There’s a lot to digest in The Washington Post’s lengthy report on federal law enforcement and the investigation into Jan. 6, but one of the recurring points in the article is just how slow and cautious the Justice Department was when it came to scrutinizing Donald Trump.
After highlighting a Jan. 6 briefing document from a federal prosecutor, presented to Attorney General Merrick Garland two months after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Post noted just how long it took for the investigation to include the former president and his White House as part of the focus:
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. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.
And why was that? From the Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News:
A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.
There is an enormous amount of important information in this article, which is well worth your time. I’m mentioning a couple of paragraphs, but the Post’s report is nearly 8,000 words, and it touches on several highly relevant angles to the ongoing investigation — including the “fake electors” controversy, which Rachel talked about on last night’s show.
But while reading about federal law enforcement’s overly measured process, and the glacial pace at which Garland and his team moved, I found myself thinking about the degree to which the apparent facts conflict with Republicans’ preferred narratives.
The attorney general’s goals were understandable, especially in his first year in office. During Trump’s tenure, the White House saw the Justice Department as little more than the then-president’s law firm. Trump expected prosecutors to prioritize his political agenda and target his perceived foes at his direction. As a New York Times report summarized last year, Trump and his team “tried to turn the nation’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the Republican’s wishes.
Garland not only wanted to lead the Justice Department, he also wanted to put things right and restore the agency’s reputation. If he and his team simply “charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department,” the politics would work out fine.
The problem was not with his logic, but rather, with his political expectations. The attorney general and his team thought that if they just did everything by the book, exercised great caution, avoided politics and partisan games, and pursued cases in an independent and methodical way, no one could reasonably accuse them of politicizing law enforcement.
So that’s what they did — and Republicans accused them of politicizing law enforcement anyway. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, appeared on Fox News earlier this month and told viewers that Garland “wants to indict Donald Trump because he hates Donald Trump. He hates him. He’s angry, Merrick Garland is angry that he wasn’t confirmed to the Supreme Court, he wants to indict him.” Even at the time, the rhetoric seemed a bit bonkers — the Texas Republican’s theory really didn’t make any sense — but the argument looks even worse after reading the Post’s reporting. Federal law enforcement didn’t even want to investigate Trump, and officials resisted efforts to follow the evidence when the evidence seemed to lead to the former president. And yet, to hear leading GOP officials tell it, Garland’s office is effectively an appendage to the Democratic National Committee, reality notwithstanding. The moral of the story is, there’s no harm in acting in a cautious way, but taking deliberate steps in the hopes of avoiding Republican attacks doesn’t work, because Republican attacks are going to happen anyway.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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