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:

If it's what you say I love it, especially on January 6

 

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who "frequently cries at work." Screenshot from video at Huffpost.

aardvarkcheeselog comments:

Is there any doubt at all that Mark Meadows defied a Congressional subpoena? What is the hold-up on indicting him for that, since Congress declined to do so on their own hook?

It would be easier to expect good faith from DOJ if they were doing anything to discipline scofflaws that don't need cases built against them. Maybe I am not paying enough attention to news and am missing reports about this?

It might be interesting to ask why Congress declined to do it on their own and kicked the can over to DOJ instead. It's my impression that they have almost never done that historically, but they've done it four times in the January 6 investigation: for Bannon in October, for Meadows in January, and for Scavino and Navarro last week.

The procedure for criminal contempt (as opposed to inherent contempt, handled by Congress, or civil contempt, for the Senate, when they sue the party in civil court), is:

Following a contempt citation, the presiding officer of the chamber is instructed to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia;^[20] according to the law it is the duty of the U.S. Attorney to refer the matter to a grand jury for action.

So in Bannon's case the grand jury did issue an indictment pretty quickly, in just a few weeks, and nothing further seems to have happened, nothing at all has happened with the Meadows complaint, and it's certainly too soon to ask about the other two.

So what has happened to the Meadows complaint? Prosecutors were required to do something with it, and my hypothesis is that they've folded it into something bigger negotiations for a cooperation agreement in which he will cooperate with the investigation and in turn face relatively light criminal charges, in which criminal contempt of Congress (1-12 months in jail and $100-$100,000 in fines) could certainly play a role.

At the time he first rejected the demand that he give the committee a deposition, in December,

Mr. Thompson said Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby.

Mr. Meadows also turned over to the committee his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Mr. Biden’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.” And he furnished text exchanges about the need for Mr. Trump to issue a public statement on Jan. 6 aimed at persuading the mob marauding through the Capitol in his name to stand down.

But Mr. Meadows also informed the committee he had turned in the cellphone he used on Jan. 6 to his service provider, and he was withholding some 1,000 text messages connected with the device, Mr. Thompson said, prompting additional questions and the need for more cooperation and a deposition.

Meadows has committed more crimes than the House committee is prepared to charge him with; we're starting to get a sense of it through the leaked text messages, which show him operating as a coup planning communications center, fielding demands from volunteer insurgents, from Junior to Ginni, to pass up the hierarchy. "I love it!" He also had that reputation for getting weepy under stress. He needs to be made to tell what he knows first, before he goes to jail.

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. 

DOING SOMETHING

 

Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Not just because he and Mrs. Meadows seem to be inveterate committers of voter fraud, or his text conversations with Mrs. Virginia Thomas, but especially because he was clearly one of the people using one of those burner phones during the seven hours when the official White House phone logs went dark on January 6. Photo by Patrick Semansky/AP via NPR (which has the voter fraud story if you need a link for that).

Redhand writes,

the failure fault line runs directly through Merrick Garland's office. It's hard not to feel despair when the chief individual charged with combating criminality threatening our own Government lacks the courage to do his job. I believe the news that Justice Dept. expands Jan. 6 probe to look at rally prep, financing about as much as I do the Putin regime's claims that they are curtailing military activities around Kiev.

Actually, for me, that's one of the few bright and hopeful spots, and that WaPo story is one of the reasons, though I think they got the story wrong when they suggested that the development (subpoenas to White House officials who contributed to planning the January 6 rally) is some kind of new and surprising development. Especially because I predicted it a couple of months ago, around the time of the arrest of Stewart Rhodes and the other Oath Keeper defendants.

That's when I learned that there was a special grand jury working all the January 6 cases, methodically working its way up the chain up from Viking Boy in the Wagnerian headdress to somebody senior enough that he didn't enter the Capitol himself but rather directed it, by phone, from outside.