General Discussion

1. Immediately begin the investigation right at the beginning. Everyone knows the one superpower Trump has is delay. Plus, it wasn't surprising that the longer you got away from the incident the less folks would be angry about it.

2. Treat it like any other case. By treating it as a special case, he created a bar so high that it took years before he felt like he had done enough to justify prosecution. By then it was simply too late.

He was simply too much of a believer in institutionalism and thought that if he just was thorough and methodical that those traits would be recognized and everyone would find things legitimate. All it did was the opposite. It signalled that this simply wasn't that large of a priority to a lot of people. I'm not going to pretend the election was lost because of him, but it neutered the whole protect democracy argument.

It's hard to make that argument stick when you take three years to prosecute someone for it and you don't even get to a prosecution before the next election.

Should have been max a year to charging. They should have been extra open at every step. I personally think they could have gotten a grand jury to indict within six months. Then if you need to take a little extra time to build a case that's ok, because Trump is going to give you that time with all of his delay tactics.

There's playing by the rules and then there's slavishly playing by the rules. One is the right thing to do, the other is unnecessary. We chose the second path.

It wasn't even a particularly complicated case, and yes I did decades of criminal law on both sides. I've done more complicated cases and it took less than a year from crime to sentencing and I didn't have near the resources he did.

At the end of the day, he was worried too much about appearing not biased or unfair without recognizing that was baked in with half the country no matter what he did. He should have been more worried about an expedited case that still followed the rules but did so with an eye to it being the most important case the federal government had.