UPDATE 10:53 am:
They have a point: why DIDN'T he? Who was HE protecting?
The day before we hit the road in December 2021, I finished writing my book, They Knew. T
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“The 21st century's most desirable currency is impunity,” I wrote. “Impunity, the sadist's conception of freedom, mainstreamed and marketed as the new American Dream.”
Victims positioned as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn.
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The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland.
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Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. Even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency.
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The Biden administration falsely proclaimed the pandemic over and blocked public health data from view as millions died or became disabled. They abandoned the tenets of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in favor of Cop City. They greeted the reversal of Roe as a fundraising opportunity, not even offering meaningful rhetorical opposition.
They continued the migrant abuse that took place under Trump and let the abusers remain at large. They sanctioned Russian oligarchs while letting their proxies fund campaigns in both parties. The most egregious offender is the DOJ. Under Merrick Garland, the best friend of Jared Kushner’s ethics lawyer Jamie Gorelick, the DOJ refused to prosecute Trump administration crimes even after the criminals confessed. They let the statute of limitations run out on the Mueller probe, ignored the repercussions of Trump’s network of mafiosos gaining classified intelligence, disregarded blatant criminality on the Supreme Court, and slow-walked a response to the theft of stolen documents containing nuclear secrets.
This is not a serious country, but a country in serious crisis. This is not a sovereign country, but a country under the tyranny of the minority regardless of who is in charge. We have elections, but we do not have choice.
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[Biden] fist-bumped MBS, bear-hugged Netanyahu, and announced the appointment of Iran-Contra war criminal Elliot Abrams. Biden was in the middle of waiving 26 federal regulations to build Trump’s Wall when he was interrupted by Israel’s genocide, to which he pledged material support. We don’t know how far the complicity goes, because in an unprecedented move, the Biden administration has decided to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy.
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In late September, Biden rolled out an ad bragging about his ability to work across the aisle. Across the aisle sit Republican seditionists, aspiring autocrats, and stooges propped up by dark money plutocrat networks. A person cannot rightly claim democracy is under attack and then brag that they are working with the people trying to destroy it.
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Democrats are worried about how Biden’s nonchalance over the slaughter of over 10,000 Palestinian civilians, roughly 4000 of them children, will affect the next election. This is possibly progress: in the beginning, he refused to believe the death toll was even real.
Now, faced with bombed schools and bombed hospitals and bombed refugee camps and Palestinian parents carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags while screaming in agony as the electricity is cut and the food supply ends and Israelis mock Palestinians deaths for a Tik-Tok challenge and Netanyahu uses Biblical references to convey his annihilatory intent.
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There are many reasons for the US government’s unwavering support of Israel no matter how authoritarian it becomes. I explain some of them in this article.
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But Israel is also a nexus for organized and white-collar crime, the money of which streams into US elections through lobbying groups and megadonors. That money is often far darker in origin than it seems. Ask any of the oligarchs and mafiosos who have long abused Israel’s right of return policy in order to escape criminal charges and launder their filthy gains.
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Ask Ghislaine Maxwell, since you can’t ask her father, Mossad agent and mafioso Robert Maxwell, or her partner, Jeffrey Epstein. Ask genocide abettor Antony Blinken. He might know since his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was Robert Maxwell’s best friend and lawyer before offering his services to Epstein. It’s a small, dirty world.
It is a world of elite criminal impunity, and now we are seeing the cracks.
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The most notable foreign policy difference between Trump and Biden has been Ukraine. Biden generated global goodwill for supporting a struggling country being invaded in sharp contrast to Kremlin lackey Trump. But that goodwill is vanishing and Ukraine – now gutted – may end up abandoned.
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Our crisis is beyond elections. You cannot vote out the mafia. You cannot wait for a referendum on ongoing mass murder. But you can look evil in the eye and stand up for those targeted. You can hope that if you are targeted, someone will do the same for you. If no one does, you still did the right thing, and that still matters.
