Garland was too slow.
"The department bears some of that responsibility." = Tactful way to say they fecked up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/politics/trump-jan-6-merrick-garland.html
Inside Garland’s Effort to Prosecute Trump
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland might have made one big one: ending up in a race against the clock.
[...]
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.
In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.
“I think that delay has contributed to a situation where none of these trials may go forward,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said in a recent interview on CNN, citing the Justice Department’s approach as a factor. “The department bears some of that responsibility.”
[...]