Donald Trump isn’t going to like what Merrick Garland just said
As Congress continues to get to the bottom of how Jan 6 was able to unfold the way it did, a number of doomcasters have been complaining about how the investigation is doomed before it officially begins – with reactions ranging from the usual pessimism to outright insane conspiracies of how somehow Merrick Garland is secretly on the side of Donald Trump and using his position at the DOJ to cover up the former guy’s crimes. The trouble is that these people never really offer a practical solution that House Democrats and/or Garland can do instead of whatever it is they’re doing.
A lot of it really just boils down to the fact that the DOJ only drops hints to the media when it’s already obvious what they’re going to do. One that functions healthily shouldn’t be dropping weekly updates of what their next move will be – contrary to what a number of pundits and Twitter resistors routinely demand. When Garland testified before Congress on Wednesday, however, he dropped a pretty crucial hint for the road ahead: there are no constraints on the probe into January 6.
It’s the absolute last thing Republicans who have done all they can to cover their tracks want to hear, since it means that not only are the people like the staffers who confessed to planning it being under investigation, so are the people who funded the attack itself – which will make it that much harder to distance themselves. No wonder they were so quick to rebuke him during the Senate questioning today. Most of the probes that happened during the Trump years and brought a number of salacious details were relatively narrow in their scope – so one can only imagine what surprises the probe will have in the weeks to come.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making