Behold, a Pale Horse Race NOV 05, 2023
In 1991, I did not feel threatened by the fact that Trump, a career mobster, had avoided prosecution. He lived in a golden tower, and I went to middle school. The Jeffrey Epstein case wasn’t public, so I didn’t know I was the same age as the trafficked girls Trump allegedly raped.
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Kids were expected to know Trump was evil. All Americans knew, until the American media forgot 25 years later.
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Trump was first investigated by the Department of Justice in 1973, and they let him go with a slap on the wrist. His criminal activity grew bolder the longer officials let him do it. Trump committed crimes my entire life, cocooned in impunity, until hatching like a butterfly effect in 2016. Transnational autocratic alliances strengthened during his presidency.
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Trump is part of an American criminal elite that does not run from the law, but runs for office in order to become the law.
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Controlled opposition issues “strong statements” of condemnation but, in reality, countenances sedition, ignores confessions, and blames the American people for anything going wrong. They tweet that America is in danger like they are passive spectators, instead of the few people with the legal power to investigate state crimes.
Sometimes they take breaks from streamlining elite criminal impunity to fund genocide. It’s how Congress likes to bond across the aisle.
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Every day, I watch a massacre in Gaza. Every day, I watch liberals play down this massacre, which is funded with their tax dollars, and speak of the looming danger of Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a right-wing plot to turn the US into a fascist state. It is indeed threatening, but much like the Trump mafia project that abets it, it has been building for my entire life and no one seems serious about stopping it.
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Instead of explaining their plan to prevent Project 2025, Democrats use it as an excuse to change the subject. They tell me to stop talking about Gaza because beheaded Palestinian babies make Biden look bad.
“You need to shut up,” they threaten, “or Biden will lose, and then you’ll lose your reproductive rights!”
“Well, joke’s on you,” I reply, “because I already lost my reproductive rights!”
This comeback always sounds better in my head.
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I haven’t had legal bodily autonomy since 2022. It’s not a loss you get used to. I wake every morning keenly aware of it, and keenly aware that the Democratic Party traded my uterus for fundraisers after the Republican Party raped my rights.
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I live in the land of the Aftermath People. My dark-money, gerrymandered state of Missouri enforces many of the terrible policies the Republicans promise nationwide for 2025. My vote is meaningless in a presidential election, and a foreign country’s henchmen are trying to oust my congresswoman.
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I am told I must vote to get my freedom back. This should be easy: my representative, Cori Bush, is a strong supporter of the right to bodily autonomy. But the Democrats are trying to get rid of her. So are the Republicans. They tried to oust her in a 2022 primary with the same tactics they are using now. [ed note: They finally succeeded in August 2024, losing her primary.] Every two years, my home is spammed with propaganda from fake PACs with names like “Progressives for Missouri” that are secretly funded by hard-right Zionist fanatics.
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I rarely hear “democracy is dying” from Aftermath People. I hear fury and disgust with the system, but not surrender, because we cannot afford that.
I hear “democracy is dying” the most from representatives trying to get my money.
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Aftermath People have to always think in terms of survival, and what powers the will to survive is moral clarity. You learn new ways to stand your ground. Never live your life on your enemies’ terms. Never emphasize the villains over the victims.
That’s why the Trump verdict doesn’t matter much yet: the real victims, the American people, are no freer than they were before.
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I’ve been writing about Trump for nine years, and about autocracy for over twenty. It’s frustrating to see people catch on when it’s too late.
The Aftermath People Jun 11, 2024
[Donald Trump] is a pathological liar who spent his life in organized crime before committing sedition, and then getting immunity when no one — not Congress, not the January 6 committee, not the DOJ, not the very president he tried to overthrow — used the legal means granted to them to contain him in time.
For four years, Trump played his favorite, most predictable game — running out the clock — as officials let our freedom tick away. What does the constitution mean to these politicians, anyway? Just a paper, just a joke. Just “justice”, a concept at which they sneer behind the scenes while striking a pose of solemnity when they beg for your money on camera.
