Anyone else pissed at Merrick Garland?

[bigtree]

146. how?

...Trump was already a convicted felon when people voted.

Nothing prevents anyone convicted of felonies from running for president or getting elected, even from jail, and no grand jury recommended any insurrection charges which would have precluded him from assuming office.

So what is this magic formula where Garland would control the outcome of the election?

You really have to suspend your thought process to narrow the re-election down to something Garland could have done, or any other AG, fo that matter.

I think that's why these anti-Garland screeds don't come with any reasoning behind actual facts other than disproven tropes about bringing some petty charge early on in his term, before he hired Smith who inherited the over 20 prosecutors Garland had gathering evidence and defending what they'd seized since the Fall of 2021 against withering series of challenges in myriad courts packed with republican and Trump-appointed judges and justices who obligingly delayed hearings and trials in the effort to run out the clock until WE voted.

As a poster said above, it's as if this perspective completely missed the actual efforts of the prosecution in 2021, and further, can't fathom the appointment of Smith after Trump officially announced which most critics claimed was an attempt and effect to SLOW the prosecution, and continue to cast Garland as the prosecution, not the Smith team.

The person you're 'pissed' at approved the dual indictments after not only gathering almost all of the evidence in the documents, but securing it for trial in myriad, successive courts, up to the Supreme Court, including removing the attorney and executive privileges and securing the testimony of a dozen of Trump's top aides and attorneys in the White House.

In fact, Garland's lead attorney who began investigating the Trump WH in the Fall of 2021 was IN COURT arguing the government's position on the Trump appeals to Judge Chutkan before voters effectively pulled the plug.

He also prosecuted over 1200 Trump supporting rioters, including the riot leaders on charges up to the crime of Sedition, obtaining the cooperation of DOZENS who would be expected to give testimony about communications between the WH and the Willard hotel; something mentioned in the revised indictment submitted to the court by Jack Smith before we voted.

It should be obvious that he could have stopped the thing any time he wanted BEFORE it got to the grand juries. On the contrary, Garland not only gathered the most evidence included in the dual indictments, he defended all of that in successive courts packed with both republican and Trump appointees who were the ones who actually delayed trials which had more than enough time to take place after charges were brought.

But instead of scorn on those political appointees in the appeals courts and on the Supreme Court, you cast all of this blame on the prosecution (albeit, micast from Smith to Garland) who was actually IN COURT right before we voted -- on the people who worked tirelessly to not only bring charges forward, but defend them until the plug was pulled by voters.

And, the absurdity proposed by a poster on this thread about Garland being some republican plant... no one with a wit of information about the actual prosecution would suggest someone aligned with the 'GOP' would allow this to even get to a grand jury. After all, it was Garland's authorization that allowed the charges to proceed.

Smith brought forward a stripped down indictment designed to lessen the appeals and allow a trial to go forward without unnecessary delay.

At the very least, we should be criticizing the SC rulings which essentially have made all of those expectations of prosecuting Trump moot.

And you should be concerned with the communications between the Oath Keepers and Roger Stone at the Willard hotel which was briefly referred to in a passage in the revised indictment about 'telephone communications' with the Trump WH. That information came as a result of cooperation of over a dozen PB and OK rioters arrested and charged by Garland up to the historic, successful convictions of the crime of Sedition.

What I would suggest is that the Garland/Smith prosecution effort failed, in part, because so many in the media and elsewhere who were ostensibly concerned with prosecuting Trump, focused most of their attention and ire on the prosecution, basically stifling any political rallying around the prosecution's clear and devastating set of charges which would advantage opposition against Trump in the election.

In any reasonable circumstance, the evidence uncovered and revealed by the Garland team in their indictments, confirmed as valid by myriad reporting efforts, would be the subject of the daily news and at the forefront of resistance efforts.

Instead, each and every progress by the prosecution was drowned out by the daily whinging, by people like the political operative Nicole Wallace who chose Sarah Palin to run with John McCain, about an investigation they knew absolutely nothing of substance about outside of a false and incomplete article in the WaPO about Garland 'waiting' for something they couldn't actually describe beyond the internecine squabbling they chose to focus on instead of the actual substance of the investigation.

What an absolute sham of a reporting effort. I'll post just a fraction of what they (and their viewers) missed about the investigation, and people here can decide for themselves if they had the whole story, or not. Or even care to.

This was always going to be a political challenge, but too many people believed foolishly that it was the Justice Dept's job to win the election for us and keep Trump from being elected again and ending the prosecutions.

