Garland's Big Lie

On January 5, 2022, the eve of the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a “solemn speech,” according to a contemporaneous Guardian report, in which he pledged to hold responsible all those who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results: “'The justice department remains committed to holding all January 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,' Garland said in his address, delivered from the justice department’s Great Hall in Washington. 'We will follow the facts wherever they lead.'...

“Garland did not mention [Donald] Trump by name, and in keeping with the justice department’s longstanding rule not to comment on ongoing investigations, he did not detail any possible leads the department was pursuing related to the former US president, his family or his allies. But the carefully crafted speech seemed designed to address concerns about the focus of the investigation.... 'There cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless,' he added.”

However, if yesterday's Washington Post report is substantially correct, then Garland was lying in January 2022. Or at least in that “carefully-crafted speech,” he was purposely misleading listeners, suggesting that the Department of Justice was pursuing “the powerful” people behind the coup attempt. According to the Post, “'A decision was made early on to focus DOJ resources on the riot,' said one former Justice Department official.... 'The notion of opening up on Trump and high-level political operatives was seen as fraught with peril. When [Deputy Attorney General] Lisa [Monaco] and Garland came on board, they were fully onboard with that approach.' Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice.... Garland, Monaco and [FBI Director Christopher] Wray ... remained committed to [a 'going up the ladder' approach] even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.”

The Post reports that it was not until April 2022, months after Garland's misleading January 2022 speech and 15 months after the insurrection, that  “Wray signed off on the authorization opening a criminal investigation into the fake electors plot. Still, the FBI was tentative: Internally, some of the ex-president’s advisers and his reelection campaign were identified as the focus of the bureau’s probe, but not Trump.” And that sign-off came only after federal judge David O. Carter ruled in March 2022 that “Trump 'more likely than not' committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes.” “More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability.… If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself,” Carter wrote in his opinion.

And it was not until November 2022, after Trump announced he would seek the presidency* again, that Garland got around to appointing a special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to oversee the case.

If you believe the attorney general should tell the public the truth, then you were mighty irritated when then-attorney general Bill Barr lied about the contents of the Mueller report weeks before Barr allowed the report itself to be released to the public. How is it any better for the current attorney general to craftily imply the Justice Department is investigating “the powerful” when DOJ and the FBI were doing no such thing? To err is human; to lie about erring is unconscionable.

Comments

[Jeanne]

Yes.

[P.D.Pepe]

Here's a bit of an exchange between PBS's Geoff Bennett and WP reporter Aaron Davis:

Geoff Bennett:

In this piece reported by you and Carol Leonnig, you quote a former Justice official, who says of the current DOJ: "You can work so hard not to be a partisan that you're failing to do your job."

How widely held a view was that within the DOJ, that the Garland DOJ was, in many ways, overcorrecting for the perceived ethical failures of the Barr DOJ?

Aaron Davis:

There was a huge culture shift.

In Garland's own words, this was to try to get back to regular order. Under Bill Barr, there were many times that the attorney general said, this is a valid investigation, this is not a valid investigation. The attorney general, Garland, wanted to come in and say, I'm not going to make those decisions. These should bubble up to me from the bottom through evidence.

The problem was, there was such a culture that had been effected by — under the previous administration, where it was hard to go up the chain. There wasn't the mechanism to go up and try to make these cases. And very early on, even before Garland came in, there was an attempt to investigate Trump's orbit.

And it was batted down in the very early weeks after January 6, saying it's premature to do that. Let's build up from the evidence and get there. The problem was, at some point in time in this investigation, they realized there was no connection between the people entering the Capitol and the people who had done some of the fake electors and more of the conspiracy type of work leading up to January 6.

As we quote in the story, there was no ladder to get from here to there to get to those other potential investigations.