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Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election.
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It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.
Biden’s cult is so loyal that they had long given up on him fulfilling his 2020 campaign pledges, including enforcing accountability for Trump’s many crimes. Instead, they spent years reciting a long list of why those promises were always impossible, and stressed the importance of voting for Biden again, so he can let down America with less surprise next time.
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The Blame Room is mirrored and infinite. Blame the media, blame the lighting, but above all, blame yourself — blame yourself, voter, you did not vote hard enough! Blame yourself for having expectations! Blame yourself for being betrayed.
But never, ever blame the officials who tore up America’s last chance like it was a losing lottery ticket and laughed as the pieces scattered in the wind.
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It has been heartbreaking to see a widespread loss of compassion over the past four years, along with abandonment of policies and people who were championed in 2020. The acceptance of mass death through covid during Biden’s term, greeted with horror during Trump’s term, was followed by the acceptance of mass murder abroad.
I have begged Americans not to give into cruelty. The surrender of the soul is the most dangerous act a person can commit — to others and to themselves. It is also the surest route to authoritarianism.
Last Chance, USA JUL 10, 2024
I do not want to talk about Merrick Garland again. It feels like doing homework for a class my country already failed.
But it is necessary to do so. There is a shroud over the USA. It is woven of decades of deceit and impunity, but it is not interminable. There are threads that, when pulled, cause the shroud to unravel and Americans to see the light.
One of those threads is Merrick Garland’s rise to power, and the role of his mentor and lifelong best friend, Jamie Gorelick, in that rise.
I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.
It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.
The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.
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Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.
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Among them are William Sessions and Louis Freeh, FBI heads who went on to serve Semyon Mogilevich and his transnational mafia operation. I explain this complex network in my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.
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These servants of the mafia state would not intervene even when public safety was at grave risk. The longer they waited, the more power Trump accumulated.
As a career criminal with deep ties in business, media, and organized crime as well as access to classified information, Trump now has more leverage over the American government than they do over him.
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Trump is a career mafioso trained in the arts of blackmail and bribery by his mentor, Roy Cohn. He and his backers continually threaten physical violence against anyone in their way. But it is not necessary to deploy threats when the ostensible target – the DOJ -- is their willing accomplice.
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It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.
Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.
As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family.
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Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.
It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.
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Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.
In reality, the GOP refusal had little to do with Garland, but with their desire to pack the court with right-wing extremists once Trump ascended. Garland is not a right-wing extremist. He is a cog who serves corrupt interests under the guise of being “moderate” and “cautious” – stalling investigations and blocking evidence from public view. That is what he did during his brief tenure at the Clinton DOJ from 1994-1997. That is what he does at the Biden DOJ now.
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In 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Mitch McConnell suggested that Garland become the FBI director.
“I have spoken with the president about it. I recommended Merrick Garland,” McConnell said in May 2017.
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McConnell is not the only Republican linked to Russian oligarchs to praise Garland. In 2010, when Garland was being considered for the Supreme Court, Republican operative Joseph DiGenova commended Garland as “a profoundly serious guy” who would be a great addition to the court.
DiGenova is a seasoned GOP criminal abettor and Trump operative who has -- among other things -- attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, worked with Rudy Giuliani on the 2019 Ukraine shakedown plot, and represented oligarchs immersed in transnational organized crime.
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In October 2021, Donald Trump praised Garland as “a good man” and said he was glad Garland was Attorney General. At that point, the DOJ had not even opened an inquiry into the Capitol attack, a dereliction of duty that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears, but which Garland’s backers staunchly denied until time had run out, and it was too late.
Servants of the Mafia State NOV 16, 2023
Every accusation is a confession.In his report to Congress on Biden's handling of classified documents, Hur claimed that Biden, 81, had repeated memory lapses during the interview — an allegation the White House has denied.
