How cable news covered Merrick Garland’s press appearance: ‘I think this was brilliant’

Your move, Donald Trump.

That was the gist of cable-news network coverage of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s brief statement Thursday, in which he addressed the FBI search of the former president’s Florida home on Monday.

Garland said during his appearance before media that he moved to unseal the search warrant used in the search of Mar-a-Lago.

Game on.

“I think this was a brilliant press conference and the right thing to do in this extraordinary circumstance,” Neal Katyal, a legal analyst on MSNBC, said.

Joe Concha, media and political columnist for The Hill and a guest on Fox News, disagreed, and quickly moved to pull the White House into the fray.

“I think the appearance actually just made things worse for the White House,” Concha said, later adding, “It was a nothing burger basically with no bun.”

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That’s absurd, of course — moving to unseal the search warrant is a big deal indeed. And Katyal, like others, pointed out that Garland’s action puts the onus on Trump and his attorneys and supporters.

“This was a bit of a put up or shut up for the Donald Trump team,” Evan Perez, CNN’s senior justice correspondent, said.

“They’ve had the field for a couple of days, making accusations. And now it’s up to them if they want to go to a judge and try to get the judge to say no, your honor, you can’t release these documents that the justice department says it’s in the public interest for us to see.”

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Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, echoed Perez.

“For about 72 hours now Trump and his attorneys and his allies have driven the narrative around this search warrant,” she said, “framing it in their way and in their manner and calling it unfair and politically motivated. And now the justice department is basically daring them to explain why they don’t want these documents released.”

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Katyal went even further down that road.

“It’s the right thing to do but it’s a key chess move,” Katyal said, “because for the last 48 hours Donald Trump has been blathering on along with the Republican party saying this search is abusive and so on, and we’ve all been saying look, you’ve got the warrant, release it to us. And now Garland has figured out a separate way to have that released.”