The Lawfare Podcast: Merrick Garland, Ed Levi and the Power of Speech

Merrick Garland has been getting a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of it is less than entirely fair, or at least it's premature. But Andrew Kent, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argue in a Lawfare piece published today that there is at least one matter on which Garland's decision-making is ripe for criticism: He is not speaking enough.

Garland has modeled himself after Attorney General Ed Levi, the first post-Watergate attorney general, and in their article entitled, “Merrick Garland Needs To Speak Up,” Kent, Jurecic and Wittes argue that Levi actually used public speaking as a big part of his strategy to rejuvenate confidence in the Justice Department. Garland, by contrast, has been very quiet. Kent, Jurecic and Wittes hold the two up against one another and argue that Garland should make more of a case for what he's doing than he has so far. This episode is a reading of that article.