Republicans wanted the audio largely to use it against Biden in the presidential campaign.
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The ad is likely to be the Republicans' most tangible trophy from the effort to drag Garland over his refusal to release the audio from President Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
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"Extreme House Democrats voted to block Americans from hearing secret audio filings showing the truth about Biden's mental fitness," the ad says.
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Garland's Justice Department, which has released a transcript of the interview, has already made clear it will not act on the contempt referral.
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In a digital spot first shared with Axios, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) accuses Democrats of putting "party loyalty before the country" by voting against contempt.
Axios
And may I add, Garland is exhibit A in why presidents shouldn't use important governmental offices as consolation prizes.There are three principal problems with Garland as AG that I hope even people who defend his individual decisions can now recognize as obvious. First: He has a judicial temperament, not a prosecutorial one. He acts like a judge, not an advocate for the people or the issues, as lawyers do. When he was appointed, his supporters touted him as the US Attorney who brought Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, to justice. But by the time Biden named him as AG, he wasn’t that guy anymore. Instead, he was the guy who spent 13 years as judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. And so we have an AG who always seems afraid of being “overturned” by a higher court. We can see this in his approach to Texas’s “Operation Lone Star,” where instead of desperately trying to stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from breaking the law and hurting people, Garland cautiously avoids a showdown at the Supreme Court over whether murder-barriers are constitutional. We see this in the post-Dobbs abortion environment, where Garland meekly accepts that states can criminalize women and pregnant people seeking healthcare and control over their own bodies, instead of making each red state fight for every single inch they take away in lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.
The second problem is that Garland is an institutionalist, more committed to the reputation of the DOJ (and to his own reputation) than the pursuit of justice itself. Garland acts like the DOJ and “justice” are the same thing, when they’re clearly not. He’s simply unwilling to get his hands, or the DOJ’s hands, dirty, even when justice requires it. We see that in his general approach to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which was to go after the idiots and white supremacists who carried out the attack instead of the Republicans in political office who organized the attack and tried to overthrow the government. And we see it in his over-reliance on appointing “special prosecutors” to do his job for him. Garland is so desperate to keep the DOJ above the political fray that having an “R” next to your name might as well be a cloak of invisibility.
And that leads to Garland’s last and most critical flaw: He’s so desperate to appear “apolitical” that he makes disgustingly political decisions every time it looks like Fox News might become angry with him. We saw this most acutely with the Hunter Biden “investigation.” Republicans have conducted a years-long harassment campaign against Hunter, a private citizen who has never held a government position, to take a pound of political flesh out of his dad. Instead of putting an end to it, as he should have, Garland allowed the investigation to continue, so it didn’t look like he was playing favorites with his boss’s son. But Garland didn’t even have the decency to “both sides” the problem and start an investigation into Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump—two presidential family members who did in fact hold government positions– over their possible violations of the Hatch Act. Why? Because that would also look “political.” Under Garland, Biden’s children can be investigated, so as not to appear political, but Trump’s children can’t be investigated, so as not to appear political. It is maddening.
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Say what you will about former attorney general and Confederate mouth-breather Jeff Sessions, he at least quit and got out the way when it became clear that he was not doing what the administration needed him to do.
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Biden is also worried about appearing “political” (even though he is literally a politician) when it comes to the DOJ. Even when Garland basically used the DOJ’s vaunted independence to release a report that would have gotten any other prosecutor drummed out of office.
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Garland was always a pro-cop moderate institutionalist nominated by Barack Obama to replace Antonin Scalia in a bid to appease Mitch McConnell and get Republican votes. The fact that he failed to do that did not transform him into a fighter. He was never for a second the kind of no-nonsense prosecutor needed to hold Republicans accountable and defend democracy.
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One way or another, Garland is just eight months away from starting to write his best-selling self-help book: Under the Desk: How to Get Others to Do Your Job.
