News in DO SOMETHING

 Revised

Jennifer Rubin in The Crush, 1993. It's a Rectification tradition.

So apparently somebody at the Justice Department has taken to leaking stories tied to the January 6 investigation, in defiance of department policy, in the desperate hope of persuading the press that the investigation actually exists it's somebody from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that leaked the Virginia Thomas texts to Mark Meadows in late March to Woodward and Costa, and Junior's text to Meadows from the day after the election to CNN. 

But it's the Justice Department, maintaining its grand jury secrecy, that everybody's worried about. The DO SOMETHING caucus doesn't seem impressed, anyway:

Jennifer Rubin: “The rationale that the feds have to start at the bottom and work their way up — as though this were a Mafia case — makes no sense. Prosecutors go after foot soldiers if they have no real proof the kingpin has engaged in criminal activity.”

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) April 10, 2022

Is it my imagination, btw, or are an awful lot of the DO SOMETHINGers on or near the right side of the aisle, like Jennifer here, while the Merrick Garland fans who are certain that something is in fact being done tend to be situated on the left, like Marcy Wheeler in the first instance? (That also seems to be the case in the House committee, where it's Republican Liz Cheney and "centrist" Elaine Luria who are reported as demanding a criminal referral of Trump while progressive Zoe Lofgren represents the case that what's going on inside DOJ is more important to what DOJ does.)

But sorry, Jennifer, it is a Mafia case, or an organized crime case at the very least. Trump himself has been running a racket for years, on classic lines like John Gotti or Semion Mogilevich, never signing a contract or making a direct order, switching up phones and ripping up documents and otherwise hiding communications, letting his subordinates guess what he wants them to do and punishing them if they guess wrong. And teasing government and media and public by "joking" about it, or challenging them to prove it. 

As Greg Olear wrote last year,

Trump’s apologists and sycophants can easily sidestep the truth, using the same simple argument mobsters from Al Capone to Semion Mogilevich have made to gaslight the public about their crimes. As the latter told the BBC: “If at least one fact was proved, at least once during last 20 years, I would have been called to the police station.” Or, more simply put: “If any of those allegations were true, why have I never been charged?”

So of course they have "no real proof" and have to build it up slowly from the bottom up, exactly like a Mafia case. If they can break some upper-level lieutenant that helps a lot, but it doesn't bring the investigation to a triumphant end—Sammy Gravano turned in 1991, but it took another four years to bring the Gotti murder case to trial. 

(This week has seen the central Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander—who already delivered lots of documents to the House committee in December—agreeing to "cooperate" with a DOJ subpoena and Proud Boy leader John Donohoe has made a proper plea deal; Alexander says he can't imagine anything he knows would be of any use to the investigation, but that may change once he and his lawyer find out what they've got on him, or may already have changed behind the scenes.)

I remain convinced that the Department is working very hard on this vast and confusing case, and not ruling out any defendants (Giuliani, Jones, and Stone are as always more important to me than Trump himself, who I regard as a diminished responsibility case). That doesn't mean I'm guaranteeing a good result, especially before the November election; I'm afraid I don't think it looks good at all. 

Nevertheless, scapegoating like Rubin's isn't going to help. We'd do better to occupy ourselves with the boosting the House committee in the job they can do better than DOJ can, by nature, what I call the narratology, explaining to the public what's wrong with what happened between November 3 and January 6, which DOJ is going to call "obstructing a congressional proceeding", and is something much more threatening than that sounds.