Thread by @benjaminwittes

As this idea seems to be taking off, let me say a few words about Merrick Garland as a potential AG, a subject about which I have a lot of thoughts.

https://twitter.com/Klonick/status/1336718410235908096

First, I floated this idea some time back, before the election, because Garland struck me as precisely the type of person Biden should want running the Justice Department. He has unusually deep experience the the department.

He is also, critically, as close as we have in this day and age to a figure who is actually above politics. Despite what Mitch McConnell did wth his nomination, he the subject of pretty universal admiration among his colleagues on the D.C. Circuit.

This has been true since the day he showed up on the court, from the Justice Department, in the mid-1990s.

A Garland nomination would send the following signal to the judiciary and the public about the Justice Department: the president-elect wants to return the Justice Department to its tradition of investigative rigor and non-political decisionmaking on investigative matters.

The judiciary would take that message seriously. Consider that Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, is a former colleague of Garland's who is known to admire him deeply.

It would also send an important message to everyone actively debating the question of how to handle a possible Trump or Trump-family investigation/prosecution after January 20. The message it would send is one of independence and uncertainty.

If Garland were to come off the bench to become AG, it certainly wouldn't be with any understanding on the point with Biden--who surely knows better than to even discuss the matter with him.

So we'd be getting a rigorous mind who was not involved in the Russia investigation at all (save that certain matters, like Flynn, eventually came before the DC Circuit). He would come in with no baggage, a great deal of intimacy with the department, and both the reality...

...and appearance of independence.

There is nobody I would trust more to (a) decide how to handle the Trump situation, (b) supervise and deal with the John Durham stuff, and (c) clean up the FBI's FISA mess.

That's all I got.