Earlier this week, the January 6 Committee expressed its utter frustration with AG Merrick Garland. As Bess Levin writes at Vanity Fair, January 6 Panel Politely Requests That Merrick Garland Do His F–king Job:
More than 14 months after the events of January 6, 2021, many Americans are pretty frustrated with the fact that, so far, there appears to be absolutely zero consequences for trying to overthrow the results of a presidential election.
[At] a hearing to vote on contempt-of-Congress referrals for former Trump advisers Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro—who have refused to cooperate with the investigation, claiming executive privilege—members of the House January 6 committee publicly pleaded with the Justice Department to get its ass moving on charges for uncooperative Trump cronies specifically and step up its investigation of the events surrounding the attack on the Capitol in general. “The Department of Justice has a duty to act on this referral and others that we have sent,” Rep. Adam Schiff said. “Without enforcement of congressional subpoenas, there is no oversight, and without oversight, no accountability—for the former president or any other president, past, present, or future. Without enforcement of its lawful process, Congress ceases to be a coequal branch of government.” Rep. Zoe Lofgren echoed that statement, saying: “Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rightly said that the public needs to know everything about what caused and occurred on January 6. Now, to inform both the American people and legislative reform proposals, this committee needs to speak with Mr. Scavino. He has to fulfill his legal and his moral obligation to provide testimony and documents, or he should face the consequences. That’s why we’re taking this action today. In the United States of America, no one is above the law. This committee is doing its job—the Department of Justice needs to do theirs.” And while those were the most fighting words we’ve heard directed at the DOJ from the committee thus far, Rep. Elaine Luria was even more explicit, officially dispensing with the niceties and fully putting the man in charge of the department on blast.
“When given the opportunity to tell the truth about the attack on January 6, both Mr. Scavino and Mr. Navarro continue to put loyalty to Donald Trump before the Constitution and the American people,” she said. “Tonight, I will vote to hold Mr. Scavino and Mr. Navarro accountable for their actions, and recommend that the House of Representatives cite both of them for contempt of Congress. And the Department of Justice must act swiftly. I will echo what myvcolleagues have already said, but more bluntly: Attorney General Garland, do your job so that we can do ours.”
The demands for Garland to step up his game came the same day federal judge David Carter said that it was “more likely than not” that Trump (and lawyer John Eastman) had committed a crime when the former president plotted to steal a second term.
[A]pparently just as frustrated as the House committee, not to mention millions of Americans, Judge Carter added: “If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.” In other words, Carter was practically screaming for Garland—the only person who has the power to bring criminal charges against Trump and others—to do something.
As Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien wrote on Tuesday:
A federal judge thinks that former president Donald Trump likely committed fraud…how much longer will it take Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about that attempted coup?
Perhaps Garland has already gone down that path. But there are no outward signs that he is investigating Trump with an eye toward a possible criminal prosecution. He has every reason to be circumspect, of course, but he has no reason to ignore the mounting evidence of Trump’s crimes.… Carter’s certitude isn’t bias; he understands what’s right in front of him. Garland should do the same.
Incidentally, we already know Trump is laying the groundwork to try and steal the next election, should he decide to run. So it would be nice if the attorney general made stopping him at least the second or third priority on his to-do list.
Just days after these rebukes from the January 6 Committee and Judge Carter, the New York Times runs a report sourced to the Department of Justice, once again seeking to reassure us, “don’t believe your lying eyes, we really are working on it.”
Given the suspicious timing of this reporting, color me skeptical. If the Coup Plotters were actually being called to testify in front of a grand jury, their corrupt GQP lawyers would be singing to Fox News propagandists every night, and the Coup Plotters (grifters) would be sending out fundraising emails to the MAGA/QAnon cult to shake them down for their legal defense fund. This is not happening, so there is no public facing evidence of an actual DOJ investigation of the Coup Plotters.
The Times reports, Justice Dept. Widens Jan. 6 Inquiry to Range of Pro-Trump Figures:
Federal prosecutors have substantially widened their Jan. 6 investigation to examine the possible culpability of a broad range of figures involved in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, people familiar with the inquiry said on Wednesday.
