From last year. The Nation, 8/2/2023, Why Did Trump's January 6 Indictment Take So Long?
(snip) There’s plenty of blame to go around—starting with Attorney General Merrick Garland.
(snip) From the outset of his tenure atop the Justice Department, Attorney General Merrick Garland evinced little interest in mounting any such investigation, fearing that the GOP’s permanently aggrieved MAGA base would view it as a weaponized, partisan effort to hound Trump into political irrelevance. As a blockbuster report by The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis revealed this June, for a full year after the insurrection, Garland’s team looking into January 6 “consisted of just four prosecutors working with agents with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the National Archives and Records Administration.” Garland also shunned any wider probe into Trump’s coterie of political shills and hack-legal advisers building the case for him to gin up a bogus roster of alternate electors from swing states to throw Congress’s January 6 certification of results into chaos. Those sycophants and grifters are now unnamed co-conspirators in Smith’s indictment, and will be subject to future legal proceedings. In the end, Garland didn’t mount an investigation into the electors scheme until 15 months after the failed coup attempt.
(snip) Garland’s extreme solicitude to avoid courting the impression of promoting partisanship or other unlovely kinds of divisiveness in the pursuit of accountability on high is clearly a personal shortcoming—but it’s also a more widespread malady afflicting the culture of legal oversight in Washington. Leonnig and Davise reported that Garland and senior DOJ officials even hesitated in authorizing sedition charges against members of the Oath Keepers militia group, who committed some of the worst (and most coordinated) acts of violence outside the Capitol. Things got so bad in the Justice Department and the FBI alike that one Justice official complained that “you can’t use the T word” in deliberations over ultimate responsibility for the January 6 attacks—a state of affairs not unlike a forensic inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic that makes no mention of an iceberg. Other legal figures in the federal justice system were also taking anxious notice of the Justice Department’s dilatory approach to January 6. James O. Carter, a federal judge presiding over a civil suit involving the crackpot proposals of John Eastman to seize the presidency under the clouds of confusion kicked up by the fake electors’ slates, bluntly pronounced the effort a “coup in search of a legal theory,” adding that “the illegality of the plan was obvious.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-indictment-merrick-garland/
I'm going to look for that Washington Post article.
Things that make go hmmmm.
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