Elie Mystal @ The Nation
I remember at the time people were speculating that the FBI/DOJ likely had a secret investigation going into Trump. Apparently not.[Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and his] office, with the help of the FBI, was responsible for prosecuting all crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. He had made headlines the day after by refusing to rule out the possibility that President Donald Trump himself could be culpable. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Sherwin said in response to a reporter’s question about Trump. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”
But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.
A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election.
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[AG Merrick] Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department.
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In November 2022, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
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The effort to investigate Trump over classified records has had its own obstacles, including FBI agents who resisted raiding the former president’s home.
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Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature. [...] Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.
The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it 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.
In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021. [...] The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022.
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For many months after the attack, prosecutors did not interview White House aides or other key witnesses [...] . In that time, communications were put at risk of being lost or deleted and memories left to fade.
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William P. Barr had left his post as attorney general two weeks before the attack amid a growing rift with Trump. His successor, Jeffrey Rosen, held the office for less than a month, and Garland would not be sworn in until March 11. Biden’s pick to replace Sherwin as the U.S. attorney in D.C. would not take office for another 10 months.
At the FBI, Trump, over the previous year, had repeatedly threatened to fire Wray, 56, who had in turn tried to keep a low profile. [...] Since then, Wray and his team sought to avoid even an appearance of top-down influence by having local field offices run investigations and make day-to-day decisions. In fact, when it came to the Jan. 6 investigation, agents noticed that Wray did not travel the five blocks from FBI headquarters to the bureau’s Washington field office running the investigation for more than 21 months after the attack.
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Two days after the Capitol attack, the FBI began announcing charges that were meant to send a message.
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Beyond short written or video statements denouncing the Jan. 6 violence in general, however, neither Wray nor Rosen came out publicly to reinforce that message.
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[A] group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.
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In 2019, [Cooney] oversaw the team that convicted Stone on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress. Cooney signed off on recommending a prison sentence of seven to nine years, but Barr pressed to cut it by more than half after Trump tweeted that it was “horrible and very unfair.” Trump later pardoned Stone.
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In February 2021, Cooney took his proposal to investigate the ties with people in Trump’s orbit directly to a group of senior agents in the FBI’s public corruption division.
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According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone, as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers.
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Cooney’s plan would have started agents looking from the top down as well, including directly investigating a senior Trump ally.
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[A meeting was called with top deputies at the FBI, but] Cooney wasn’t there to defend his plan. [...] Cooney wanted membership rolls for Oath Keepers as well as groups that had obtained permits for rallies on Jan. 6, looking for possible links and witnesses. [Two officials at the meeting] saw those steps as treading on First Amendment-protected activities.
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Some in the group also acknowledged the political risks. [...] Seeking the communications of a high-profile Trump ally such as Stone could trigger a social media post from Trump decrying yet another FBI investigation as a “witch hunt.” And what if the probe turned up nothing? Some were mindful, too, that investigating public figures demanded a high degree of confidence, because even a probe that finds no crime can unfairly impugn them.
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In the U.S. attorney’s office, budding investigative work around the finances of Trump backers was halted, an internal record shows, including into Jones, who had boasted of paying a half-million dollars for the president’s Jan. 6 rally and claimed the White House had asked him to lead the march to the Capitol.
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About the same time, attorneys at Main Justice declined another proposal that would have squarely focused prosecutors on documents that Trump used to pressure Pence not to certify the election for Biden.
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The National Archives inspector general’s office asked the Justice Department’s election crimes branch to consider investigating the seemingly coordinated effort in swing states [to replace electors]. Citing its prosecutors’ discretion, the department told the Archives it would not pursue the topic.
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“A decision was made early on to focus DOJ resources on the riot,” said one former Justice Department official familiar with the debates. “The notion of opening up on Trump and high-level political operatives was seen as fraught with peril."
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Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice. Colleagues responsible for preparing briefing materials and updates for Garland and Monaco were warned to focus on foot soldiers and to avoid mentioning Trump or his close allies.
