“Merrick Garland wasted a year,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler said ahead of the fourth anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot.
Arthur Delaney and Igor Bobic at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON ― After a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it looked like Donald Trump’s political career was over. Democrats and Republicans alike blamed Trump for inciting the attack, and he only escaped conviction at his Senate impeachment trial — which would have barred him from the presidency forever — because Republican senators insisted it was too late to convict a president who had already left office. Besides, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued at the time, Trump would face another kind of reckoning. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” McConnell said.
That never happened, and many Democrats are ready to place the blame on one man: Attorney General Merrick Garland. They argue he waited too long to appoint a special prosecutor, which allowed Trump and his legal team to stall the case long enough for Trump to win the presidency a second time. Garland made the appointment in November 2022, saying he’d done so partly because Trump had just formalized his bid for the presidency. The announcement also followed a series of high-profile public hearings by a bipartisan House committee airing the evidence against the former president. “Garland only started the prosecution after he was in effect forced to by the report of the Jan. 6 committee and the criminal referral,” former House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told HuffPost. “The evidence the Jan. 6 committee used was available from the beginning.” “Had they proceeded with those prosecutions, I think he would have been convicted and we’d have a different president now,” Nadler said. “Merrick Garland wasted a year.”
Nadler is not alone in thinking so. The Washington Post reported last month that President Joe Biden has expressed regret about picking Garland, believing the nation’s top law enforcement officer took too long to pursue Trump after Jan. 6. Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), members of the Jan. 6 committee, also told HuffPost they thought Garland waited too long. “I didn’t realize that they were not looking at the whole picture,” Lofgren said. “I think they were taking a look at the foot soldiers.”
While the Justice Department indicted Trump for the mob attack on the Capitol and other crimes related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, it did not do so until August 2023, long after the Republican Party had purged most members who spoke out against Trump. A Supreme Court decision relating to presidential immunity created further delays, and ultimately, Trump won the 2024 election before the case could finish up and he could stand trial. Since longstanding Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, the DOJ dropped the case after Trump’s November victory, allowing him to escape responsibility and walk back into the White House. Garland reportedly told prosecutors early on in 2021 that they could pursue cases against people involved in the Jan. 6 riot wherever the evidence led, even if it implicated the former president. But it turned out investigators couldn’t pinpoint financial ties between Trump and key players on the ground.
Prosecutors apparently did not initially consider building a case out of Trump’s public election-fraud lies, or his well-publicized efforts to coerce various officials into undoing the 2020 election, including his demand during a phone call that Georgia’s secretary of state fraudulently “find” him 11,000 votes. Details of the call became public within a day. That material became a key component of special counsel Jack Smith’s eventual case. Still, it was likely inevitable that if the Justice Department prosecuted a former president, the Supreme Court could get involved to settle questions of presidential immunity that Trump would raise in court. It’s possible that even if the Justice Department had acted swiftly, appeals to the Supreme Court could have bogged the case for years.
HuffPost wrote a solid piece on why the DOJ's slow-walking of prosecuting Donald Trump for his role in inciting the January 6th Insurrection 4 years ago led to him escaping accountability (and ultimately got him re-elected). Merrick Garland was the wrong choice to lead the DOJ.
