For those of you whose only knowledge of criminal investigations is movies and TeeVee (where the crime, the investigation, the trial AND conviction all occur in 90 minutes or less), here is your corrective.
After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.
At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.
“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.”Another example:
That 2021 focus is inconsistent with other conspiracy theories people are floating, too: None of this started until Jack Smith was appointed (or that Jack Smith gave it new life), they say. Nothing happened for two years, they say.
As far as I know, every phone that went into the indictment and immunity brief (which added information from Boris Ephsteyn and Mike Roman’s phone) was seized before Smith’s appointment. The onerous 10-month process of obtaining Executive Privilege waivers for testimony from Trump’s top aides, without which you couldn’t prove that Trump held the murder weapon — the phone used to send a tweet targeting Mike Pence during the riot — started on June 15, 2022, five months before Smith’s appointment. Jack Smith looks prolific to those who don’t know those details, because 10 months of hard work finally came to fruition in the months after he was appointed.
The claim nothing happened for two years? The only major investigative step that happened after the two-year anniversary of Merrick Garland’s confirmation was Mike Pence’s testimony.ew points out the first seven responses to her post are predictable:
So far 7 of the people who've responded to this post have simply bragged that they don't care about actual facts, they have their belief and they're going to stick with it. This is why I call them MGAnoners. Classical conspiracy thinking.Her thesis is that the real villain is John Roberts. She’s right.
What I care about is that at a time when we need to start establishing means of accountability for a second Trump term, much of the Democratic world has chosen instead to wallow in false claims about the Trump investigation in order to make Garland a scapegoat, rather than the guy directly responsible, John Roberts. It’s classical conspiracy thinking. Something really bad happened (Trump got elected), it’s not entirely clear why (because almost no one bothers to learn the details I’ve laid out here, to say nothing of considering the political work that didn’t happen to make Trump own this), and so people simply invent explanations. Every time those explanations get debunked, people double down on the theory — it’s Garland’s fault — rather than reconsidering their chosen explanation.
And those explanations have the effect of distracting attention from Roberts. Rather than talking about how six partisan Justices rewrote the Constitution to give the leader of the GOP a pass on egregious crimes, Democrats are choosing to blame a guy who encouraged prosecutors to follow the money in March 2021.
It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that guarantees maximal impotence. It’s a choice that eschews actual facts (and therefore the means to actually learn what happened). It’s a choice that embraces irrational conspiracy thinking (which makes people weak and ripe for manipulation by authoritarians). It’s a choice that distracts from Roberts’ role.Watch the 🍩, not the 🐇 🕳️.
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