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By fall, some of Biden’s Justice Department nominees began to finally win Senate confirmation.
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With that, 10 months after the attack on the Capitol, Garland finally had a permanent team of chief prosecutors in place to guide the investigation.
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On Nov. 1, 2021, Matthew G. Olsen was sworn in as assistant attorney general for national security.
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Olsen, 61, pressed to take on a role in the Jan. 6 casework, which had been led until then by the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, according to people familiar with the offices at the time. He argued to senior Justice Department officials that an effort to block the peaceful transfer of power was squarely in the vein of what the national security division should be focused on.
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Since then, with successive new indictments, the government’s evidence had grown stronger.
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The bottom-up approach that had dominated nearly a year of the government’s time had not yielded any significant connection to Trump’s orbit.
“It had become clear that the odds were very low that ‘bottom-up’ was ever going to get very high,” said one of those individuals. “At some point, there was no ladder from here to there.”
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At a meeting in November 2021, W[Thomas] indom asked [an assistant director, Steven] D’Antuono to assist in a grand jury investigation, which would include subpoenaing the Willard hotel for billing information from the time when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was working with Stephen K. Bannon, Boris Epshteyn and other Trump associates in their “war room.”
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“I’m not serving subpoenas on the friggin’ Willard,” D’Antuono told Windom, according to a person familiar with their discussions. “You don’t have enough to issue subpoenas.”
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D’Antuono offered instead to give Windom full access to the FBI’s trove of evidence about Oath Keeper and Proud Boy extremists involved in the riot. Maybe Windom would find a communication or financial link between rioters and Trump deputies, D’Antuono suggested. The two also briefly discussed fake electors,
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In one of several examples, three former military generals warned in The Post that the country had to prepare for the next insurrection after not a single leader who incited the violence had been held to account, and they pressed the Justice Department to “show more urgency.”ut the FBI wasn’t ready to move forward on that topic either.
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On Jan. 13, 2022, the department indicted Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers on charges of seditious conspiracy. It did not quiet the criticism, but instead put a spotlight on signs the Justice Department was not, in comparison with the House committee, working as actively to investigate Trump’s role in the attempted coup.
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Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors in Michigan who received Nessel’s referral were waiting to hear from Monaco’s office about how Main Justice wanted to proceed. National Archives officials were dumbstruck; the Justice Department was suddenly interested in the fake electors evidence it had declined to pursue a year earlier.
One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. “Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,” the person said.
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Within a few weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office were again in a meeting with D’Antuono. This time, they did not attempt to link the electors scheme to violence on Jan. 6 but presented it as worthy of its own investigation.
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The process did not go quickly. Lawyers at the FBI and Justice Department launched into what became many weeks of debate over the justification for the investigation and how it should be worded; one time-consuming issue became whether to name Trump as a subject.
With the FBI investigation still not opened, late in March a federal judge presiding over a civil case made a startling ruling: Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes.
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“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.”
In April 2022, more than 15 months after the attack, [FBI director Chris] 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.
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Then, on Nov. 18, Garland abruptly summoned to Main Justice the D.C.-based prosecutors working on the Jan. 6 conspiracy as well as those who had already gathered extensive evidence of Trump concealing classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The attorney general told them that to ensure the appearance of independence into the two probes of a potential Biden rival, he would appoint a special counsel later that day.
WaPo
And now, of course, it's too late to bring anything to trial before the 2024 election.A new chief prosecutor would typically need weeks or months to get up to speed on a high-priority investigation. But Smith issued subpoenas in the Jan. 6 probe after just four days, picking up where the U.S. attorney’s office had left off, seeking communications between officials in three swing states and Trump, his campaign, and 19 advisers and attorneys who had worked to keep him in power.
[...]
