Aaron C. Davis

He benefited from the very things that are not now part of how the Justice Department operates.

And that certainly, you know, he's said he has no interest in affording his political enemies that they're, you know, he calls them criminals and they should be subject to prosecution.

Yeah.

There are no doubt were a whole lot of human moments in the last many years where, you know, Merrick Garland comes into office thinking that and telling people close to him that he feels like finally the fever of Trump in the first term has burst, you know, in the wake of January 6th.

And the country is finally going to turn as it did after Watergate and be ready to move forward together again.

And that was the moment he came into.

And that's really, as best of our reporting shows, what he firmly believed.

And so he felt like he had a lot of time, you know, that the country was heading a different place.

And so quickly it shifted and Trump, his base rallied behind him.

And so it was a very moving target that he was the time that he was living through.

But there's no doubt that it's a tragic point in time.

And then, you know,

In the calculus here of where things are, it's a point where you have to say that the Department of Justice is really only as good and as stable as the people who are there running it.

And, you know, that has whiplashed a lot over the last 10 years of the period we cover.