Merrick Garland Did Something

 

Via The New York Times.

My narratological take is that it started on Friday, when ABC reporters spotted Marc Short, Mike Pence's vice presidential chief of staff, coming out of a federal courthouse in Washington with his lawyer. They asked him if he'd been testifying to the January 6 grand jury meeting there, and of course he had indeed, though he wasn't allowed to say about what. Then over the weekend The New York Times learned that another Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had been testifying as well, making it clear to anybody who's been thinking about it that the Justice Department has indeed been looking at Donald Trump's activities as part of its criminal investigation, because what else would they be talking about with Short (who'd testified to the Select Committee on Pence's January 4 meeting with  Trump and Eastman where Trump screamed at Pence, calling him a wimp and a pussy) or Jacob (who'd testified to telling Pence that Eastman's scheme for refusing to certify the election results was illegal)?

And after that the dam seems to have broken, and by last night we were all learning that that was in fact the case, not just recently in the wake of the House Select Committee's TV appearances but quite a bit earlier:

... Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject.

And Garland himself showed up to tell NBC's Lester Holt:

“Look, the Justice Department has been doing the most wide ranging investigation in its history,” he said. “And the committee is doing an enormously wide ranging investigation as well. It is inevitable that there will be things that they find before we have found them. And it’s inevitable that there will be things we find that they haven’t found. That’s what happens when you have two wide ranging investigations going on at the same time....”

and that

“We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding Jan. 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable. That’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

How it seems to me is that the press sighting of Short kind of altered everybody's permission structure in how they talked about the DOJ investigation, Garland's in particular; there was no longer any point in trying to hide the fact that they'd gotten up to the White House. And then the Committee responded by leaking, or let's say releasing, the delicious emails on fake electors to The Times, showing a clear and rather cheerful awareness of the criminality of the plan:

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.

In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

And then, mostly by coincidence I think, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg showed up on WNYC Radio yesterday, mostly to defend himself against rightwing attacks from the New York gubernatorial race—Bragg is doing some really good work in getting reversals of wrongful convictions and standing up for the 2019 bail reform which is supposed to stop thousands of people from getting stranded, sometimes for years, in pretrial detention in the unspeakably bad conditions at Rikers Island, and Republicans hate that, of course (in their hearts they really think presumption of innocence is only for property owners), and GOP candidate Lee Zeldin has announced that if elected (he won't be) he'll fire Bragg on day one (legally he couldn't).

But Bragg has also faced attacks on his handling of the local criminal investigation of Donald Trump's bank and tax fraud cases, especially after two of the prosecutors resigned from the case, claiming Bragg had decided not to indict the former president—Bragg has consistently denied that he's made a decision and said little more, on the grounds that the investigation is still ongoing. So naturally that subject came up yesterday morning. Bragg repeated the denial, but in what I thought were stronger terms than usual, reminding us that there's already been one individual charged (Trump's CFO Allen Weisselberg, on 15 counts of tax evasion), scheduled to go on trial this fall:

That's a matter that that's going forward and then that's unequivocally so. In terms of what we're doing, I don't want to describe it, but suffice it to say that there are a number of avenues that we've not explored before that we are exploring and I think is important.

I would just draw your attention to as you point to others, look I'm someone who's got a 20-year history of doing complex white-collar investigations, doing investigations involving high profile people, whether that's suing the Trump Foundation and leading that work at the AG's office. Whether it's helping lead the prosecution against Malcolm Smith, the former Senate majority leader.

Any one of a number of high-profile white collar investigations. That's me, and then I could also go down a line in terms of the team of who's working on it now. It's an extraordinary team of very capable prosecutors. I can't put a timeline on it because that would be inappropriate, but I can certainly say that we're actively working...

I've long been pretty confident that Trump would end up getting prosecuted for something, not to mention some of the worse January 6 offenders—Stone and Giuliani and Meadows, and maybe some of those pardon-seeking congressmembers like Biggs, Gosar, Gohmert, the hapless Loudermilk. etc. But it's looking as if there might be really a lot of it, and I'm starting to more hopeful again about its having an effect on the public perception.