In several cases, before the special counsel’s office got in touch, witnesses in the fake electors scheme hadn’t heard from the FBI in almost a year and thought the case was dead. Similarly, firsthand witnesses to Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — in which Trump asked him to “find” enough votes to win that state — were not interviewed by the Justice Department until this year, after Smith’s team contacted them.
[...]
On Tuesday, as Trump pleaded not guilty to those charges in federal court in Miami, Smith’s investigation into efforts to steal the election continued: Michael McDonald and Jim DeGraffenreid, the chairman and vice chairman of the Nevada Republican Party who had signed a document claiming to be electors for Trump, entered the area of the D.C. federal courthouse where a grand jury has been meeting on cases related to Jan. 6.
Judge Aileen Cannon set Donald Trump’s trial for hoarding 31 highly classified documents for August 14, 2023.
The trial won’t happen that quickly. This is, instead, an order stemming from Speedy Trial Act (and in any case, the trial would be set back a few weeks once Walt Nauta is arraigned, because barring a plea or other unforeseen developments, they will be tried together). Per the boilerplate, the two sides have to file Speedy Trial notices every 21 days from here on out.
Empty Wheel
Always the victim.Attorneys for Donald Trump fired off a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland to request a meeting to complain about how the Department of Justice has treated the former president and request a meeting.
The letter comes amid reports that Special Counsel Jack Smith is finishing his investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the White House. Smith has also been probing the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
[...]Dear Attorney General Garland:[...]
We represent Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, in the investigation currently being conducted by the Special Counsel’s Office. Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter, and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly. No President of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion. We request a meeting at your earliest convenience to discuss the ongoing injustice that is being perpetrated by your Special Counsel and his prosecutors.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Mediaite
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.[AG Merrick] Garland seems more concerned about the perception of a political prosecution than he is the perception of a DOJ paralyzed by politesse and standards and norms that the suspects don't respect in the least. Does Garland think that [Jack] Smith won't be attacked for being a partisan hatchet man? Hell, the incoming House of Representatives is warming up to put Garland on the griddle along with half the administration, which also will batter the credibility of the ongoing investigations. And tossing the January 6 prosecution to a special prosecutor strikes me as a critical abandonment of the post to which Garland was appointed.
[...]
The "circumstances" are simply not that "extraordinary" here. The guy is a private citizen suspected of a crime. That's all he is, no more and no less. There's nothing magical about declaring yourself a candidate for president. You are not then blessed with the magic oil of immunity. That's not a "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card. If it were, Harvey Weinstein would've filed for the New Hampshire primary in 2016.
[...]
Garland's clear responsibility is to root out whatever crime and corruption there was during the previous administration*. It is to present to the country a clear indication that a defeated president* cannot call out the mob whenever he pleases. It is not—repeat, not—to try and shield the DOJ from Fox News and from the hysterics of yahoo congressmen on a spree. He is the chief law enforcement official of the United States. Enforce the damn law, and do it yourself.
Charlie Pierce
Jack Smith, a former chief of the Justice Department’s unit that investigates public corruption — the Public Integrity Section [during the Obama administration] — will take on the new role which operates largely independent of Justice Department control under decades-old federal regulations.
[...]
The special counsel’s purview will include the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of Trump’s alleged retention of highly sensitive national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, as well as aspects of the effort by Trump and his allies’ effort to subvert the 2020 election and disrupt the transition of power to President Joe Biden.
Garland expressed an urgency behind both investigations, emphasizing that Smith’s appointment should not slow them down.
[...]
During his stint at the Public Integrity Section, Smith oversaw the prosecutions of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted in 2015 of disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice — two potential crimes at the center of the Trump documents probe.
[...]
Since 2018, Smith has been prosecuting war crimes in the Hague stemming from the conflict in Kosovo. He’s registered to vote in the U.S. as a political independent, officials said.
[...]
The announcement also came amid a flurry of notable activity at the federal courthouse in Washington, where three new grand juries were impaneled Friday, likely linked to the start of Smith’s investigation.
Politico
