‘We Needed a Pitbull, We Got a Purse Dog’: Bill Maher Rips Merrick Garland For Going Soft On Trump
Real Time host Bill Maher railed against Attorney General Merrick Garland for not prosecuting former President Donald Trump more aggressively during the 2024 election.
The comedian opened his “New Rules” segment by claiming Garland was given his job because he “got screwed over” from being appointed to the Supreme Court under President Barack Obama.
Trump faces four criminal indictments in four separate jurisdictions for his handling of classified material, hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, and his attempts to overturn the 2024 presidential election.
Maher argued that Garland has let Trump off the hook by acting as a “purse dog” and “bending over backwards” in order to appeared to be “fair.” Moreover, he compared Garland to a “liberal judge in every 70s cop movie, the one who always lets the psychopath out on a technicality.”
Giving a guy a job because he got screwed over for another job isn’t a good reason to give a guy a job, especially if the job is attorney general, and especially if it’s during a time when we need a tough AG to catch a real criminal. Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland. Who is that attorney general I speak of and who? Spoiler alert sucks. Who was? You may recall, President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court in 2016 after the Clintons murdered Justice Scalia with a pillow. And while our government dysfunction continues to grow, one thing remained sacrosanct. When a Supreme Court justice dies, the president gets to fill the seat until Mitch McConnell said, fuck that new rule. Fuck you. Garland never even got a hearing. So when Biden got elected, the Democrats said they wouldn’t it be funny as payback if we gave Garland the attorney general job? And that’s how we got Attorney General Barney Fife. A man who epitomizes the strange stupor that comes over Democrats whenever they have to choose a top law man. They worry so much about appearing nonpartisan.
They get behind someone who lets actual crimes go unpunished. Five years ago in this space, I was tearing Robert Mueller and no one remember him. The straight arrow Republican all the Democrats thought would hold Trump accountable for colluding with Russia. But with Mueller, as with Garland, now, when we needed a pit bull, we got a purse dog. It’s so interesting when it comes time for Republicans to appoint a special prosecutor. They always appoint a Republican. And when it comes time for Democrats to appoint one, they also appoint a Republican. A Democrat hasn’t served as a special prosecutor in a major investigation since Watergate. Somehow the rule became it has to be a Republican or it’s not fair. You know, a Dudley Do-Right type, like like Mueller or James Comey. Remember him? A Boy Scout, they said, yeah, he was a Boy Scout, all right. He gave me a knot in the stomach. Because he threw the presidency to Trump by making a big announcement 11 days before the election that he was reopening the case into Hillary’s emails and then found nothing…
If Garland had done his job, Trump would be in federal court charged with breaking campaign finance laws instead of state court charged with falsifying business records. And then there’s the case of the stolen files and Trump’s bathroom croppers delight. Four months after Trump left office, the National Archives began asking him to return the documents he illegally took with him, and after being ignored for nine months, they passed the case off to Garland, who should have sent the FBI to Mar-A-Lago the next day but didn’t for another six months.
Watch the clip above via HBO’s Real Time.
