Merrick Garland is off to a strong start

Attorney General Merrick Garland hasn’t been on the job particularly long, and it can be tricky to judge how things are initially going because much of the Attorney General’s work doesn’t get seen by the public until the DOJ has reached the conclusion of whatever the AG has put in motion behind the scenes. But this week we got a glance into Garland’s approach, and let’s just say that he’s off to a strong start.

If Garland were looking to pull his punches, he’d have used the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict as an excuse to move on. Instead he’s announced that the DOJ is now investigating the entire Minneapolis Police Department to determine if Chauvin’s behavior is part of a larger pattern within the department.

In other words, Merrick Garland is showing us thus far that he’s a guy who ramps up his efforts into taking down the bad guys, rather than tamping it down. If this is how he plans to operate as Attorney General, bad guys everywhere should be really afraid.