Merrick Garland just said it even louder for the people in the back: Trump can’t magically save himself from DOJ prosecution

At the start of the year, even as the DOJ was arresting the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders for seditious conspiracy, Attorney General Merrick Garland publicly stated that his DOJ would take its January 6th criminal probe all the way to the top, no matter what.

Since that time the DOJ has cut cooperating plea deals with multiple Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders, including one with direct January 6th ties to Roger Stone. The DOJ has also carried out grand jury search and seizure warrants against Donald Trump’s co-conspirators John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark. And last week the DOJ had multiple members of Mike Pence’s senior staff testify about Trump and others to the grand jury.

Yet even as all of this has played out, the mainstream media and pundit class has tried to advance one baseless narrative after another about Garland having decided to let Trump off the hook, or having given Trump the ability to get himself off the hook simply by announcing in 2022 that he’s going to be a 2024 candidate, and other nonsense. Several times this year, Garland and/or his deputy have publicly reiterated the DOJ’s stance about taking the Trump 1/6 probe all the way to the top no matter what.

But then suddenly the media ran with the bizarre and obviously incorrect claim that a DOJ memo about midterm candidates had somehow let Trump off the hook. In response, Garland made a point of spelling out during a public appearance that Trump’s status as a former President or a future presidential candidate will not have any impact on the DOJ’s prosecutorial decisions. Yet large chunks of the media are still pushing phony ratings-driven doomsday narratives about the DOJ having decided to let Trump off the hook.

Now Merrick Garland appears to have finally had enough of the media’s constant lies about him and his DOJ, and so he sat down for an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News. In a clip posted from the interview, Garland said this:

In this clip, Garland comes off as a guy who has Trump nailed, and wants you to know he has Trump nailed, but knows he just can’t say it yet for fear of compromising the investigation.

This answer from Garland, along with the news that the DOJ has had Pence’s aides testify to the grand jury, is more than enough to make clear that the DOJ is not just targeting Trump – it’s deep into targeting Trump. You don’t subpoena the former Vice President’s Chief of Staff to testify to a grand jury about the criminal actions of the former President and his associates, unless your probe is in an advanced stage.

This doesn’t mean the DOJ is going to criminally indict Donald Trump tomorrow, or next week. Having someone nailed is not the same thing as having taken all the numerous procedural steps required to finish nailing them. But for crying out loud, it’s well past time for the media and pundit class to stop pretending that the DOJ isn’t investigating Trump, or that the DOJ is dragging its heels. The kinds of witnesses they’re putting in front of the grand jury make clear that – as Garland keeps trying to tell us – the DOJ’s Trump probe is pretty clearly a lot further along than anyone in the media has been willing to admit.