During MSNBC’s special primetime coverage of the latest indictment against Donald Trump — this time over his role in the Jan. 6 attack — Chris Hayes didn’t just criticize the ex-president. He also had harsh words for Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“I think this is an indictment of Merrick Garland,” Hayes said.
Hayes has frequently warned viewers that Trump is hoping to drag things out long enough that if he wins the 2024 election he can kill the trial completely. And Garland, Hayes argued on Tuesday, helped that happen by taking so long to investigate Trump’s role in the attempt by his supporters to violently overthrow the government.
“We all saw the crimes committed and we know that there was no predicated investigation at the Department of Justice. We sat here one year ago at this table, and we watched 85% of the facts, I would say, somewhere in that range, laid out before the nation,” Hayes said, referring to the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Committee. “[They] did an incredible job and in fact, I think this indictment reads as an endorsement of their work in many ways.”
“We’re now in a tighter space, a year later, about a guy who’s running for president to stay out of prison — he is literally running for his freedom — than we would have been a year ago,” Hayes continued.
“You know, there’s ‘hindsight is 2020,’ and Merrick Garland has a very difficult job. And I would grant him that. But,” Hayes added, “this makes me think that the year when there was apparently not very much happening at the Department of Justice, about a criminal conspiracy that happened on live television, as we all watched, was maybe not the greatest thing.”
Watch the clip below:
Hayes was echoing consistent criticism of Garland, a Joe Biden appointee who detractors say shows clear apparent deference to conservatives. This criticism has been particularly prevalent when it comes to the federal investigation of the Jan. 6 attack.
Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel for the myriad criminal investigations against Trump in November 2022; critics have called the nearly two-year delay into question. But Garland was criticized well before then — for instance, in 2021, a federal judge openly criticized him over light sentences the government sought for participants in the effort to overturn the 2020 election with violence.
That line of criticism only increased in January of this year, when it was reported that Garland actively avoided investigating Trump at all until late in 2022. Whatever the reasons for that, clearly Hayes agrees with some of the critics’ assessment of Garland.
