Stop the presses

After weeks of airing concerns the Justice Department may not be moving aggressively enough to prosecute former President Trump and others in his orbit, lawmakers on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack met the department’s request for assistance with an interesting response: Not so fast.

The Justice Department has asked the committee to share some of its materials, sending a letter noting that some of its work “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.”

But the committee has said it won’t directly turn over what it’s got, suggesting it would provide only a more narrow level of assistance.

[...]

“The Department of Justice wants to be in a position to prosecute people or to potentially prosecute people and the congressional committees want to be able to stage hearings that lay out for the American people what happened in a way that is designed to grab and keep the attention of the media and the American people.”

[...]

“Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours,” [committee member] Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) said during a March hearing to weigh their third and fourth referrals to DOJ of witnesses who refused to testify.

[...]

Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) implied DOJ may look but not touch.

“They could come and view what we have, but we’re not going to share it,” Thompson said.

“A decision was made not to share any of the records. If they would like to change the request and say we’ll come over and view it that’s fine. But the original request, as it came to the committee, has been turned down,” he said, adding that the department has yet to come back with a more tailored request.

[...]

“My concern, frankly, is the lack of evidence of DOJ investigating in areas where I think they should. And so that’s a greater concern for me than the breadth of what they’re asking Congress for,” he said.

“I think they need to be specific about what they need and why they need it. And the failure to do so raises the same questions about the scope of their investigation and why it is more than a year after Jan. 6 some things still don’t seem to be investigated by the department.…The department doesn’t wait on Congress to do an investigation. And so I think the question is: Why is the department coming to Congress at this point? Why hasn’t the department been doing a broader investigation from the beginning?”

  The Hill

I don't know...maybe because they're stretched so thin dealing with the actual insurrectionist cases and the fucking insane number of racially motivated mass killings we've been having?

Robbins said the select committee should be mindful about keeping the DOJ investigation at arms length so it doesn’t create the perception that it is colluding with prosecutors on cases against partisan adversaries.

JFC, you're going to get blamed for that no matter what you do.

“The January 6 Select Committee has a very specific, statutorily defined purpose,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said.

“The House resolution creating us has asked us to assemble evidence about what happened on the sixth, what caused it and what we need to do in order to prevent it in the future. The Department of Justice has a completely different mission, which is to determine specific crimes and to prosecute them. And so in the Venn diagram of our relevant missions, there’s a lot of overlap, but it’s not complete.”

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) also echoed the hope that DOJ is serious about holding people accountable.

“Everybody’s got their role,” he said. “We’re staying in our lanes and we’re focused on laying out the case that’s ahead of us in June.”

Oh, FFS. Cooperate, or this will take much longer, and backfire to possibly be a factor in Trump's return to the presidency. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.