The DOJ’s January 6th due diligence has now landed it two steps from Donald Trump’s doorstep
The DOJ didn’t wake up yesterday and randomly decide to arrest the Oath Keepers leadership on a lark. In reality the DOJ spent all year painstakingly working through the lower level grunts involved in January 6th and flipping people upward – while most pundits insisted it was doing “nothing” – so it could be in position to take out Oath Keepers leadership yesterday.
No serious person would ever have thought that the Garland DOJ was doing “nothing” about the January instigators (sorry, but pundits who talk like that are a joke). The real questions were what the DOJ was specifically doing behind the scenes, whether it would succeed, and whether we’d end up agreeing with the strategy. Now we’re getting some answers.
DOJ managed to flip so many people upward, it was able to build slam dunk seditious conspiracy charges against all twelve of these Oath Keepers leaders. That’s due diligence right there. What stands out is that the DOJ apparently decided to wait until all twelve cases were ready, then arrested them all at once yesterday. Now these twelve Oath Keepers leaders will each feel pressure to hurry up and flip before any of the eleven others can. Typically there’s only one truly lenient plea deal available in situations like this, and their lawyers are all explaining this to them.
It’s overwhelmingly likely that one or more of these twelve will flip fairly quickly, which in turn will take down the people on the next rung up of the January 6th criminal conspiracy – people like Roger Stone and Alex Jones, who were allegedly acting as liaisons between the Trump administration and the Oath Keepers.
In any massive criminal conspiracy, any given person usually only has direct evidence against the people one rung up from them. But now that the DOJ has wiped out the Oath Keepers leadership, if the next rung up is indeed Roger Stone, then the next rung up from him is Donald Trump.
Of course even if one or more of these Oath Keepers leaders cuts a deal tomorrow, it’ll still take the DOJ time to use their cooperation to complete the cases against the next rung up. So the “are we there yet” folks will still have plenty to complain about. But the DOJ is now just two steps from Donald Trump’s doorstep.
This still doesn’t guarantee the DOJ will prosecute Donald Trump for January 6th. It’ll likely need the cooperation of at least one person close to Trump, like Stone (or Jones, Mark Meadows, take your pick), in order to get a conviction against Trump. And we’re not there yet. But we’re now much closer to the end of this probe than the beginning. The DOJ is now a long way down the path to getting to Trump. That’s what happens when these probes are done the right way.