The investigation now encompasses the possible involvement of other government officials in Mr. Trump’s attempts to obstruct the certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory and the push by some Trump allies to promote slates of fake electors, they said.
Prosecutors are also asking about planning for the rallies that preceded the assault on the Capitol, including the rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 of last year, just before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
The federal investigation initially focused largely on the rioters who had entered the Capitol, an effort that has led to more than 700 arrests. But the Justice Department appears to have moved into a new phase [where is your supporting evidence for this bald assertion?], seeking information about people more closely tied to Mr. Trump. This development comes amid growing political pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to move more aggressively on the case.
A grand jury sitting in Washington is investigating the rallies that preceded the storming of the Capitol, a person familiar with the matter said.
One of the subpoenas, which was reviewed by The New York Times, sought information about people “classified as VIP attendees” at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally.
It also sought information about members of the executive and legislative branches who had been involved in the “planning or execution of any rally or any attempt to obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the 2020 election.
Really? Let me help you out, I keep a handy list right here. The 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack, i.e., provided aid and comfort to the violent insurrectionists. See, 18 U.S. Code § 2383. I even have their photos, which I am still waiting for the DOJ to turn into orange jumpsuit mug shots.
I have not seen any of these traitorous seditious insurrectionists on television complaining that they are the subject of a DOJ partisan witch hunt, so no, I don’t believe that the DOJ is seriously investigating any of them (even the handful of traitorous seditious insurrectionists subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee who are refusing to cooperate).
And it asked about the effort by Trump supporters to put forward alternate slates of electors as Mr. Trump and his allies were seeking to challenge the certification of the Electoral College outcome by Congress on Jan. 6.
Really? Because I don’t see any of the two groups of fake GQP electors from Arizona on television complaining that they are the subject of a DOJ partisan witch hunt, so no, I don’t believe that the DOJ is seriously investigating any of them.
Another person briefed on the grand jury investigation said at least one person involved in the logistics of the Jan. 6 rally had been asked to appear.
In pursuing Jan. 6 cases, prosecutors have been assembling evidence documenting how defendants have cited statements from Mr. Trump to explain why they stormed the Capitol. And prosecutors have cited in some cases a Twitter post from Mr. Trump weeks before Jan. 6 exhorting his followers to come to Washington, a call that motivated extremist groups in particular.
[T]he expanded inquiry, elements of which were reported earlier by the Washington Post, suggests that prosecutors are pursuing a number of lines of inquiry. Those include any connections between the attack on the Capitol and the organizers and prominent participants in the rally on the Ellipse, and potential criminality in the promotion of pro-Trump slates of electors to replace slates named by states won by Mr. Biden. [But not the Coup Plotters at the top of the Seditious Conspiracy pyramid.]
This report from the @washingtonpost is the first evidence that DOJ is doing anything. It's light on details and doesn't explain why Garland is not supporting the Jan 6 committee. But it is SOMETHING. https://t.co/FkJhqNNgOT
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) March 30, 2022
We can safely assume that the "some officials" mentioned here are not the same ones who are defying Congressional subpoenas I think (b/c their bad "privilege" arguments are totally busted if they start talking to the feds). But there are others who have cooperated with 1/6.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) March 30, 2022
.@ElieNYC: "Either Merrick Garland has a super-secret investigation going on that nobody knows about–he's got all the cards and he's ready to go–or it's the biggest failure of an attorney general in American history." #TheReidOut pic.twitter.com/SVXTNkoKYi
— The ReidOut (@thereidout) March 28, 2022
Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon, Merrick Garland is ignoring the DOJ’s original mission: Battling seditionists like Donald Trump (excerpt):
In remarks scheduled the day before the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Attorney General Merrick Garland swore that his agency would not let power and privilege shield those responsible for the assault on our democracy.
“The Justice Department,” he promised, “remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.” Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers, he said, would “follow the facts wherever they lead.”
It’s now been nearly three months since those remarks, and unfortunately, it’s starting to look very much like the elite Republicans who were part of a conspiracy to overthrow democracy are, in fact, too swaddled by status and wealth to be held accountable under the law. Every day, the extent of the conspiracy and the number of high-level GOP officials and activists involved with Donald Trump’s attempted coup becomes more clear. Yet the DOJ appears to be doing little, if anything, to charge them with crimes. It’s gotten to the point where the members of the January 6 committee are publicly beging Garland to do something.
