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The Nation’s Ben Gerson has a prescient piece in the Nation about a DOJ that has not vigorously enforced the law when it comes to disgraced former president Donald Trump, who attempted to remain in power in spite of losing the 2020 election resoundingly.
If Merrick Garland Had the Courage of His Convictions…
Donald Trump would already be on his way to prison.
By Ben Gerson
...The Justice Department itself has a National Security Division. Another of its divisions is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Obviously, Attorney General Merrick Garland has always known all this. Nonetheless, in the face of an organized and multifaceted threat to national security—involving President Donald Trump’s misappropriation of state secrets, attempts to subvert fair elections, and ultimately the weakening of this country’s international standing—Garland’s actions, or, rather, his lengthy pattern of inaction, suggests a deference to other facts and considerations. Garland continued to procrastinate—ostensibly in search of an exorbitant level of proof that might finally convince Donald Trump’s followers that their hero is a criminal.
Do read the whole piece, it lays out a pattern of failures and reluctance to vigorously enforce the law by AG Garland. But I want to focus on the biggest legal slam dunk that Garland could have perused in in early 2021, but was reluctant to act on.
Because even allowing for the difficulty of proving a sedition conspiracy, the explanation for the lack of white-collar indictments cannot be the insufficiency of evidence collected so far. Take Trump’s by now widely heard demand, in early January 2021, before the change of administrations, that Brad Raffensberger, Georgia’s secretary of state, “find” the requisite number of votes to choose Republican electors instead. Trump’s demand is infamous because it is on tape, thanks to Raffensberger’s foresight.
On the Georgia tape, the sound is clear as a bell, Trump’s language is plain, and his intent—to fraudulently reverse the election result—which he substantiates with threats, is unambiguous. Yet Garland not only never brought an indictment; there is no indication that he even initiated an investigation into that aspect of the Georgia scheme.
The Georgia vote tampering is not the only easy layup available to Justice...
Gerson goes on to explain how Mr. Trump’s theft of top secret documents would make a simple straightforward case for the DOJ to make. In both instances Merrick Merrick has proved to be a miserable failure. Had Garland gone after Mr. Trump for election tampering in Georgia, as Gerson points out TFG would be well on his way to prison by now, and not threatening our national security to the extent TFG is attempting to now. Now Mr. Trump’s MAGA minions are actively trying to help overthrow the government of Brazil, using the Trump Big Lie as a template. I doubt that meddling in their election would be happening now if Mr. Trump had been held accountable for attempting to tamper with the outcome of the 2020 election.
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