Thanks to the OP for an excellent, urgent, maddening question.
The answers above include: 1. Garland is (unjustifiably) weak; 2. In our era, it takes years to collect evidence (for certain types of cases); 3. Among officials at several levels, fear (some would in good faith say justified) of interfering with the electoral will of the people.
There’s some truth to these, surely…but they’re NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I fully share the anger of the OP. A system that fails to bring justice and closure to events perpetrated four years ago is an utter failure. Period. We had an entire presidential term to get this done, and we failed. Utterly.
The lack of legal judgment is exactly what is thwarting the will of the people! It’s forcing many millions of people to make a critical choice, based on woefully insufficient information. (True, we all know – or have access to – to basic facts of these cases. But legal judgment – and sentencing – is real, and important. If it isn’t, the whole concept of law is fucked.)
Is it impossible for a high government official blatantly engaged in obviously illegal, and quite possibly treacherous, acts to be charged, prosecuted, and convicted of crimes?
The answer seems to be Yes. Which means there is something seriously broken about our system of justice.
It depends on if they are a Republican or Democrat. Republicans are above the law, while Democrats can be jailed for pretty much any reason.
As for Trump, recall how as far back as 2016 he was calling for a “Second Amendment solution” to kill Hillary Clinton; he was of course barely criticized for that, much less charged or punished. As a Republican he is considered to have the right to call for the murder of his opponent.
Brutality and lawlessness from the Right has always been tolerated in the US.
In Illinois, we have had, within the last two decades, governors from both the Republican (George Ryan) and Democratic (Rod Blagojevich) parties go to prison for corruption.
At the federal level, there’s a long list of former Congresspersons (in both the House and Senate) who have been convicted of corruption. Since the year 2000, six have been convicted of such: two Republicans, and four Democrats.
Got to say it – hurrying the cases against Trump would have had the effect of making it quicker and easier to exonerate him. Go in with a half-baked case and you end up enabling him to say he “proved” in a court of law that he did not do it. As mentioned,
All the people who in 2020 were proclaiming that by 2024 he would be imprisoned or stripped of all wealth by lawsuits, did not really understand how the system is set up.
(And not only is DrDeth right that the judges and justices who have ruled in his favor in 2023 and 2024 would have done the same in 2021 or 2022, but the same applies to what would be the reaction of his supporters: even if he got off on a technicality or hung jury they would believe that it was 100% proven it did not happen at all and it was not a wrong thing to do if he did.)
One of the problems with getting on with taking him down is that there was no real precedent. At the level of Presidents, the unspoken agreement all these centuries has been, you lose the Presidency, you walk away and we let you walk away in peace. And people acted like it was impossible for the contrary to happen so they did not prepare for it.
The case against Trump didn’t take four years. It took eight. Remember, the Justice Department started investigating him before he was even elected, and the departmental policy of not prosecuting a sitting President was the only reason he wasn’t prosecuted at the time. But at the time the department issued that policy, everyone knew that Trump wouldn’t be President forever. They should have gone ahead with all of the preparation, so as to be ready to nail him to the wall as soon as his term ended.
And yes, it takes time to gather evidence and so on. But if it takes eight years to build a proper case for a very serious set of crimes, then we don’t really have a criminal justice system at all. Whatever the purpose is for criminal justice, if it takes that long, it’s not successfully serving any of those purposes.
Extremely important point. Trump is currently screaming that the “rigged” prosecutions were “false” just because a couple of items have been stricken from some before the trial. Any trial that did not result in a complete and unassailable victory for the prosecution would have essentially ended all efforts thenceforward. Talk about not having a criminal justice system. That would destroy the DoJ. Better a slow process that ends in convictions than any case that doesn’t have every possible out glued shut.
Garland failed miserably in clearing the unbelievable low Bar his predecessors set.
His stint as AG will be taught forever as how to not do anything.
He is Trump’s most import supporter.