[If] Garland’s hesitation comes from a belief that prosecuting coup-related crimes is too “political” to be handled by the DOJ, well, then he needs to be a better student of history. It’s not just that dealing with people like Trump and his co-conspirators has always been a part of the DOJ’s mission, it’s that stopping racist and anti-democratic criminal conspiracies like Trump’s attempted coup is quite literally what the DOJ was founded to do.
Quick history lesson: The modern DOJ — which was originally called the U.S. Department of Justice and Civil Rights Enforcement — was founded in 1870 under President Ulysses Grant. Its most important mission, as Bryan Greene at the Smithsonian Magazine explained in a 2020 article, “was the protection of black voting rights from the systematic violence of the Ku Klux Klan.” In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the DOJ to break up the white supremacist criminal conspiracies that had risen up throughout the former Confederacy to intimidate Black citizens from voting.
It’s not a coincidence that this 1871 law is now being used by civil rights groups, Capitol law enforcement, and some Democratic members of Congress to sue Trump and his alleged co-conspirators for inciting violence on January 6. It’s also being leveraged by civil rights groups and Democratic officials to sue Trump supporters engaged in campaign and voter intimidation across the country. That’s because the January 6 insurrection and these voter intimidation efforts are very much the historical descendants of the KKK and similar white supremacist groups the DOJ was explicitly founded to quash.
Everything that followed from the Big Lie, from the attempts to decertify the election to the Capitol riot, flowed from the same impulse that shaped the KKK: A belief that white Americans are the only legitimate Americans and that a president elected by a racially diverse coalition is illegitimate. Like the KKK, Trump and anyone else involved in the attempted coup would rather destroy democracy than accept sharing power with people who don’t look like them.
The DOJ’s failure to act, meanwhile, can’t be chalked up to a lack of facts or possible charges, either.
The House of Representatives referred Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on contempt of Congress charges three and a half months ago, and so far, Meadows has not been arrested. Instead, more stories have come out about how he and his wife likely committed voter fraud, aka more crimes they will likely be too rich and powerful to have to answer for. The committee’s public call for Garland to act this week came after they referred two more Trump officials — Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro — to the DOJ for refusing subpoenas.
In just the past week and a half, the amount of evidence of the high-level conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election has been frankly overwhelming. Trump fought to keep White House call logs from January 6, 2021 hidden for months. They have finally been turned over to the January 6 committee — and sure enough, seven hours are missing, despite a mountain of witness testimony showing that Trump was glued to his phone throughout this period. Former national security advisor John Bolton has confirmed that Trump liked to talk about using “burner phones,” which is exactly the sort of evidence that establishes criminal intent in trials against people who actually face charges because they aren’t high-ranking Republicans. A federal judge in California also just ruled “it more likely than not that President Trump” conspired with his lawyer, John Eastman, to commit crimes — and the evidence of that is being entered into the public record.
There’s also this big-time story about how Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was part of a larger circle of people plotting ways for Trump to steal the 2020 election. According to new reporting from the Washington Post, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., was also heavily involved, fleshing out schemes to block Joe Biden’s electoral win certification. While it’s unclear if either of them can be charged with crimes, what is clear is that there was an extensive, high-level conspiracy to deny Americans the right to choose their own leaders, one that was fueled by white supremacist intent. Which is exactly the sort of thing the DOJ was founded to stop.
The good news is that there are whispers that the DOJ is planning to hire more lawyers to handle the January 6 investigations, which many DOJ watchers took as a sign that Garland is finally — almost 16 months after the Capitol riot — starting to take seriously his duty to do something about the conspiracy to end democracy. Unfortunately, this may just be more wish-casting. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco did recently reiterate the promise of holding perpetrators accountable “no matter at what level.” Still, she mostly talked about how, “We are going to continue to do those cases.” So far, “those cases” have strictly involved the low level idiots who actually stormed the Capitol, as well as some fringe leaders of neo-fascist street gangs. While these folks are known to be in communication with Trump’s inner circle, the actual inner circle people — as well as Trump himself — remain untouched.
