The DOJ just sent a message ahead of the January 6th public hearings

| 3:00 pm EDT June 9, 2022
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When the DOJ indicted and arrested top Trump adviser Peter Navarro last Friday, it seemed to send a message that no one who helped Donald Trump commit crimes was safe. But because the DOJ held off on charging Mark Meadows at this time, the doomsday types insisted that last week’s message was actually “Trump and his people have gotten away with it all.”

Now, however, the DOJ is letting us know how it really intends to deal with all of this. This morning the FBI, a division of the DOJ, arrested a guy named Ryan Kelley for having allegedly stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Why is this arrest important? Kelley is currently a Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan.

Why didn’t this arrest come sooner? Presumably, the criminal case against Kelley was more complicated than most of the other cases against Capitol attackers, or he’d have been arrested a long time ago. But the key is that the DOJ could have arrested Kelley last month, or next month, or two months from now, and instead decided to do it on the morning of the first January 6th public hearing.

By choosing not to delay Kelley’s arrest until after the public hearings came and went, the DOJ sent a de facto message today. That message is that while its criminal cases are not partisan in nature, it’s not going to back down just because any given move might look partisan in nature. For whatever reason, today was the prosecutorially appropriate day to arrest Kelley, so it arrested him.

This also makes clear that being a candidate for office – even an active declared candidate who’s on the ballot like Kelley – will not in any way prevent a suspect from being charged and arrested. So much for the doomsday narrative that Trump can somehow magically avoid being criminally charged simply by positioning himself for a 2024 run. Nothing works that way to begin with, and today’s arrest of a Republican candidate makes it all the more clear.