MASSIVE FAIL: FBI & DOJ stonewalled Trump Jan 6th probe for a full year
We all sensed it, the lack of urgency, the lack of subpoenas, the lack of leaks, for a full year, we knew that the FBI wasn’t investigating the Trump White House over January 6th.
It left a pit in the stomach. If they weren’t going to investigate that year, why believe they ever would?
There were other clear indications.
Reporters were damn well investigating the matter.
We would read that everyone in Washington texted Mark Meadows, but we didn’t hear anything about the FBI subpoenaing him to ask what he did about them.
After it became clear there would be no bipartisan committee investigating the matter, the House, under Nancy Pelosi, formed its own.
That committee obtained deeply disturbing evidence, some of which leaked before the televised hearings. The FBI wanted the House Select Committee’s transcripts of interviews.
What? We all wondered.
How is it that the FBI, the most elite law enforcement organization on earth, was behind Congress? How could that be?
We were forced to accept that the FBI had spent countless hours catching and prosecuting window breakers but ignored possible organizers in the White House.
The House Select Committee told us that these people attempted a coup!
Isn’t that a crime?
And then we looked at the calendar and worried. This would, by necessity, be a long investigation.
The closer we got to 2024, the more Trump whitewashed, and his screams about trying to keep him out of the election resonated with the wrong people.
Now, The Washington Post reports that the time lag wasn’t due to a lack of resources or lack of evidence.
No, it was the lack of political will.
First, the Post reports that a year passed without any investigation.
“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.”
Again, if one starts with the assumption that attempting to overthrow the U.S. government is a crime, this is not only unacceptable but outrageous enough that some hard questions should be asked.
Should be asked.
But President Joe Biden is not going to ask whether he should request Attorney General Merrick Garland’s resignation. It is too late.
Under no circumstances should a president involve himself in any single investigation or case. But the president does set DOJ-FBI policy.
He could have and perhaps should have said that the failure to prioritize an investigation into how the insurrection came about is proof that one cannot properly prioritize the Department’s duties.
Making it worse, the unwillingness to investigate the real crimes was rooted to a significant degree in politics. As written in the report:
“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.”
Partisan?
The decision to not investigate is at least as “partisan.” If they were looking to restore faith in the FBI, investigate how June 6th happened!
We know that ten GOP House members believed that any sensible law enforcement organization would not worry about “partisanship” in prosecuting the real crimes committed at the top.
Indeed, the delay allowed the Republicans to whitewash January 6th to the point that it now appears far more partisan.
Trump is not only in the midst of his next presidential run, but it’s highly questionable whether one can even get a jury verdict in any trial before the actual election.
Last, one has every single right to question whether the Department would’ve investigated the incident at all had the Select Committee not humiliated it into action.
Everyone paying attention noticed that the news of subpoenas, leaks, and requests for transcripts and materials began right after Congress started releasing some of its findings.
The time to start the investigation into both the window breakers and the top organizers was February 1st, 2021, and learning within two weeks that Trump struggled with the steering wheel to get to Capitol Hill, learning that the Secret Service erased their texts on January 20th, and how it was that Steve Bannon’s online show on January 5th promised all hell would break loose the next day.
The FBI could’ve learned all of that in two weeks.
At that particular point in time, nearly everyone, including Kevin McCarthy, hated Trump.
Had leaks come out then, it would have been seen as infinitely less partisan.
But again, we all sort of “knew.”
Some said at the time, during that year, “You don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors… ” True.
But we knew what wasn’t going on outside those doors.
We all sort of knew. Now we know why, and it is confirmed.
One thing we’ll never know?
How much evidence floated away during that period?
And we’ll never know if we could’ve secured a non-partisan indictment had Trump and co-conspirators been tried and convicted back then.
Back then.
Before he was running. Before it was whitewashed.
Before we had “political prisoners” singing. Before all the MAGAs came back.
Before we worried about whether we could get a trial prior to the election.
Before there was a serious danger that he’d win and simply pardon himself.
Unacceptable.
And even though we “knew.” It is still kind of unbelievable.
Original reporting by Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis for The Washington Post.
I can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com and on Twitter @JasonMiciak.
Editor’s note: This is an opinion column that solely reflects the opinions of the author.