Perhaps that will change. If so, Garland is nearly out of time.
The midterm elections are a mere seven months away, and if Republicans retake the House of Representatives, as most polling shows they likely will, one thing is certain: They will do anything and everything in their power to destroy any meaningful DOJ investigation into high-ranking coup conspirators. As they are the people who control the budget to hire all those lawyers the DOJ is finally asking for, this could get ugly fast. So the clock is ticking. If Garland has some secret desire to do his job, the time to get it done is nearly out.
I have said before that if Merrick Garland is not up to the task of prosecuting Donald Trump and his cabal of seditious insurrectionist Coup Plotters, he should resign and afford President Biden the opportunity to appoint someone who will aggressively prosecute these seditious traitors. And that goes for Trump appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray as well.
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Jennifer Rubin writes, “If Biden is frustrated with Garland, it’s his own darn fault”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/04/biden-garland-jan-6-prosecution-frustrated/
The New York Times reports, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/us/politics/merrick-garland-biden-trump.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes, “The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself.” The Times says that “while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.” Biden’s frustration notwithstanding, the blame is not only Garland’s.
A host of former DOJ lawyers, prosecutors, commentators and legal experts warned Biden that the qualities needed to be a federal judge were different than those suited for attorney general. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has remarked, Garland “comes out of an ivory tower judgeship, far away from a lot of the political mischief. And I’m not sure how much situational awareness he has about the forces that are operating … around the department and operated through the department, it appears, during the Trump administration.”
Biden knew what he was getting when he picked Garland. He selected someone totally lacking not only in partisanship but in political awareness and savviness. Biden chose a judge known for his deliberate, copious analysis. He and his advisers certainly knew Garland avoided public speaking and writing as a judge. That Garland has eschewed the public limelight and lacked prosecutorial zeal and willingness to challenge Justice Department protocol and traditions should come as no surprise.
Garland likes to invoke as a role model Edward Levi, the post-Watergate attorney general who reformed the Justice Department. However, Garland misses a critical attribute Levi possessed, as Lawfare’s legal gurus explain: “Ed Levi spoke a lot. Garland has been, in sharp contrast, largely invisible. … You don’t establish norms, or reestablish them, merely by modeling them. You establish them by articulating them, by talking about them, and by convincing people that they are the right way to behave.”
And you do not reassure the public that you are defending democracy by failing to explain the crime you are investigating: a plot that began well before Jan. 6 to overthrow our democracy and install the losing candidate.
If Biden is displeased with Garland — or finds he lacks the necessary qualities to conduct the sort of investigation our fragile democracy requires — Biden can replace him. He has every right to a new attorney general who embraces the public, educational nature of the job and who will push back aggressively against institutional reticence and wariness of disrupting outmoded conventions.
In addition to selecting an attorney general who lacked political deftness and prosecutorial zeal, Biden has certainly not helped matters by failing to address the urgency of the Republicans’ assault on democracy. He has studiously avoided making the connection between defense of democracy in Ukraine and defense of democracy here at home. He refuses to give a speech explaining that our ability to mount a democratic alliance in support of the West demands we defeat domestic authoritarian impulses, such as big lies and conspiracies in service of propaganda, assaults on election results and election officials, and the embrace of violence.
Without naming specific defendants, Biden can publicly declare that those legally responsible for the coup must be held accountable. (One hopes he made this clear when he interviewed Garland.) And Biden could still task the Justice Department as a matter of policy with presenting a report on threats to democracy and recommendations for addressing it.
In sum, Biden chose someone not suited for prosecuting a former president and co-conspirators, and not inclined to play the public role that is a critical part of the job. Biden has not lit a fire under Garland. Certainly, the public has every reason to be frustrated with Garland. But the buck stops with his boss. If Biden is a lackluster defender of democracy at home, what do you expect of his attorney general?
I’ve heard the obvious “Garland fears what MAGAland will do” so he’s not going to charge the unemployed Florida actor.
That makes some sense, who knows what some nut or bag of nuts would do? A school? A mall? A power station?
Probably a school board meeting. These people are sick.
