Jack Smith comes to Merrick Garland's defense
A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. The delay, critics say, made it much more difficult for Smith — once he was appointed in November 2022 — to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 election.
But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.
...It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trump’s last-ditch efforts to remain in power.
The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.
Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.
And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.
read: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
...good reading for the reality-based community which has had to endure spurious claims about what was essentially a secret investigation and prosecution which only revealed its intentions in court, advantaging the reticence of DOJ to explain or defend their actions while the cases were still ongoing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...was what the celebrated Jan 6 committee focused the most on, looking for connections between the rioters and the Trump WH.
Indeed, one of the FIRST efforts Garland made was to look for ties between the rioters and Trump, directing the investigation of financial connections and communications between rioters and WH confidants like Roger Stone, as well as activities out of the Willard Hotel where Oath Keepers were know to be organizing their assault on the Capitol.
It made pefect sense for DOJ to investigate those ties, especially since the Trump supporting rioters arrested produced over a dozen willing to cooperate with DOJ.
Even though the report states that they didn't find the collusion they were looking for, it makes no sense to criticize them for looking.
Moreover, that certainly wasn't the only effort Garland's team made in the early days of his term. It's really specious to criticize the effort because he was not only doing the heavy lifting that produced over 1200 prosecutions of dangerous, often violent Trump supporters, but was also handling the investigation he ordered to reach all the way to the top of the Trump cabal at the very same time.
There wasn't so much as a slight pause in that effort when Smith was brought in to take it home, and no evidence was ignored or left uninvestigated, the vast majority of it already subpoenaed and resolved through appeals courts before Smith came aboard. The rest was defended in successive courts well after that appointment by Garland's DOJ.
Smith actually took tome to explain in his report that Merrick Garland had taken NO action to impede his investigation or prosecution.
In fact, Smith came aboard what was described at the time as a 'fast moving investigation, ' inheriting over 20 Garland prosecutors and more evidence than Mueller inherited at the time of his appointment.
receipts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/us/politics/trump-investigation-thomas-windom.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/index.html
From Mike Pence to ‘fake’ electors, here’s who has testified to the January 6 grand jury or met with prosecutors
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/politics/grand-jury-testimony-list-january-6-trump/index.html
files all kinds of due process pre-trial motions.
The public is generally ignorant of how underfunded, understaffed our judicial system is, along with how overburdened court dockets are.
Yet the public finds it easier to complain about no justice than to ask why.
...refuting the bullshit that Garland wasn't investigating and pointing out the appeals process that often took years because of the way judges set the dates of hearings months into the future, and that there were myriad appeals that had to be fought in successive courts, sometimes up to the compromised Supreme Court before much of the key evidence gathered as early as 2021 would be available to present to the grand juries who make the recommendations to charge people for the federal government.
There was not 'almost two years wasted.' That's a provable lie for anyone who reads this report.
It's been a provable lie for years for anyone who bothers to read what's been reported about the investigation and prosecutions.
The most common misinformation has been that Garland waited unnecessarily to charge Trump. but the AG doesn't just bring indictments forward on some will and whim of his, DOJ uses grand juries to recommend charges in federal investigations.
As you can read in the Smith report, not only was evidence key to getting a grand jury to indict held up for sometimes years, testimony from key Trump officials was also held up in several courts proceedings with challenges to claims of executive privilege and attorney client protections which sometimes took as much as a year to resolve.
And the hearings which dates were set exclusively by often republican and Trump nominated judges and justices didn't all occur concurrently, but were dragged out for years before all of the evidence and witnesses were available for Jack Smith to present those to a grand jury.
No one has shown any evidence that the material Merrick Garland's prosecutors had gathered as early as 2021 was available to present to grand juries in the time you describe. To the contrary, this report clearly outlines those challenges and makes clear that the AG wasn't just diligent, but was successful in getting all of the evidence and witnesses through the myriad appeals through successive courts packed with republicans and Trumpers.
After all, it was Garland's prosecutors, DOJ career prosecutors, who argued all of the appeals cases, even after Jack Smith's appointment. Moreover, jack Smith inherited what was described as a 'fast moving investigation' which had already gathered more evidence than Mueller had when he started his own probe.
my receipts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/us/politics/trump-investigation-thomas-windom.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/index.html
From Mike Pence to ‘fake’ electors, here’s who has testified to the January 6 grand jury or met with prosecutors
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/politics/grand-jury-testimony-list-january-6-trump/index.html
...Garland's prosecutors began investigating the Trump WH as early as the Fall of 2021, well before Congress began their own investigations.
And you can tell just how little they contributed to the actual indictment by the dearth of any material from those hearings in evidence or from the witnesses who are key in the election interference charges brought by the Special Counsel.
Go on, name ONE thing from the one-sided congressional hearings which made it into the indictment.
Name one thing in the indictment from the Jan 6 committee investigation which withheld ALL of the product of their investigations from DOJ (despite repeated requests for a year) until MONTHS after they ended their hearings.
There's nothing in there that DOJ hadn't already obtained. ALL of the product of the subpoenas they initiated in 2021 was put through myriad appeals in successive courts, sometimes up to the Supreme Court. ALL of the witnesses in the indictment who were top Trump WH aides, officials, and attorneys saw their challenges defeated by Garland prosecutors stretching well into Smith's term.
You've presented a myopic, incomplete, and frankly false representation of the investigation and prosecution to make the conclusions you posted. You should read the report.
Garland directed his investigators FROM THE BEGINNING to go as high up the chain as the evidence took them. In the Fall of 2021, his Deputy AG directed Tom Windom to investigate the Trump WH:
from December 2022:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-high-profile-moves-trump-criminal-investigations/index.html
No stone was left unturned, and this is important because, DOJ isn't just responsible for putting forth their charges and evidence of crimes in court, they are responsible for presenting responses to ALL of the evidence available. That includes what the perps present, as well as reconciling whatever Congress gathered.
All of that is required to be made available to the defense under Discovery obligations before a trial can proceed. It can make or break a case, so this notion that all they needed was one piece of the prosecution or the other is a simplistic and false representation of what would be a successful or even viable prosecution
Read the report.
Yet, what's obvious about how criminal investigations work has to be pointed out by Jack Smith himself.
Thanks for the Politico link. Glad they finally caught up with the realities of how the DOJ works and how the judicial system often doesn't.
...lookey here.
Many apologies are owed here. Will we see them? Doubtful.
