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Merrick Garland’s Fraught Legacy

Merrick Garland
Mark Schiefelbein/AP

By Evan McMorris-Santoro, Riley Rogerson and Nuha Dolby

January 10, 2025 07:41 AM

Today’s notice: How will Democrats remember Biden’s DOJ? Plus, the latest on how Democrats are shifting their rhetoric on trans rights and immigration and a look at what might happen if Pete Hegseth is in charge of your kid’s school.

Did Merrick Garland’s Legacy Change in a Day?

Our conversations with Dem-friendly legal observers over the past few weeks have found a lot of Merrick Garland defenders. His role as sacrificial SCOTUS lamb in 2016 earned him points among these Democrats. And as Donald Trump 2.0 gets closer, people have been more focused on Garland as a standard-bearer than on the political failures of the Trump investigations.

That was until this week.

After the DOJ announced Wednesday it would not publicly release the classified documents portion of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, we’ve heard a lot of bafflement. DOJ has said it won’t release that part of the report while the classified documents case against Trump’s associates remains ongoing. (On Thursday night, an appeals court cleared the way for the DOJ to release the report.) Some of Garland’s strongest critics saw the move as an I-told-you-so moment.

“The unforgivable delay was Merrick Garland waiting two years to launch an investigation,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo told NOTUS of the end of the special counsel’s cases. Smith’s team “did everything they could,” she said.

She’s a former Manhattan prosecutor, Democratic-leaning legal analyst and high-profile defense attorney (among her current clients is Luigi Mangione). She holds the attorney general responsible for why Smith’s case will now go nowhere and why his findings likely never see a public release.

“This case went fairly quickly from indictment to trial. [The Trump legal team] got a few delays — a couple of weeks here and there — and in the end it made all the difference,” she said.

Even Benjamin Wittes, a prominent Garland defender in legal journalism who penned a defense of the AG as recently as November, is scratching his head over the report release decision. “In real world terms, not releasing the report while the litigation is pending means not releasing it all,” Wittes wrote. He called the DOJ’s move “the wrong decision.”

—Evan McMorris-Santoro and Jose Pagliery

The Art of Getting Trump to Commit

Staring down a year of big policy negotiations, Republicans who were around for Trump’s first White House stint are bracing for the art of the flip-flop.

“The puppies who’ve not been around him are in a state of glow; the senior members are in intestinal knots, waiting to see what happens. Because you don’t know what he’s going to do,” one longtime GOP member told NOTUS’ Reese Gorman.

Specifically, Republicans’ 2017 health care bill comes to mind: House Republicans stuck out their necks to pass a measure that undermined protections for people with preexisting conditions — only to have Trump label the legislation as “mean.”

Knowing that “he can change his mind on a whim,” as another veteran Republican told Reese, Republicans this time around are trying to get Trump on the record — privately and publicly — about what he wants.

Read the story.

Front Page

Anti-Trans Policy Déjà Vu

A 2019 Ben Carson-proposed Housing and Urban Development rule to allow single-sex homeless shelters to turn away trans people will probably be making a comeback. Will Democrats respond to it in the same way?

Rep. Mike Quigley, who sparred with Carson in hearings over the 2019 proposed rule, told NOTUS’ Oriana González he expects to be in a similar fight as he was then. “Unfortunately, I may have similar interactions with the next Trump administration than I did with Secretary Carson,” he said.

But not every Democratic lawmaker is signaling a public-facing fight.

When asked about how Democrats would respond to attacks on trans homeless people, Rep. Susie Lee, who serves in House Democratic leadership, told NOTUS that “we need to remember that all people need to be treated with respect and dignity” but that this is “a complicated issue. It’s not a black-and-white issue.”

Read the story.

Hegseth’s Education Agenda

As Pete Hegseth vows to crack down on “wokeness” in the military, Republican lawmakers are eager to see Hegseth get aggressive about reshaping service academies and federally funded schools that serve the children of service members.

NOTUS’ Torrence Banks and Shifra Dayak report that those schools are in the crosshairs of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the military and in public education.

“One thing that Pete Hegseth has got to do early is get it straight and get people in the leadership roles in the academies that’s going to take no for an answer when it comes to woke,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS.

Read the story.

Number You Should Know

33

That’s how many Senate Democrats and Democratic-aligned senators (the independent Angus King) voted to advance the Republican-led Laken Riley Act — a major sign of Democrats’ willingness to engage with conservatives on immigration.

The bill mandates that federal authorities detain unauthorized immigrants if they’re charged for certain crimes, like theft or shoplifting, even if not convicted. Thursday’s big, bipartisan procedural vote was a major step toward the act becoming law, but as NOTUS’ Casey Murray reports, some Democrats want to attach amendments that could bog down the legislation.

Read the story.

Not Us

We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.

Be Social

Very Texas.

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