Business Insider has this helpful reminder to our overly cautious, frustratingly slow as molasses in winter Attorney General Merrick Garland: Time is running out for Biden’s Justice Department to prosecute Trump for 10 possible crimes detailed in the Mueller report:
[A] full year out of office — and five years removed from his own swearing-in — Trump is closing in on anniversaries that carry more legal than political significance.
The five-year statute of limitations to prosecute any alleged federal crimes he committed while in office, after all, is ticking away.
In his more than 400-page final report, Robert Mueller’s special counsel team documented 10 episodes of possible obstruction of justice by Trump. Among them were Trump’s efforts in early 2017 to pressure then-FBI Director James Comey to close an investigation into Michael Flynn, who at the time was national security advisor. Trump later fired Comey, setting in motion the events that led to Mueller’s appointment as the special counsel in charge of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The special counsel’s office examined not just that episode but also Trump’s effort to have Mueller himself removed. Mueller declined to make a decision about whether Trump broke the law, in part because of the Justice Department’s longstanding policy that sitting presidents cannot be charged with a federal crime. But, at a closely-watching congressional hearing, Mueller acknowledged that Trump could theoretically be charged with obstruction of justice after leaving office.
Charging an ex-president with a federal crime would be an unprecedented first in American history. Still, in the eyes of Trump’s critics, the Mueller report provided a playbook for prosecuting him.
But the Justice Department has been silent as the five-year deadline nears.
Note: The DOJ investigative due diligence is completed, and the “charging memo” is already drafted in the Mueller Report. All that is required is for the DOJ to file the damn indictment. Mueller would have filed the indictment but for the B.S. Office of Legal Counsel memos (not law or binding legal precedent) that a sitting president cannot be charged. That indictment could have, and shoud have been filed at any time in the past year. Merrick Garland is failing to enforce the law. Letting the statute of limitations expire – blowing a deadline – is professional malpractice by incompetent counsel.
Rule 1.3 Diligence: “A lawyer shall act with reasonable diligence and promptness in representing a client.” Rule 1.3 Diligence – Comment:
[3] Perhaps no professional shortcoming is more widely resented than procrastination. A client’s interests often can be adversely affected by the passage of time or the change of conditions; in extreme instances, as when a lawyer overlooks a statute of limitations, the client’s legal position may be destroyed. Even when the client’s interests are not affected in substance, however, unreasonable delay can cause a client needless anxiety and undermine confidence in the lawyer’s trustworthiness. A lawyer’s duty to act with reasonable promptness, however, does not preclude the lawyer from agreeing to a reasonable request for a postponement that will not prejudice the lawyer’s client.
“What’s a matter of urgency that I’m very upset about is the statute of limitations is five years for obstruction of justice, and it’s going to expire in a few months,” said Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who previously served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “That Mueller report is a roadmap to an indictment of Donald Trump for obstruction of justice … Literally, a couple hours of work, and you probably have an indictment.”
A broader conspiracy?
Trump’s unconventional presidency raised a number of novel legal issues and inspired legislation that specifically addressed the statute of limitations. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the No President Is Above the Law Act in 2020 to toll — or effectively pause — the statute of limitations for federal offenses committed by sitting presidents.
Late last year, the House passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which includes a similar provision, along with others meant to prevent future abuses of the pardon power. The bill faces an uncertain future in the US Senate.
Where all 50 fascistic Sedition Party senators follow the Grim Reaper of Democracy’s playbook of total obstruction and will filibuster it, and two Vichy Democrat collaborators with the enemies of democracy will not support modifying the archaic Jim Crow relic filibuster rule.
With the Justice Department taking no visible steps to pick up on Mueller’s work, the expiration of the five-year statute of limitations will mark a largely symbolic moment in the reckoning with Trump’s conduct, legal experts told Insider. Once the five-year deadline passes for the various episodes of possible obstruction, the option of “charging that as a standalone offense goes away,” said Randall Eliason, a former public corruption prosecutor who now teaches law at George Washington University.
Eliason said the Justice Department could still fold conduct outside of that five-year window into a prosecution alleging a broader conspiracy to obstruct justice. If the Justice Department has weighed obstruction charges against Trump and decided not to bring them, Eliason said the public deserves an explanation.
“Given the fact that it involved a former president, given all the information that’s out there in the Mueller report and elsewhere, if DOJ has considered the obstruction charges and decided not to pursue them, I think it would be good for them to issue some kind of statement to that effect explaining why, so the public knows this didn’t just get ignored,” he said.
* * *
Merrick Garland’s dilemma
The Justice Department has not publicly shown an appetite for prosecuting Trump.
In speeches, Attorney General Merrick Garland has emphasized the need to restore the independence of a Justice Department that had been politicized under the Trump administration, and even those clamoring for a prosecution of the former president concede that such a case would cleave an already divided country.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“On the one hand, we don’t want anyone to be above the law. So if he is guilty of a crime, he should pay the same criminal accountability that any other defendant would have to encounter. On the other hand, it’s not great to have one political administration of one political party prosecuting the actions of its predecessor of a different political party. That is nightmarish as well,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor at the Stetson University College of Law.
“So there are many damned if you do, damned if you don’t aspects to holding Trump accountable through the federal criminal system.”
Spare me this “optics” argument. So Trump gets a lifetime “get out of jail free card” simply because the Republicans and their propaganda machine are going to scream “political witch hunt”? They have already been doing this for five years as political intimidation to force inaction by the Department of Justice. This is also obstruction of justice as part of the coverup. Just do your damn job and don’t give a fuck what the co-conspirators at Fox News have to say. The rule of law must be restored after the most corrupt administration in American history.
Garland recently appeared to address the criticism that the Justice Department was ignoring Trump and his inner circle — and instead focusing on relatively low-level offenders — in the investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. On the eve of the first anniversary of the Capitol siege, Garland said the Justice Department was “committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
Yeah, what about the Mueller Report obstruction of justice counts you are sitting on, General?
More recently, the defense lawyer for an accused Capitol rioter said the FBI had focused its questioning of his client on establishing an “organized conspiracy” involving Trump and his inner circle, suggesting that the Justice Department is exploring the former president’s role in the violence of January 6.
Please do – and pick up the pace will you, time is of the essence – but what does this have to do with the Mueller Report obstruction of justice counts?
With Trump, “DOJ is a black box from the outside as far as what prosecutors are or are not pursuing,” Torres-Spelliscy told Insider.
“What’s really peculiar about this situation is that, while President Trump was president, he got the benefit of a DOJ policy that they will not indict a sitting president. We are in somewhat unprecedented legal territory, because the closest we’ve come to this is the Nixon presidency,” she added.
Nixon should have been prosecuted alongside his co-conspirators. Gerald Ford was wrong to pardon him, it introduced this era of Republican lawlessness without any consequences with which we have been living in. It’s time to restore the rule of law.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
He also needs to withdraw the Barr memo against the ERA that was sent the national archivist – NOW. The ERA becomes the 28th Amendment on January 27 and Garland needs to get off his duff. The government brief OPPOSED to the 28th Amendment is due on March 4th unless they change their stance!
Have civil rights organizations put pressure on the White House to change the government’s position? Especially in light of the pending reversal of Roe v. Wade? Please post about this litigation. Thanks.