I didn’t claim he was a super-genius. But his criminal mind is the first (or the finest) ever to occupy the Oval Office. He thinks of crazy shit any other president would have his brain bleached if that shit ever crossed his mind, and some of it was remarkably effective because the people who devised the laws never thought we’d elect anyone who thought like that. Even when they did anticipate things, like the emoluments clause, they didn’t bother to make it crystal-clear and air-tight because “we all know what we mean by that.”
More to the point, they expected that the legislature would have the good sense to impeach and remove a president who was unduly corrupt, authoritarian, or terminally inept. That particular check & balance failed because approximately half of the legislature is now just find with a corrupt, authoritarian, and terminally inept president. This isn’t a legal problem (although Trump has done many things that are clearly illegal even if the evidence is lacking to a criminal court standard); this is a fundamental political problem with one of the two major political parties no longer even nominally adhering to a democratic normals and basic facts.
Stranger
OK longer post time. Mainly a response to this:
This is the misleading part. The prosecutors put in charge of aspects of this investigation are involved in directing both the investigation and the prosecution (as we can both agree on). And of course these things go hand in hand. In order to get people to testify against the guy at the top, you have to investigate the people with the most direct connection to the crimes, then use prosecution, subpoenas, the threat of prosecution etc. to get evidence from them, then use that evidence to keep investigating up the chain.
Isolating the prosecution from the investigation is an incomplete picture, and in this situation where there were multiple roads that could have led to Trump, the way the people at the top directed the effort was crucial. There was never a known link between people actually storming the capital and Trump. There was public evidence that Trump conspired with campaign and other GOP operatives to defrau. Garland dedicated the early investigations to the path that had a less clear path to Trump. And ultimately that path did not lead to Trump.
The delay in getting to the point where they were investigating the people that actually led to the eventual Trump indictment, which is identified by NYT as after Thomas Windham got involved, was self inflicted. Merrick Garland and the people he had running the investigation prior to that were spending most of their effort on the wrong investigation (at least with respect to getting to the leaders), and it took too long for people like Windham and eventually Smith to be in a position to investigate Trump’s allies in a situation where the time to do so was limited.
In your view, is this more of a “knew or should have known” or more of a “with the benefit of hindsight…?”
No, I strongly disagree. Trump is not a criminal genius. He’s as incompetent at crime as he is at business or politics or human relationships.
The only reason Trump gets away with crimes is the reason I gave; the Republican party protects him from any of the consequences of what he does.
We knew at the time that Trump was directly involved with all the vote finding nonsense and getting a paper trail from the rioters to his inner circle was the uncertain path.
And I didn’t claim he was a criminal genius, just a criminal mind, the likes of which we’ve been lucky enough to keep far from the Oval Office until 2017.
I agree he is incompetent. I think that should be his slogan–“Incompetent, Incontinent, incoherent TRUMP IN 2024!!”
But his criminal mind allows him to go in directions that “outsmart” the drafters of our laws simply because they could not conceive of U.S. voters actively and proudly voting a convicted felon into office.
Nixon was clearly a criminal. And I feel several past Presidents also pushed the line. The difference was they were all aware of what they were doing and what they could and could not get away with (although Nixon misjudged where the line was).
Trump isn’t smart enough to understand that. He’s a dumb criminal. He’s the kind of criminal who’ll walk up to a jewelry store in the middle of the day, throw a brick through the window, and start stuffing jewels into his pocket with a dozen people and two security cameras watching him.
Anyone else would get arrested and be in jail an hour later. But the mayor and the police commissioner and the judge all refuse to act. They won’t arrest Trump or prosecute him. So Trump gets away with his crime and a week later he does the same thing at another store.
Trump deserves none of the “credit” for the way he succeeds at his crimes. The only reason he’s succeeding is because of the mayor, the police commissioner, and the judge. Trump’s not even smart enough to realize this; he thinks he’s a criminal mastermind and he’s running the city. He doesn’t understand he is completely dependent on those other people who protect him and they’re the ones who are running things.
Yes. They weren’t investigating the Mafia, this was a violent crowd of followers. The congressional committee went after the right people and got relatively fast results. Garland was too worried about appearances and not worried enough about the damage caused by Trump running free. Selfish and/or weak. And now we’re on a knife’s edge, our democracy in the balance.
