Merrick Garland just told us what we needed to hear about the January 6th investigation
Attorney General Merrick Garland is not a publicist or a press secretary. It is not his job to go out there and tell you all about sensitive ongoing criminal investigations, so you can sleep better at night after the pundits on TV and Twitter have filled your head with all kinds of histrionic doomsday scenarios.
Merrick Garland is the nation’s lawyer. It’s his job to bring criminal cases against criminals and win them. Nothing more. He’s not there to make your socks roll up and down in the meantime. So the fact that the DOJ hasn’t yet indicted Donald Trump, tells us nothing about whether he’s under DOJ criminal investigation. And the fact that the DOJ hasn’t told us it’s investigating the insurrectionist House Republicans, tells us nothing about whether they’re being investigated. The Attorney General does not owe us this information, if it could compromise the criminal cases he and the DOJ are building.
But Garland does owe at least some big picture answers to Congress, being a coequal branch. Accordingly, he appeared before the Senate today to answer a variety of questions. Naturally, he was asked about the DOJ’s probe into the January 6th attack.
Specifically, Garland was asked if the DOJ probe was limited to the people on the ground on January 6th, or if the DOJ was also investigating those who planned or funded the attack. In response, Garland confirmed that there are no constraints on the probe whatsoever.
This may not have sounded like much, if you’re still under the mistaken impression that it’s Garland’s job to grab a microphone and tell you every detail of ongoing criminal investigations. But if you understand that Garland has to choose every word carefully about ongoing probes, he just told us that the DOJ is in fact going after everyone involved with January 6th.
The doomsday pundits will continue to try to scare you into staying tuned in by insisting that Merrick Garland is doing “nothing” and that the January 6th conspirators are somehow magically off the hook. But there is literally zero evidence to support this sentiment. And now Garland has flat out told us that the January 6th probe is going after everyone. It’s clearly time to tune out the pundits who keep baselessly insisting otherwise.
