General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Bashing Garland for the election? Spell out the evidence he supposedly had that he could have used to convict Trump [View all]bigtree
(94,314 posts)...with endless appeals and challenges of privilege, although Obama wasn't a stranger to claiming privilege over communications.
The courts ultimately agreed with Garland's prosecutors that none of those privileges applied, but those court fights that Garland's team waged in successive hearings on multiple perps up the Supreme Court took over a year, and more in some cases.
After those were resolved, there was still the matter of the grand juries hearing the testimony from all of the principles and co-perps in the indictment before making their decision, while we all waited.
You're right that it represents a broken system, but this isn't some instance where DOJ is at fault. Their obligation is to justice, but there wasn't actually enough time between elections.
A combination of obstruction, appeals and challenges to privilege, and the normal scheduling of often Trump-appointed judges over challenges to evidence hampered immediate charges, and created this race to the election that was more desire than reality.
DOJ isn't supposed to tailor their prosecutions to elections, but they did pare down the indictment to try and move it through the courts on its own with more speed.
That's not harmful to the defendant or candidate, and that protection of defendant candidates against interference in elections is what's proper for a Justice Dept. to consider. Not whether they can hamper him from winning, but whether they can achieve a judgment beforehand. It's amazing more people don't recognize the contradiction in expecting a conviction on election interference to be advantaged by his political rival's AG's interference.
What Garland actually did was pursue evidence from Trump aides and attorneys from the very beginning, and fought successfully through several successive courts, up to the SC, to preserve that evidence to use in his prosecutions.
That took more time than we needed to get him into a trial, and the Supreme Court made certain with their foot-dragging scheduling all throughout (and other Trump judges, as well) that those appeals and challenges by his co-conspirators would successfully delay the cases until the election.
Makes no sense to blame a DOJ that pursued all of the evidence, because that's how prosecutions work. They are not advantaged to just look at things that convict (like Congress), but need to have all of the evidence before them, as do the grand juries they expect to return recs for indictments.
And folks should understand that there's no law preventing a charged or convicted felon from running or being elected and assuming office, even from jail.
Keeping Trump out of office was OUR job, not DOJ's which had zero ability to do that, even at the best of folks' imaginations about what they had in their possession in the first year.