Fuck Trump voters. Fuck the media worried more about clicks than the freedom of my brown son and gay nephew and reproductive rights and anyone on Trump’s enemies list and everyone else Trump is a threat to. And yes, Fuck Garland.
It’s worth noting that a lot of Trump support is coming from “Yes he’s terrible, but the communists and leftists he’s running against are even worse.”
That’s not a small thing. And when we consider how much of the FBI’s history has been involved in suppressing “leftists and communists”, you have to think there’s still a lot of institutional bias in that direction.
Say 20% of the FBI are hardcore anti-left, anti-communist and they see being anti-Democrat as part of that. Especially the older ones, especially the old guard. A small minority is enough to put the others in terror of losing their fat government pension, so they pull back and devote extra effort into documenting, memorandizing, etc
OK, I’ll give you Nixon, but even he was aware of the possible consequences of his crimes. His famous “I am not a crook” speech sort of acknowledges that he WAS a crook, just not the kind of crook who knocks over gas stations wearing a mask. Trump and his Supreme Court boboes have managed to make “high crimes” legal.
Sorry to duck out of the discussion for awhile. It’s a busy time of year/month for me and I wanted to wait until I could take the time to respond thoughtfully.
I think we’re largely in agreement and for the most part, I don’t quarrel with your points.
And this is the part where I take exception, though you acknowledge my objection where you say parenthetically, “(at least with respect to getting to the leaders) and it took too long for people like Windham and eventually Smith to be in a position to investigate Trump’s allies in a situation where the time to do so was limited.”
Limited by what? Who’s limiting the time to do an investigation? In all our history, it has never the been the job of the DOJ to complete an investigation within some artificial deadline such as an election. It’s a false narrative, that somehow it was Garland’s responsibility to ensure Trump was investigated, tried and convicted ahead of 2024. It wasn’t. His job was to get him investigated and indicted. Garland completed his part. The people who built delay into the tried/convicted parts of the process do not answer to Garland and were entirely beyond his control.
Let’s go back to January 7, 2021. The country is on fire, divided as it has never been since the Civil War. Biden nominated Garland for a return to normalcy. That meant to eliminate political considerations in doing their work as much as possible. So no, Garland wasn’t operating under some invented standard that he must act ahead of any political campaign. Why should he? His job was to complete investigations, period. And he did.
Garland was working with a weakened DOJ/FBI that included more than a few Trump loyalists. If he had ignored his responsibilities to find, arrest, charge and prosecute all the people who were directly responsible for January 6th, to instead focus solely on getting Trump, how political would that have looked? This is exactly what Garland was hired to avoid.
All the investigations were important, but let’s look at it more from Garland’s point of view. Few people on this Board seem willing to give the man his due. He was a highly respected federal judge, would have been confirmed for the Supreme Court but for the Federalist Society/Leonard Leo/Mitch McConnell agendas. His reputation as a federal prosecutor was one of being tough and unafraid. He sat atop the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and was generally considered to be the best judge in the country, just below the Supreme Court (not the current Supreme Court, obviously). As he watched his own seat on the SCOTUS slip away to partisan hacks like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett, he had to know better than most the potential for this SCOTUS bench to fuck with (delay) proceedings against Trump past the 2024 election. So where best to point the limited resources he had available to him?
He managed to point them in both directions, and he managed to complete his part through to indictments of Trump in both the insurrection and documents cases. What happens to the cases after indictment is not within his control or remit. So why the big push to blame him? It’s pure ignorance of the process. On this Board, we’re supposed to be smarter than this.
I would also argue that trying to force the DOJ to do their work within some artificial election deadline is dangerous. It’s what got James Comey into such a fix when he went outside DOJ guidelines in July of 2016 to shake his finger at Hillary Clinton ahead of an election before announcing the FBI would not be filing charges. From that one departure from those guidelines flowed all else that went sideways in 2016, up to and including likely some culpability for Trump’s election success. It was because Comey got political and spoke when he shouldn’t have, working outside the rules that governed him.
