. But it must be fair. And you must all know it to be fair. That is my job. To ensure the law is fair beyond any doubt. That is my calling. That is my sense of service.
Mr. Trump’s interests are not now and have never been not to serve, but to take for himself. By evidence of his crimes, he showed himself worthy neither of the total scorn of his political enemies, which gave him too much power, nor the zealous devotion of his supporters, which only encouraged his worst instincts.
The combination of outrage and disdain between the halves of our nation that is a culmination of our long, shared history must somehow become tempered. The country needs all of us. It cannot exist whole on what only the left or right have to offer. We all must find within ourselves somewhere a renewed resolve to reshape the country together, under its laws and their faithful execution that we come to agree on, so it fits more comfortably around all of us.
That is an essential part of preserving a Union that is imperfect, but more perfect than before.
Decades of liberal disdain for the values, aspirations, and concerns of the right – expressed through our culture at large, our universities, our news and entertainment media, our corporations, and our Democratic elected leaders and government bureaucrats – gave Mr. Trump the opening to gain power. His critique of the abuse of power of the left has far too often gained currency because he was exactly right. It will pain some liberals to hear me say that. But what I’m saying today is as true as what Trump said in 2016 about all this to win the White House.
But he is also a liar and a fundamentally bad person. That is also true.
Thinking the country must be torn down, as some of you do, or, that ridding the country of Mr. Trump and his followers will bring our salvation, as others of you do, is just not correct. Nothing so complicated as our current uncivil war can be served by a solution neat, clean, simple, or violent.
As I suggested in opening, we are a nation divided by an insidious, symmetrical self-cynicism. This makes us ill, it is our disease, and has made us too susceptible to political manipulation by the likes of Adam Schiff and Donald Trump. They detest each other, but their playbooks are identical.
Theirs is an exploitation of the worst of our history, of our national tribal instincts, all with deep roots in the lived experience we have shared.
On both the left and the right, the historical frame of the great divide over slavery, the polarity of white versus black, is still used in subtle and not so subtle ways as a lever to gain political power.
Slavery no longer exists. We have an imperfect but truly pluralistic society. We must face that we are no longer a purely white dominated nation, nor are we destined to become a perfectly politically correct nation, where no one is ever offended nor discriminated against. We are a lively mix of imperfect humans, mostly trying to care for our families.
Occasionally we treat each other badly, but not as a rule. Too often, we harbor – and, these days, express – non-gracious thoughts.
But must fight against such things. That is all we can ask. For these imperfections do not, as a rule, totally rule us. We should from time to time take note of this. It is not news. It is however more important than news.
We should finally try to put away the historical multiple scars of slavery, its riddance, and its white-led counter reaction, as all of this is having a continuing but unhealthy purchase over the mechanisms of gaining political power and over government policy. Our laws defining equality for all properly administered can do the job well. We should forbear extralegal exhortations on our fellow humans to be good in this way or that.
I am your Attorney General. I cannot solve what is not mine to solve. I can only pledge my department to never put an unfair or partisan hand on the scales of justice.
That I had a role to play to bring Donald Trump to justice was my fate. I take no joy in it. But it had to be done. It is not just seen as political as hell, but it IS political as hell.
As you will see, the evidence is clear that Mr. Trump broke the law. This is a slam dunk case. He needed to be brought to justice. But am I also happy that, when we convict the bastard, he will never get near the Oval Office again? You are damn right I am. And so is Joe Biden. And so are a lot of the people who work at the Justice Department and the FBI. So is Rachel Maddow. That doesn’t make it wrong.
But we aren’t going to send Trump to prison, convicted by a jury dominated by Black Americans. We aren’t that dumb. I’m sure we will make a plea agreement (part of which will be that he accepts that he will not to run for president again) or Joe Biden will pardon him. The left will howl then too.
It’s pretty simple: Trump is horrible. Trump broke the law. Trump has to be stopped. He opened the door to being stopped by the law because he behaved so horribly. Searching Mar-a-Lago was not done by the Deep State.
It was done by me and the prosecutors and agents working with me because we have a clear set of crimes now and that is what we needed. It isn’t tidy or clean but neither is Donald Trump. And it is more tidy than indicting him for January 6 or trying to bring in fake electors.
Some of you might want to call this case a “nothingburger,” insufficient cause to inflame the nation. You will shout “Hillary!” and “Hunter!” I totally get your point. I still haven’t figured out how to handle the Hunter Biden investigation, to be honest. But we need to go one step at a time. And whatever crimes Hunter Biden committed did not involve, in and of themselves, demonstrating callous disregard for our democracy or the incitement of civil war.
If you want someone to blame for this indictment today, you can blame me. I am ready to take the heat. But throughout this legal process my focus is going to be on healing the breach, speaking every day to those of you who are persuadable that I am doing the right thing for the right reasons at the right time, as messy and complicated as it surely will be.
I wanted to be here today to tell you my thoughts. I hope it was helpful.
As Bruce Reed likes to say, consistency is the hobgoblin of bad cable TV punditry.