But that’s not a good excuse. We can’t live in fear of criminals. I hope it’s not true.
I don’t recall who, but some legal person said it’s more likely Garland has decided he can’t win a case against the pussygrabber, because after dragging a trial out for years a jury of 12 would certainly have one or more of his supporters on it, and they’ll never get to guilty, even if they more than prove the case.
So after 6 years of “he’s going to get indicted any minute now” and “he’s not going to like how fat his ass is going to look in an orange jumpsuit” I’m just going to finish up.
It’s all clickbait, and 6 years of edging is more than even Sting could handle.
The January 6 Committee and the DOJ are supposed to be conducting parallel investigations into the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection on January 6, 2021. They each have their own remit, and own jurisdiction. Yet it increasingly appears as if the DOJ is waiting on the January 6 Committee to do the hard investigative work, when it should be the other way around.
Jennifer Rubin writes, “Please, Merrick Garland. Don’t wait for the Jan. 6 committee.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/31/merrick-garland-dont-wait-for-jan-6-committee-donald-trump/
[N]umerous lawyers and pundits — have outlined multiple potential lines of prosecution against defeated former president Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. So why does the Justice Department seem so desultory in pursuing such strategies against Trump and his inner circle?
Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco have both said they would follow the facts and not artificially exempt anyone from inquiry. Indeed, The Post reported on Wednesday, the Justice Department has at least convened a grand jury to subpoena “some officials in former president Donald Trump’s orbit who assisted in planning, funding and executing the Jan. 6 rally,” showing the investigation has at least “moved further beyond the storming of the Capitol to examine events preceding the attack.” But the Justice Department has yet to show signs that it is pursuing charges against Trump and his senior advisers who sought to upend the tabulation of the electoral college votes.
[So] let’s assume the Justice Department has not ruled out prosecuting Trump and his immediate advisers. Then what’s going on?
Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare articulates a popular theory in legal circles these days: “Perhaps the department is deferring to the [House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection], letting the committee develop the facts on this matter of the president while the department focuses on seditious conspiracy cases against the Oath Keepers for example.” If that is the case, it is very misguided, both as a legal strategy and a matter of practical politics.
On the litigation front, federal prosecutors should not rely on another branch of government to conduct a thorough, appropriate investigation. Doing so would risk the mishandling of evidence that might render it inadmissible in court. Lawmakers might also fail to nail down admissions sufficient to provide the basis for prosecution. Plus, no prosecutor should want witnesses to know who other witnesses are and what evidence is out there, let alone watch others testify on TV before interviewing with law enforcement or testifying in front of a grand jury. It’s essential that witnesses not shape this story or coordinate with others.
Moreover, if suspects or witnesses are inclined to hide or destroy evidence, affording them time to do so is reckless. Congress has a clumsy and time-consuming process for enforcing subpoenas. It also has the additional risk of legal rulings barring production of documents that a prosecutor using a grand-jury subpoena likely would not face.
Just these week, The Post reported that the White House’s phone logs have a gap of 7½ hours on the day of the insurrection. What happened to the phone logs? Were they removed or destroyed while Congress was litigating subpoenas?
Waiting until Congress finishes its inquiry would also ignore key political considerations. What if the committee does not conclude its work [should] Democrats lose their majority? What if the committee (foolishly) does not make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, thereby seeming to play down the viability of criminal culpability?
If the attorney general plans not to bring charges against Trump and his inner circle until 2023, then he really does not appreciate the mischief a Republican Congress could unleash on the Justice Department (defunding it, impeaching the attorney general). Moreover, filing charges after Republican victories in the midterms could give the appearance of a desperate effort to slow down the GOP’s political momentum. If the goal is to avoid making the department seem political, waiting for Congress and the midterms is no way to go about it.
Garland is by training and habit a judge, not a prosecutor. He seems devoid of political instincts, lacking an appreciation for the need to inform and educate the public to build support for his department. That puts a strong burden on advisers, both political and career, to push him forward both to preserve the department’s litigation strategy and to avoid political potholes. At the very least, advisers should urge him to initiate prosecution against senior figures (up to and including the president) well before the midterms to the extent the law and facts warrant.