What's interesting to me is that no one has actually come up with a scenario where the prosecution of Trump could have been completed sooner. That's likely because all critics are charged with doing is pointing fingers, notably away from themselves, and at people making extraordinary progress in bringing TWO historic, multi-felony indictments in the first place.

Despite the claims by people outside of the investigation with absolutely no way of knowing the details of the state of evidence seized outside of court filings or what perps admit in public, it was far from a slam dunk that ANY prosecution of Trump would be completed before the election.

It's such an absurd expectation, that it's a scandal how little the public was told about the prospects. It's not as if it wasn't said, but there were people who invested their opposition to Garland on that improbability, knowing full well that they were in the catbird seat with their disingenuously cynical refrains, delivered over and over as if DOJ was actually supposed to win the election for Democrats.

For example, there's zero evidence DOJ's investigation was hindered by the reported inter agency squabbles that Carol Leonning at WaPo and others following her clickbaited about years ago in an abandoned and discredited investigatory reporting effort.

There's much more evidence that Garland not only proceeded directly to WH perps finances, he tied that effort to communications with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers; including the Willard Hotel meetings; fleshing out what the vaunted Jan. 6 committee focused almost exclusively on without congressional members coming to any conclusion or proof of Trump's complicity.

Even with all of the early effort by Garland, this wasn't the slam dunk so many like to portray it as. DOJ prosecuted well, and voters pulled the rug out from under them. It's that simple.

To the point, his critics haven't shown any proof other than time-passed to the election to support their complaints. Justice doesn't have a political timetable, and it shouldn't.

What happened was an extraordinary prosecution effort unlike any other in history, which was blocked and hindered by Trump allies on the bench (up to the SC) advantaging obstructive appeals, often frivolous ones. Period.

May 2021:

Prosecutors took 18 electronic devices from Rudy Giuliani’s home and office in April raid
As part of the same investigation, agents last month also executed a search warrant at the home of Victoria Toensing, a lawyer and Giuliani ally.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/20/politics/rudy-giuliani-raid/index.html

Jeffrey Clark's electronic devices were seized by federal agents in June 2021 "in connection with an investigation into violations of 18 U.S.C. 1001, which relates to false statements, 18 U.S.C. 371, which relates to conspiracy, and 18 U.S.C. 1512, which relates to obstruction of justice". The agents were looking for evidence of crimes of making false statements, criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The raid took place at Clark's house in Northern Virginia, and his electronic devices were seized.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/jeffrey-clark-trump-considered-ag-phone-seized-obstruction-probe-rcna47923

...a year later:

April 14, 2022

Giuliani helps feds unlock devices as charging decision looms
Giuliani unlocked several devices, or gave investigators possible passwords.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/giuliani-helps-unlock-electronic-devices-feds-decision-looms/story?id=84081611

...emptywheel on the evidence seized early on and the challenges brought by the perps:

In Rudy Giuliani’s case, a privilege review of his phone content took nine months (though that review incorporated content relating to January 6, so it has been done since January 2022). In Enrique Tarrio’s case (largely due the security he used on his phone), it took over a year to access the content on his phone. In Scott Perry’s case, prosecutors are still working on it seven months later. In James O’Keefe’s unrelated case, Project Veritas still has one more chance to prevent prosecutors from getting evidence the FBI seized in November 2021, almost 17 months ago. You can’t skip privilege reviews, because if you do, key evidence will get thrown out during prosecution, rendering any downstream evidence useless as well.

In cases of privilege, DOJ first gets grand jury testimony where the witness invokes privilege, and then afterwards makes a case that the needs of the investigation overcome any privilege claim. DOJ first started pursuing privileged testimony regarding events involving Mike Pence with grand jury testimony from Pence aides Greg Jacob and Marc Short last July, then with testimony from the two Pats, Cipollone and Philbin, in August. It got privilege-waived testimony from Pence’s aides in October and from the two Pats on December 2. That process undoubtedly laid the groundwork for this week’s DC Circuit ruling that people like Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino must likewise testify to the grand jury.

By the time DOJ first overtly subpoenaed material in the fake electors plot last May, it had done the work to obtain cloud content from John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark. If DOJ had obtained warrants for the already seized phone content from Rudy — which is likely given the prominence of Victoria Toensing from the start of the fake elector subpoenas — then it would have built on content it obtained a year earlier in another investigation.

