He has one of the smartest legal minds in the business. He knows exactly what he is doing.
Yeah, I know, I know. You all wanna see trump in a orange jumpsuit. Great. Until the hung jury “exonerates” him. Garland can’t afford to screw this up by rushing things.
No matter how thorough Garland is in nailing Trump, how can he prevent a likely hung jury?
Hard to do, but with a buttload of solid evidence, the chance is reduced.
And waiting until Congress finishes will add to the credibility.
What the feck?
I dunno. He could run for agriculture secretary for the state of Indiana. If they ever suspect an infestation of Mediterranean fruit flies, he can trap specimens with his head (it ought to be good for something).
If there is little likelihood of a conviction, then one might consider the effect one’s actions right have given different timings and approaches. Some prosecution is essentially done for PR purposes. It might be more useful to APPEAR like you are doing something at one time, than to actually DO it at another.
Another big issue is that no matter how serious the crime or solid the evidence, there’s a chance it’s going to be washed clean on January 21st, 2025. Trump promised as much last night in a speech to “religious leaders”.
If a Republican wins, anyone that was convicted and jailed will be pardoned. Anyone under indictment will be pardoned. Any ongoing investigation will be dropped like a hot potato and they’ll begin persecuting the investigators. I’m pretty sure that’s why they have no intention of investigating the political actors…….Eastman, Clark, Meadows, Navarro, Bannon, and Stone.
My opinion is not only only based on the 18 months that have passed with no apparent signs of investigation, but on the public statements of the investigators. Chris Wray ( Barr’s partisan toady) is willfully blind, he’s public stated that he doesn’t see a connection between Trump’s election loss and the mob violence and he’s referred to the entire Stop The Steal / election denier movement as “scattered online chatter”.
Garland is simply being disingenuous, when he referred to prosecuting people that weren’t present I’m pretty sure he was referring to Tarrio, but he wanted everyone to think he was referring to the people I mentioned upthread.
My rational self thinks that they are scared to prosecute Trump and his cronies because they might fail, he might win again and then he’ll destroy their careers. My less rational self thinks that maybe they actually made a deal with Trump and agreed not to prosecute the people I listed upthread if he would refrain from pardoning them.
Or worse.
Though, if Trump wins in 2024, we are all in for worse.
A deal with marmot mop? I don’t see any/zero intelligent folks swallowing that.
Given Trump’s tendency to talk, and his ego, if he had been given a deal, he would have crowed about it publicly.
There are some things that he doesn’t talk about. He has shady buisness dealings, as well as shady stuff in his personal life that he’s self aware enough to know would hurt him if he admitted.
And admitting that he took a deal to throw the insurrectionists under the bus in order to not get personally prosecuted could actually hurt him with the MAGA base.
My thoughts trend towards Ann’s, but if a deal was made it was between the J6 committee and Republican leadership: “pummell Trump as much as possible, but leave us out of it.”
The Republicans, especially the “younger generations”, are at a point right now where a lessening of his personal popularity would be really helpful. Trump is getting older, his rallies are increasingly smaller, he is more and more being portrayed as a sore loser who condemned 800 upstanding Americans to felonies while he grifted off of millions of others, and, as happens in every other aspect of human ingenuity, the movement he created is moving past him. Especially @ 76 years of age.
Trump has the votes to become the R nominee. But he won’t have the votes to become President in 2024, not unless the ticket is Biden/Clinton (Chelsea) or something. He’s just… damaged goods. Too damaged.
And yes, ‘his supporters’ blah blah blah. I don’t care, his haters are just as (even more so!) numerous and inspired to vote when he is on the ticket. 62m to 59m, 81m to 74m. We did it twice, we’ll do it thrice. 
Assuming a fair election. It certainly appears, to me, that Republican leadership in many states is trying (and maybe succeeding) to put into place methods to make it more difficult for people in Democratic-leaning areas to vote, as well as to potentially overturn or invalidate election results which they don’t like.
Yes, but we have to cross that bridge when/if we come to it. To your point, the Republicans are doing the age-old boiling frog routine - “what can we get away with before there are riots in the streets?” If we, as citizens, watch 2024 elections get stolen without going out into the streets then we, as citizens, have decided to give up on electoral democracy.
And thus another vote is cast.
But for the purposes of this thread, the J6 committee is focused on Trump and not ‘the Trump wing of the Republican party’. And that, to me, smells of a bargain made.
I wish I could agree, but I still see people driving down the road with Trump flags on their trucks. People still wear MAGA 2020 hats, they still have yard signs. If you talk to them, it gets even worse, what with the illegitimate government run by China’s puppet Biden.
You and I may see him as a sore loser, but his supporters never will.
You should care, as it doesn’t do any good to underestimate his support.
You’ll note that only one of those actually ended up with a win for Democrats. You should also not all the efforts of making sure that that doesn’t happen again being done by the right at the state level.
I don’t know that I would be as cavalier as you seem to be about the future of our nation.
What do we do when we get out into the streets? Do we do as the MAGA crowd did, and storm the Capitol, trying to overturn a stolen election?
Republicans don’t mind riots in the streets, it actually makes their efforts at authoritarianism easier.
It seems to be a condemnation of the Trump wing of the Republican party as well. I suppose it depends on what you mean by Trump wing. McConnel certainly benefited from having Trump in office, but I wouldn’t say he’s in that wing. The congress critters who were assisting the insurrectionists on planning their attack are in that wing, and they seem to be part of the J6 committee’s focus.
I’ve said it before.
When no choice available will have a better outcome. And there is no way to be sure.
Just do the right thing. That’s what people are supposed to do.
This whole issue has created a lot of “Things aren’t going as I’d like, and people are behaving in ways that I don’t think rational people would behave. There must be a conspiracy going on behind the scenes, or the people involved are corrupt cowards.” And I absolutely sympathize with that. At the same time, it makes me a bit uncomfortable, perhaps because it feels to me like armchair quarterbacking. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but I guess I’m just not fully confident in drawing that conclusion for myself at this point.
Judge Luttig 'splains why he spoke. . . . . so . . . . . slowly . . . . at . . . . . the . . . . . hearing.
No, he hasn’t had a stroke (he says). Just wanted to be very very very very sure he spoke exactly as he meant because he is conscious that he is speaking for the history books. He also says that this is the first time in his life (as far as he can recall) ever having been on TV.
Judge Luttig noticed the above tweet, and apparently agrees with it.
That is exactly what the GOP and trump wants- to show he was absolved again. Remember, they consider the two impeachment indictments to be victories.
And that is vote.