The New York Times is out with a very good, very aggravating account (gift link) of the “determined and methodical, if at times dysfunctional and maddeningly slow” years-long process taken by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department in investigating the election interference case against Donald Trump. Hoo boy.
Based on “dozens of interviews” with key players, the story details how Garland’s DOJ took so long to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, explaining key instances where Garland’s determination to get everything right and do a seamless investigation led to not a lot happening, not very quickly, getting us to this ridiculous place where the 2024 presidential election is likely to take place well before the wannabe dictator faces trial for his attempt to subvert the outcome of the 2020 one.
Since you have this gift link here, we won’t retrace every step of the story, because it can be adequately summed up by these two damning paragraphs on the consequences of Garland’s determination to replace the chaos of the Trump years with reliable, even stodgy, by-the-book regular order:
As a result, prosecutors and the F.B.I. spent months sticking to their traditional playbook. They started with smaller players and worked upward — despite the transparent, well-documented steps taken by Mr. Trump himself, in public and behind the scenes, to retain power after voters rejected his bid for another term.
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.
American Prospect editor Ryan Cooper’s assessment on Twitter Bleu is perfectly on target:
[The] irony here is they didn’t count on Trump’s resurrection because if they had done their jobs right it wouldn’t have happened
Instead, like the relatable teen protagonists in a horror flick with 20 minutes’ runtime left, Garland and company made the mistake of thinking that the insane, cackling madman who’d been thrown into the bottomless canyon of fire and giant lampreys would remain dead. If Garland had only watched more fourth-wall-breaking campy slasher flicks, he might have anticipated the baddie would return, blood-spattered chainsaw at the ready.
Especially since the baddie was on Fox News the whole time, preempting any chance of a jump scare when he fired up the ol’ MAGAsaw.
Thanks to plenty of reporting already, reading the Times story is a little like rewatching a movie whose main plot points you’re plenty familiar with, even as you’re yelling at the characters to move their asses and get to the train station in time to stop the desperadoes who have unaccountably made it a Western.
The Times does break one bit of news, as far as we know, explaining that by the summer of 2021, just months after the failed insurrection, Garland and his deputy, Lisa Monaco,
were so frustrated with the pace of the work that they created a team to investigate Trump allies who gathered at the Willard Hotel ahead of Jan. 6 — John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roger J. Stone Jr. — and possible connections to the Trump White House, according to former officials.
Good for them! Now, just find out what they got up to, subpoena phone and social media app records, dig into all the connections, and nab ‘em!
Oh. Instead, that team tried to take its cue from the All the President’s Men script and “follow the money” — a thing Garland actually said — but that didn’t work: Trump insiders didn’t have to pay for any of the Proud Oafs to come to DC to “be wild.” Instead, the insurrectionists were plenty motivated to coup on their own dime:
The reality was more mundane. Most rioters drove themselves to Washington, paid their airfare and hotel bills out of pocket, slept on couches, or set up crowdfunding sites.
And by then, 2021 was ending and the House Select Committee on January 6 was getting its investigation underway, not that Garland let that pressure him. And hey, the seditious conspiracy cases against the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were a lot of work, too, as well as the prosecutions — still ongoing — of individual Capitol rioters.
The story only uses the line “Then things appear to have stalled” once, but it feels like a lot more than that.
As we say, you’ll want to read the whole thing, and just count all the times good investigative intentions got stuck in the tarry road to hell. It’s not that Merrick Garland “botched” anything so much as that his cautious, deliberative methods, well-suited to getting every last bit of evidence from the Oklahoma City bombing (his biggest career success), weren’t very well-suited to dealing with Trump, an agent of chaos with the mercurial temper of The Joker, but the impulse control of the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight.
So here we are, with the Supreme Court plodding along and helping delay Trump’s prosecution yet again, and it’ll be up to us to keep That Man from ever setting foot again in the Oval Office. We really have to make sure the asshole doesn’t get to make a sequel.
[NYT (gift link)]
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