Some of this undoubtedly benefited from the January 6 Committee’s work. I would be shocked, for example, if DOJ didn’t piggyback on Judge David Carter’s March 28, 2022 decision ruling some of John Eastman’s communications to be crime-fraud excepted. As NYT reported in August, in May 2022, DOJ similarly piggybacked on J6C’s earlier subpoenas to the National Archives (and in so doing avoided any need to alert Joe Biden to the criminal, as opposed to congressional, investigation); this is consistent with some of what Mueller did in the Russian investigation. Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, obtained via trust earned by Liz Cheney, has undoubtedly been critical. But the January 6 Committee also likely created recent delays in the January 6 and Georgia investigation, thanks to the delayed release of transcripts showing potentially exculpatory testimony.

But much of it preceded the January 6 Committee. I’ve shown, for example, that DOJ had a focus on Epshteyn before J6C first publicly mentioned his role in the fake electors plot. Toensing’s involvement came entirely via the DOJ track.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/04/06/the-testimony-jack-smith-gets-this-week-builds-on-work-from-over-a-year-ago/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/index.html


https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/index.html

...Smith obviously didn't believe the teevee clips we all saw were enough to convict because, he made clear in his latest filing that he was seeking to use “forensic evidence” from Trump’s iPhone to corroborate his assertions Trump instigated the riot.

Not just clips from teevee, which the DOJ team of career prosecutors obviously didn't believe would suffice (like critics want us to believe), but through corroborated evidence.

Besides, neither charges or a conviction is legally enough to keep Trump or anyone from running, being elected, or assuming office, even from jail. Or that voters just now elected a convicted felon/adjudicated rapist.

What did folks think was going to happen? These high profile cases regularly take two to three years in appeals to completely resolve (after conviction), minimum.

This, below, is the hush money case, arguably less complex than the federal ones:

How long could this appeals process take?

It’s hard to say exactly, but the first layer of the appeal, which is just to the First Department, I would expect to take about a year. If that appeal is unsuccessful, then after about a year, he would have an opportunity to file what’s called a leave application with the New York Court of Appeals, which is confusingly the name of New York’s highest court. The lowest court was where Trump was just convicted and is called the Supreme Court. The middle layer court is called the Appellate Division.

Since the Court of Appeals is the highest court, they don’t take cases as of right—so after Trump’s first layer of appeal, he may not get another appeal. He would have to ask the New York Court of Appeals to allow him to appeal, and if they grant his leave application, only then can he actually file an appellate briefing, saying, “I was denied my constitutional rights under either the New York Constitution or the U.S. Constitution.” He can also say there was some sort of failure to follow criminal procedure. The Court of Appeals would typically decide the leave application after three to five months, and if granted, then the appeal could take probably another year, maybe a little less. And if the Court of Appeals’ decision is adverse to Trump, he could then file a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the basis for that would have to be limited to the U.S. Constitution, rather than New York law or the New York Constitution.


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/donald-trump-whats-next-jail-prison-appeals-process-explainer.html

This was always OUR responsibility as voters to keep Trump out of office and allow the already proceeding prosecution to continue.

So many are running from that responsibility today, including legislators, that it's not surprising to me that the only people they can think of to blame are their own allies in that fight; people who worked harder than ANYONE ELSE in Trump's entire life to hold him accountable to the law.

Voters and legislators, not so much, as they're still talking like they expected Garland to overcome everything they allowed politically to obstruct him, from the Jan 6 committee's own delay in working with DOJ as they proceeded to stage a legal show with no teeth at all while keeping DOJ at bay until they finished almost a year later - then complaining about too much time passed - to voters who couldn't be bothered to show up and keep an ALREADY convicted felon out of the WH with their participation in the election.

But, Garland's to blame? The man who prosecuted over 1200 white supremacist Trump supporting rioters and riot leaders on charges up to the crime of Sedition, obtaining their cooperation manifested in the last report from Smith to Chutkan as instrumental in the filing's characterization of Trump as responsible for the Capitol riot.

This is an AG who fought each and EVERY Trump appeal and challenge of evidence he'd collected since 2021, and SUCCESSFULLY secured through myriad appeals and challenges on privilege and standing through several successive courts with dozens of republican and Trump appointed judges and Justices setting court dates far in the future as possible to accommodate the obstruction of perps and keep Trump out of federal court.

When DOJ was cut off by the election, one case was nearing to trial and the other was tied up in a dismissal that was expected to be reversed. DOJ did their job.

Everyone outside of that process failed DOJ. Period. No other explanation holds any water, because no other explanation comes with the receipts I provided.

Pissed? I'm pissed that voters didn't provide the justice in the election that they insisted this one man was supposed to guarantee against a political and justice system actively serving as Trump's defense team.