“In the two months between Election Day in 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, Trump mounted a wide-ranging campaign to subvert Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Trump and his advisers spread false information about voter fraud, urged Republican state officials to undermine the results in states that Biden won, assembled false slates of electors and pressured Mike Pence, the vice president, to unilaterally toss out the legitimate results. The effort culminated on Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power. Federal prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith have charged Trump with four federal crimes stemming from his attempts to derail the transfer of power.”
It was always an error to rely upon legalistic protections of the Justice Department and Supreme Court to prevent Donald Trump or anyone else aspiring a subversion of the government by political means. The legal system has never been particularly good about dealing with political malefactors unless they’ve been caught in the act accepting a bribe cash in hand, and often enough not even then. The lesson of the Iran Contra affair is that a president can get away with anything, even lying both to Congress and the American public as long as they string out the case past the point that anyone really cases.
The politicians of late Weimar Germany thought that they could keep Hitler and the NSDAP under control via the courts—even, or perhaps especially, those who sought to use him to their own ends—and once Hitler got Hindenburg to appoint him as Chancellor and the Nazis controlled the Reichstag, they essentially set up their own courts ( Der Volksgerichtshof) to persecute political enemies, i.e. everybody with any political influence who wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party. It would be even easier for a would be GOP-backed autocrat to do today because they have already co-oped the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary in addition to having effective control over many state court systems and statehouses. The idea that the people backing Donald Trump (Evangelicals, white nationalists, billionaire industrialists) are going to allow mere laws stand in their way is risible.
It’s fine to blame Merrick Garland for dragging his feet, or the Justice Department as a whole for being completely ineffectual, but as Trump said eight years ago, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Putting him on trial would have the net effect of essentially validating his claim of being the victim of a “Deep State witch-hunt” in the eyes of his supporters and disaffected voters, and it isn’t as if any of his other felony convictions have thus far had any impact whatsoever on his popularity and fundraising except to give him free publicity. Even his evident babbling confusion and inability to elucidate any coherent policy statement of even the most trivial kind aside from promises to go after political opponents and round up immigrants haven’t given pause to all of those supporters who are sure that they won’t be the ones ever caught up in or impacted by such egregiously authoritarian acts.
Which crime was it? Election Interference in GA? Secret Documents in Mar-a-Lago? Calling for an issurection on Jan 6th ? They might have been looking into some stuff- the Emoluments clause, etc, but none of that has come to light in an indictment. Tell, me what crime occured back in 2017?
There is nothing in the Mueller Report, Vol I which would support a an accusation of conspiracy (and makes the distinction between “collusion”, which is not a legal term, and “conspiracy” which is) even though it noted that there were as many as 140 contacts between 18 Trump campaign officials and associates, including specific solicitation for opposition research, not including Trump’s open request to the Russian government at large to hack and provide Hillary Clinton’s ‘missing’ emails made during a televised debate. Vol II did acknowledge that multiple obstructions of justice likely occurred but basically deferred prosecution of that (and the “quid pro quo” attempt to influence Ukraine) to Senate impeachment proceedings. Since there is no declared state of war between Russia and the United States (even though there is clearly a covert “state of conflict” that has been going on since at least as far back as 2012) a conviction for treason (18 USC 2381) is virtually impossible.
As for insurrection, although Trump made it clear in his “tweet” what he expected the January 6 “protesters” to do, like an aspiring New Jersey hood he didn’t actually state his intentions plainly, and the second impeachment held him to be not guilty of “inciting an insurrection”. No federal court is going to try to touch that one, and no federal prosecutor would waste the time to even bring it before a grand jury.
The election interference, particularly in Georgia, is the most straightforward case to make because Trump quite unguardedly asked for the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him the precise number of votes to turn the state over to him. And that case is in process, but has been slagged and delayed with legal maneuvering and will not come to conclusion until long after the election. Even if Trump were found guilty, it would not prevent him from being elected as President, just as his conviction of 34 felony counts for fraud have not in any way limited him.
This, again, is why relying on legalistic ‘protections’ was never a good plan to keep Trump from reacquiring the presidency.