If Garland insists on foot-dragging, perhaps President Biden should ask federal judge David O. Carter to take over as attorney general. He seems to know quite a bit about putting together a compelling criminal case.
-There are any number of current and former U.S. Attorneys with the Department of Justice who could and would have more aggressively pursued prosecuting the Coup Plotters at the top of the seditious conspiracy pyramid than “milquetoast Merrick” Garland has. Garland could have and should have appointed one of them a special prosecutor on assuming his office last year. It is too late now.
George Conway III writes, “A federal judge said Trump probably committed a crime. The DOJ can’t ignore that.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/30/george-conway-trump-eastman-garland-investigate/
“A coup in search of a legal theory.”
That was the sober, and apt, assessment made this week of former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election — not by a partisan or pundit, but in an opinion by a federal judge. And although that ruling, by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, did not decide a criminal case, it ought to presage one.
We don’t know whether the Justice Department has been considering criminal charges against Trump, or whether it will. We do know that Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a speech commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, vowed that the Justice Department was “committed to holding all Jan. 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
Carter’s conclusion makes clear that, for the attorney general’s commitment to be met, the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Jan. 6 must focus closely on Trump.
[C]arter’s decision was at once pedestrian and remarkable. Pedestrian, because all the 44-page opinion did was methodically recite the law and apply it to the facts. Remarkable, because of where its analysis inexorably led: that a sitting president of the United States, with the help of his lawyer, “more likely than not” violated two federal criminal laws in a desperate effort to keep himself illegally in power.
One of those statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c), says you can’t “obstruct” or “impede” “any official proceeding,” or even attempt to do so, if you act “corruptly.” The other, 18 U.S.C. § 371, prohibits people from conspiring “to defraud the United States … in any manner or for any purpose.”
These laws clearly cover the congressional counting of electoral votes. The obstruction statute defines “official proceedings” to include “a proceeding before Congress.” Carter became the 11th federal judge in the past four months to hold that the term encompasses the joint session held last Jan. 6.
The law punishing conspiracies to defraud sweeps even more broadly. As Chief Justice William Howard Taft explained for a unanimous Supreme Court a century ago, the language is “broad enough” to cover not only financial frauds, but also “any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing, or defeating the lawful function of any department of government.”
For [Coup Plotters] Eastman and Trump, the question boils down to state of mind: whether they acted “corruptly” under the obstruction law, or with the requisite “deceit” or dishonesty under the conspiracy law. And that’s where Carter’s recitation of the facts comes in. Both men, he found, “likely knew” their allegations of electoral fraud were “baseless, and therefore that the entire plan” to stop or delay the electoral-vote count “was unlawful.”
Trump was told, again and again, by “numerous credible sources,” that “there was no evidence of election fraud,” Carter noted. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency said so. An internal Trump campaign memo said so. Trump’s own attorney general, William P. Barr, told Trump as well. So did other Justice Department officials. The vice president told Trump there was no basis not to count the electoral votes. Georgia’s secretary of state said there was no fraud in his state (to which Trump notoriously responded, look, just find one more vote than I need). And over 60 lawsuits on Trump’s behalf went down in flames.
Whether all that, along with other evidence, would suffice to establish criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt — the burden of proof needed for a criminal conviction — can be left for another day. The point for now is that Carter’s conclusion, that the evidence uncovered so far is more than sufficient to overcome the claimed privileges — is also more than enough to justify a thorough federal criminal investigation of Trump himself, if one isn’t underway already.
A prosecution would involve a novel application of both statutes. But that’s only because never before have we had anyone, let alone a president, try to corruptly obstruct a proceeding so important, or to dishonestly defeat a governmental function so fundamental, as the counting of electoral votes.
As Carter put it, if “Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power” under the Constitution — by any reckoning, they attempted a coup.
If the law prohibits anything, it ought to prohibit that. And if anything seems like a worthy — indeed, unavoidable — subject for investigation, Trump’s conduct is it.
Garland has been a huge disappointment. Maybe the Republicans should have confirmed him to the Supreme Court after all and got another republican in disguise.
True. And maybe Biden shouldn’t have given him a consolation prize.