America’s voters are upset that Attorney General Merrick Garland won’t release President Joe Biden’s confused ramblings about his classified document scandal that prompted a special prosecutor to walk away because he believed a jury would sympathize with an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
In the latest Rasmussen Reports survey shared with Secrets, voters said that like Trump advisers before him, Garland should be sent to prison for failing to give Congress Biden’s interview recordings, drawing a contempt of Congress charge.
By a 47%-31% margin, voters told Rasmussen that they believed Garland was guilty as charged. And 44% said he should be sent to prison, while 35% didn’t.
The view is somewhat bipartisan, though many more Republicans want to see the one-time Supreme Court pick behind bars.
Republicans are likely still reeling from a judge’s decision to jail Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress.
In the survey, “62% of Republicans say Garland should be removed from office and sent to jail for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, an opinion shared by 34% of Democrats and 37% of voters not affiliated with either major party,” said Rasmussen’s analysis.
Garland has long denied that he nor his Justice Department are out to get former President Donald Trump or any of his allies. Those advisers, however, don’t buy the claims and have coined the phrase “lawfare” to explain how they believe the Biden administration is using federal legal resources to attack Trump, his chief political foe and 2024 presidential race rival.
A week ago, the House voted to hold Garland in contempt for refusing to hand over the recordings of Biden interviews conducted by special counsel Robert Hur.
Hur was looking into allegations Biden took classified documents from the White House. But unlike Navarro and Bannon, Biden’s Justice Department is not likely to investigate and prosecute Garland on the contempt charges, leading to GOP claims that the department is looking the other way on Democratic cases and throwing the book at Republican cases.
In his report, Hur said that Biden often mumbled and confused events. He didn’t move to prosecute because he believed a jury wouldn’t convict Biden because of his mental problems.
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Hur, in his report released in February, said that the special counsel’s team “considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
It added, “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone from whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.” And, it said, “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
