That’s absolutely fair. I’d probably grade the same way.
I think Garland, like many others, has been living in the hopes that time and chance would catch up to Trump long before any legal processes could. Unfortunately, Trump’s diet of hamburgers, diet Coke and pure spite will probably keep him alive for another twenty years.
I too think they were hoping he’d croak or something and then the problem would solve itself. They may have also been hoping that the tide would change and Trump support would dissipate to a number that was less worrisome.
Whether or not its exactly what @Grrr wrote, it was close enough to what @Grrr felt at the time that he came back later and said that he was happy to be proven wrong. So it seems that its others who are reinterpreting the OP away from its intended meaning.
I don’t think that he was worried about the deplorables calling it a witch hunt they are a lost cause, he was worried about non-deplorable Americans thinking it was a witch hunt. Which means that anything they go after him for has to be rock solid. Not just enough to convince those people who despise Trump with every fiber of their being but those who don’t really follow the news, and figure that the allegations against Trump are balanced by Biden’s laptop.
His plan was for the Jan 6 committee to do his work for him? Not sure that’s much of a defense of him. Either way, it slowed things unacceptably. The future of our democracy is too important to slow walk it.
The future of our democracy is too important to get it wrong.
Isn’t it standard practice for Congress to get first dibs on an investigation before the DOJ takes their turn? Or is it normal for investigations to run concurrently?
(Serious question, because I don’t know)
I’m not saying anything about any apparent delay between the conclusion of the J6 committee report and word of the DOJ’s investigation coming out.
A few people? Why don’t you enumerate them, asshole. (Hint: One of them was me.)
The OP, The Librarian, and yeah you gave a mea culpa before undoing it with your later revisionist bullshit.
Revisionist bullshit. Yep, exactly. We are currently seeing Trump indicted on the charges the OP was complaining were never going to happen. 100%.
There were no charges specified in the OP. Anything else you want to make up?
Yep, totally agreed. Trump had done nothing wrong up to the point the OP was posted. The OP was clearly talking about future crimes Trump might commit.
I’d like to point out that while I’m absolutely ecstatic that the DoJ finally found a avenue of prosecuting Trump this does not in any way, shape or form make their bullshit about “investigating” J6 true.
They were lying about “nobody is above the law”, they were not investigating Trump or his close orbit in relation with J6.
The people (here and elsewhere) that were (aggressively!) making claims that the DoJ were working on it were wrong. They (the DoJ) were talking about “working their way up” but were later quoted to have said “there was no ladder from here to there”.
The WaPo article really could be posted here verbatim with the same title as this thread.
And it is most likely the best source on the “true” inner workings of the DoJ we are ever going to see.
The article shows that there was no investigation 15! months later — showing that a lot of the naysayers here were 100% correct.
I’ve seen plenty of fly balls hit deep in fair territory that looked clearly like a home run, until they hooked foul or landing in outfielders glove anyway. When Trump is convicted of something then everyone gets to say Garland did go after him and I’ll be dead wrong. That’s what I’m hoping for, but it clearly didn’t happen right away, wouldn’t have happened without external pressure, and if doesn’t result in a conviction it’s like the guy who says he’ll bring the beer but shows up empty handed and still wants credit because the package store was closed,
Now we have this, originally posted in the 1/7 and beyond thread:
Exclusive: Special counsel trades immunity for fake elector testimony as Jan 6 probe heats up
Given the vagaries of the jury pool and the 6-sigma certainty that Trump will never take a plea bargain, I think a conviction is an impossible bar. Actual trials are ‘going after someone’ by any reasonable definition.
I accept that. Garland can’t be held responsible for a stupid jury if there is a competent prosecution at trial. There’s no guarantee that even if there is a trial that Garland won’t somehow tie the prosecutor’s hands. I so much wish to be wrong about this.
Right, and if they’d “gone after” Trump on everything that is being demanded, then there would likely be a number of acquittals.
I’ve not seen them limiting themselves for political reasons, but more on what is probable to get a conviction.
Garland could have had a dozen indictments against Trump by now, each of them acquitted by a jury. There’s so much hearsay in the Jan 6th stuff that it wouldn’t be that hard to create that shadow of a doubt in the jury’s mind.
The documents case is about as sure a thing as you can get. There is incontrovertible proof Trump had the documents that he wasn’t supposed to have, Trump has admitted to the mens rea elements of the crime on national television.
You can still get a MAGA on the jury that refuses to convict, and that’s a chance they will have to take, but at least the case itself is solid.
But why would he? I can understand skepticism around his willingness to investigate (due to caution, foolish bipartisanship, protecting executive privilege or whatever), but once an indictment is laid, what reason would he have to restrict his prosecutor (other than rank corruption)?
Especially with a special prosecutor handling it and Garland apparently taking great pains to (correctly) not stick his nose into the process.
Why did he wait to start investigating? I don’t know the answers. I’ve been charitable and assumed it was fear and incompetence.