For Over One Year, Merrick Garland, DOJ & FBI Did Absolutely Nothing About Investigating Trump For His Armed Insurrection And Attempted Overthrow Of The US Government
The people who have complained for close to two years how AG Merrick Garland's investigation was moving at a snail's pace, as if he didn't want to charge Trump at all, were 100% correct.
For more than two years, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has been heavily criticized for seemingly dragging his feet conducting an investigation of, and bringing criminal charges against, Donald Trump for his weeks of planning several different ways to overthrow the U.S. government and install himself as an unelected dictator, as well as his incitement of a heavily-armed mob of several thousand supporters to attack and invade the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. It appeared to many people, including me, as if Garland hoped the issue would somehow go away because the last thing he wanted to do was charge any former president with a crime.
In response to those constant complaints, another group of people online (one of the more prominent posts here) insisted that the complainers did not understand how these federal investigations worked. Garland would get only one shot at Trump, the lawsplainers said, so it was essential that every piece of evidence was double- and triple-checked that it was completely solid, and that type of serious work takes time, so just keeping wait and soon you will see why this has taken so long.
Well. A Washington Post report from earlier this month — based on “internal documents, court files, congressional records, handwritten contemporaneous notes, and interviews with more than two dozen current and former prosecutors, investigators, and others with knowledge of the probe” — makes it clear that the complainers’ complaints of foot-dragging and inaction were 100% correct and the Garlandists were absolutely fucking wrong.
This intentional delay means that various Trump trials will take place as the 2024 election gets closer (it’s 497 days away, or a little over 16 months). Those trials may not even start until the election is decided or until January 2029, when Trump leaves the White House for the second time.
Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis report:
A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.
A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.
One of Garland’s first meetings as US AG, in March 2021, was getting an overview of the investigation into the Capitol attack. Federal agents had, in two months, conducted 709 searches, charged 278 rioters, and identified 885 additional possible suspects. Garland also received an 11-page presentation, which (interestingly) contained zero references to Trump and zero references to any of his advisers.
The Post reports (my emphasis):
[T]he discovery of top-secret documents in Trump’s possession triggered an urgent national security investigation that laid out a well-defined legal path for prosecutors, compared with the unprecedented task of building a case against Trump for trying to steal the election.
Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear.
[I have to interrupt because the previous sentence is horseshit. However, it’s what journalists who do not have actual physical proof that Trump could have been indicted earlier than he actually was. So calling it “horseshit” is an educated guess. But if the FBI had started its investigation one year earlier (rather than spending that time with its collective thumb up its collective ass), could Trump have been indicted one year earlier, in May or June 2022? Or six months earlier? It seems entirely possible. Back to the Post . . .]
The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.
The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.
In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021, The Post found. The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack.
The Justice Department’s painstaking approach to investigating Trump can be traced to Garland’s desire to turn the page from missteps, bruising attacks and allegations of partisanship in the department’s recent investigations of both Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Inside Justice, however, some lawyers have complained that the attorney general’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. “You couldn’t use the T word,” said one former Justice official briefed on prosecutors’ discussions. . . .
Spokespeople at the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment or make Garland, Monaco or Wray available for interviews.
I’ll fucking bet.
Last summer, Garland stated the Justice Department would hold accountable anyone “criminally responsible for attempting to interfere with the . . . lawful transfer of power from one administration to the next”. He also said: “We follow the facts, not an agenda or an assumption. The facts tell us where to go next.”
It is with a very high degree of certainty that I say: Garland is full of shit.
Yes, delays were already in place when Garland took over. But he did nothing to stop those delays. He was the top guy and he just kept on a-delayin’. For months and months and months . . .
An investigation of the transfer of power “from one administration to the other” will — by fucking goddamn definition — focus on ONE party and ONLY one party. One party is leaving office and another party is taking office. The incoming party wants the transfer to happen as soon as possible. The ONLY party that would interfere with the transfer is the party who is supposed to be leaving. So the investigation would focus on ONE party. Garland’s excuse for doing nothing — avoiding the appearance of partisanship — is pure garbage. It makes no sense. It crumbles to dust upon even the slightest examination and disappears in the wind. Why do so few people understand this?
A related paragraph from deep in the article:
Seeking the communications of a high-profile Trump ally such as [Roger] Stone could trigger a social media post from Trump decrying yet another FBI investigation as a “witch hunt.”
Oh, no! Not a social media post that would get likes from 0.00005% of the American population! (That would be 20,000 out of 335,000,000) Are we to believe the big, bad FBI is so terrified of Trump posting a deranged ALL-CAPS rant at 4:00 AM that it will instead opt to ignore the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government? And Trump calls everything that doesn’t go his way a fucking witch hunt. It’s what replaced “hoax”. Who the fuck cares? The entire Republican party are snowflakes; they can’t stop whining whenever something doesn’t go their way.
The Post article is extremely extensive and what it reports is stunning and infuriating. I highly recommend reading it.
Rich people can get away with a lot of crimes.
Rich white people can get away with even more crimes.
Rich white men can get away with just about any crime you can think of.