There is so much more and significant culpability for why Trump is still running around loose and destroying the country. Merrick Garland is one of the Good Guys, stepping into the breach to perform a difficult, necessary and largely thankless job with odds stacked against him from the outset. I don’t see what’s so hard to appreciate about that, except people like an easy scapegoat. In this case, it’s misguided, dangerous and undermines confidence in one of our most important institutions: The Department of Justice. It’s not perfect, but I don’t hear anyone offering a reasonable alternative.
I’ll reserve my criticism and bile for the Congressional Trump loyalists who ignored their oaths and failed to remove the bastard from office when they should have, not once but twice. Also for the Supreme Court that grievously delayed justice and created immunity for a president we’ve never had before and don’t need now. Lastly for a circuit court judge who clearly doesn’t understand her oath or her obligations under the law. These are the true villains here.
One of the factors for me is that I am afraid Trump will avoid consequences by aging out. Irrationally, I blame the people responsible for investigating & prosecuting for not going faster: if he dies of old age, he’ll never be convicted.
Sadly, there is a very good chance of that. He may also be deemed incompetent to cooperate in any defense against the charges, which would put him into a treatment facility indefinitely.
Trump still has lots and lots of options (with help from his judicial buddies) to delay these proceedings. It utterly sucks. But it is our system until we change it.
That’s my issue though - all the people you mentioned are villains. And we’re now in the position where if trump or another wannabe dictator tries the same thing, all the same forces will be in place trying to shield him from consequences. That leaves either never letting those guys ever win a presidential election or using everything at our disposal to punish then before they get the chance to do it again.
ETA its entirely possible the scotus was going to come up with a reason to delay trials until the election regardless of what the doj did. In the world we live in where we don’t know, it’s frustrating that the doj committed what id consider an unforced error.
Everything you say is true, and that is for sure a big problem. We let it go too far before doing anything about it.
And now, it may be too late. Even if Trump is defeated in this election – and I still believe he will be – Republicans/MAGAs know they can bide their time and work their magic of relentless criticism of Dems and their policies (never offering any of their own, of course), until they can prevail in an election. It’s how they won in 2016.
What unforced error did they commit? Again, you’re imposing an artificial deadline on DOJ to complete investigation of crimes. Why? Investigations take the time they take.
Merrick Garland could not know there was an Aileen Cannon waiting in the wings to stifle the documents case. He could not know the Supreme Court would fully abdicate their responsibilities to act in a nakedly partisan way for Trump with delay and partisan-driven rulings.
Garland got his indictments. That’s really where his responsibility in this whole mess ends. I appreciate your frustration, I really do, but the blame is misplaced IMHO.
Which is why we have threads like this one; because the Democrats pandering to the Republicans and shielding them from the consequences of their actions IS “normalcy”, right back to the pardon of Nixon. So of course people are going to look at how the DoJ has failed to act against Trump and assume at best incompetence, if not outright deliberate delay; a lifetime of experience has taught them to expect precisely that. The Democrats consistently put the welfare of the Republicans above their own, much less the rest of the country.
Psst- he already has been convicted. 30+ felonies.
Didn’t seem to make a difference.
Okay, let me see- twice, that is two times, the Democrats indicted trump in the House for Impeachment. The GOP blocked conviction- not the Democrats. Pardon of Nixon? Done by a Republican. So, this idea that the- "Democrats pandering to the Republicans and shielding them from the consequences of their actions " does not seem to be true.
The Jan 6 Committee issued a report. The panel voted to recommend that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against Trump
But since then I haven’t sen much support from the divided Congress. Biden has distanced his office from the Judicial investigation.
The result is a timid approach that has done nothing to protect this country from a Trump reelection.
It was crucial that a fair and thorough investigation was completed before Trump won the nomination. That didn’t happen and all the work done may be dismissed with the stroke of a pen.
Which is another failure. No government official should be able to dismiss investigations against themselves. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Mayor, Governor or President.
In 2022. December 19th of 2022. Which was one year and ten months ago. Good, thorough indictments take more time than that and SCOTUS made the DoJ have to rewrite everything.
What would “protect” America? trump has been convicted of 30+ felonies and his followers “I am voting for the felon!”.
So, you want a fast investigation or do you want a thorough investigation?.
Yes, it happened-
Again i ask 'what “protection” could the DoJ do to keep trump from running?