Like it or not, this DOJ doesn’t leak
We keep hearing arguments that this or that person in Trump world can’t possibly be under DOJ investigation, because if they were, something would have leaked out about it by now. But while this is what we keep hearing from pundits, what we’re seeing play out is something very different.
Nothing leaked about the DOJ probe into Rudy Giuliani, until his home was raided. Nothing leaked about the DOJ probe into Matt Gaetz, until Gaetz himself went public about it in order to fend off someone who was trying to extort him over it. Nothing leaked about the DOJ targeting Roger Stone, until his driver cut a cooperating plea deal out of nowhere. Nothing has leaked to explain why Paul Manafort was pulled off a plane. Nothing leaked in advance about the DOJ’s arrest and indictment of the Oath Keepers leadership or the Proud Boys leadership.
If you stop listening to the pundits and look at the actual facts, it becomes very clear that this DOJ does not let anything leak. It operates in total silence and secrecy until its probes reach a point where something like an arrest, or a raid, or a court hearing for a cooperation deal, forces things to become public. Short of that kind of specific action, the public hasn’t been aware of any of these DOJ probes that were chugging along in secrecy.
It’s worth noting that Robert Mueller’s team took a very different approach. Their strategy was to tell the target he’s being targeted, make a point of questioning all his loyal buddies so they’ll go running to tell the target that he’s being hit up from all sides, and try to scare the target into flipping. Not only did it not work, it ensured that everyone knew what was coming.
It wasn’t a dumb strategy per se. It just proved to be the wrong strategy for trying to take down Trump world people, where nearly all of them are in communication with each other, many of them are sharing the same lawyers, and so on.
The Garland DOJ has taken the opposite approach. Keep the target in the dark. Only approach the specific associates who are deemed likely to cooperate, as opposed to approaching the target’s loyal allies who are more likely to alert the target. It’s a surgical approach. Garland’s strategy has consistently been to build an indictment so thorough and foolproof, the target panics and flips right after seeing the indictment.
So far this tactic has worked well enough to amass enough cooperators to take down the entire Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leadership. It’s also gotten Roger Stone’s driver to flip on everyone, including Stone. And you have to wonder if Mark Meadows may have also flipped, given that he still hasn’t been indicted on contempt, and the January 6th Committee hasn’t publicly complained about it.
And this is just what we can see from the outside of the most secretive criminal probe in modern history. Are we really supposed to believe that other people haven’t also flipped? Cooperation deals are often kept secret for as long as realistically possible, to keep the targets from knowing that the cooperator can no longer be trusted. Every time news has surfaced about the DOJ’s January 6th probe, it’s been clear that we’ve all been three steps behind in terms of knowing what’s going on.
“So we’re just supposed to trust that Garland knows what he’s doing?” Many of you have decided he’s massively and depravedly incompetent, or suspiciously compromised, and you’re basing it on nothing at all – beyond hearing opportunistic pundits constantly bash him in generic fashion.
So yes, it’s a far better bet that Garland’s clearly secretive investigation is indeed playing out extensively, well, in secret. Garland has even told you, in two separate public statements, that he’s taking to the very top. To baselessly presume that Garland is some kind of secret Trump agent, working to protect him, while lying to us all the entire time, is the stuff of unhinged conspiracy theories. Pundits who push this nonsense should be dismissed entirely.
I don’t like having to defend Garland, because I don’t know what all he’s actually doing, which means I don’t know if I’ll agree with the end result. And his secretive approach certainly makes my job harder. But these unhinged conspiracy theories about him are rubber room stuff.
Once you wipe away all the lunatic conspiracies, the only actual complaint that most of you have about Garland is that he’s not letting you in on his January 6th investigation in real time. But that would make it harder for his investigation to succeed, so he doesn’t owe you that.
“But if he doesn’t let anything leak, how do we know he’s doing the job?” Mueller let almost everything leak, and in the end it turned out he wasn’t accomplishing anything of substance. So there are no guarantees. But a lack of leaks is not a reasonable basis for concluding the lack of a probe, or the lack of progress.
God forbid any of these pundits tried to educate you on how the process actually works. It’s easier to bash the DOJ for how long it’s taking to indict Giuliani, for instance, than to explain that after the FBI seized all that evidence from his home, the courts held up the DOJ’s receipt of much of that evidence for eight months for the sake of a privilege battle. If you don’t like that it’s taking so long for Giuliani to be arrested, and you want to be factually accurate about it, blame the courts – not the DOJ.
For that matter the DOJ’s goal is not simply to indict someone like Giuliani or Meadows or Stone. The goal is to indict them with such an overwhelming case, they realize they’re screwed, and they panic and flip shortly after being indicted, instead of insisting on going to trial. Building massive criminal cases against Trump’s people, and getting them to flip accordingly, is the DOJ’s quicker path to taking down Trump. Quickly arresting Trump’s people on thinner cases, which they (rightly or wrongly) believe they can beat at trial, would be the DOJ’s slower path for getting to Trump.
“Okay so Garland should explain all of this to us!” That’s not his job. It’s honestly not. You know whose job it is to educate you on this stuff? The pundits who claim to be experts in this stuff. It’s their job. But they know they’ll get further as pundits by villainizing Garland, so that’s what most of them do. That means you have to educate yourself on how these things really work, so you understand the parameters of what the DOJ is trying to do, and so you know what not to fall for from the pundits. Knowledge is power.
