Merrick Garland’s DOJ just had a busy night
Even as Thursday night’s January 6th public hearing was playing out in devastating fashion for Donald Trump and a number of his key allies, various folks on social media began asking questions such as “Merrick Garland, are you hearing this?”
The question was perhaps rhetorical, but I’ll go ahead and answer it anyway: of course he was. In fact, at one point during the hearings, Liz Cheney said that the DOJ has been working on this with cooperating witnesses – seemingly confirming that the committee knows that the DOJ is indeed in the process of targeting Donald Trump and his inner circle.
Of course we already have several months of major media reports about a DOJ grand jury poking around in Trump’s inner circle, so none of this is a surprise. But the big question has been how much or little overlap there has been between the DOJ probe and the House probe. Now that’s about to not matter very much, because the House has begun laying out all its cards in these public hearings, and the DOJ is absolutely watching. So is the Fulton County District Attorney, along with any and all other prosecutors who are targeting or are considering targeting Trump for election related crimes.
So yeah, Merrick Garland’s DOJ had a busy night. The DOJ officials running the January 6th probe weren’t just watching, they were recording it, and are likely having the whole thing transcribed as we speak so they can study every last detail that just got aired.
The DOJ will not be criminally indicting Donald Trump tomorrow or next week. By all accounts, its probe is not there yet. No matter how obviously guilty Trump is, convincing a trial jury to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt takes more than just “obvious” guilt. The DOJ has done a lot of work on this, but still has a lot more work to do in order to get convictions against Trump and his people. But Thursday’s hearing, and the other public hearings coming up, just made that task a lot easier.
