Ari Melber Slams Merrick Garland for Being ‘Asleep at the Wheel’: ‘Accountability Means Action’

MSNBC’s Ari Melber said Friday that Attorney General Merrick Garland can’t be “asleep at the wheel” after reports of abuses that happened at the Justice Department under Donald Trump.

Melber talked about the revelations that the DOJ subpoenaed Apple for the communications of top House Intel Committee Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.

He offered up a few options for what should be done going forward, like getting Bill Barr to testify, and even suggested people at the DOJ involved in this could be fired.

But he made a point of saying the “prudence” and “institutional instincts towards cooperation” displayed by Garland and President Joe Biden has some limits:

Abusing power and compromising long-standing constitutional safeguards, well, if that’s not a limit, I don’t know what is. Accountability means action. It means going to the DOJ and rooting out the people and things that clearly were still continuing. Attorney General Garland, no matter how respected — as a lawyer, I can tell you he was widely seen as a great judge — but he’s not exactly on the ball here if it takes New York Times stories and public scandals and public pressure for him to then respond and say, “Oh, now we need an IG investigation.” Well, sir, if that’s true on the facts today, wasn’t it true on the facts yesterday before you got busted by the Times for being asleep at the wheel as this Trump-era stuff just seems to be going on inside the DOJ.

“When the buck stops at the DOJ and the White House,” Melber concluded, “you can’t get back to normal without dealing with the abnormal and the possibly illegal if you’re not serious about it.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.