Justice Department delayed probing Trump on coup for over a year

Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI, under him in the Justice Department, resisted and delayed probing Trump's role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the failed coup attempt.

WASHINGTON—It has been proved once again that you can’t trust the FBI to guard the Constitution of the United States. A major investigation by the Washington Post reveals the bureau sat for more than a year on evidence tying former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol invasion, insurrection and attempted coup d’etat.

And that’s even though the public evidence, from many sources—including Trump himself—showed the White House denizen, while inhabiting that office, violated the U.S. Constitution.

Evidence of Trump’s involvement and his aim to overthrow the U.S.’s basic charter by stealing the 2020 election,  the very crime he charged against his opposition, was staring the Bureau right in the face, courtesy of indictments and convictions of the invaders for seditious treason, the Post reported, along with testimony that Trump motivated them.

The House’s Select Committee’s investigation laid out that evidence for the entire nation to see. The FBI’s leaders disregarded it.

About the only evidence the agency didn’t have, the paper reported, was who paid for the invasion. And several good government groups gathered findings on that, which were investigated and reported early in January 2023 by People’s World.

“More than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation,” the Post reported.

The reasons: “Wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution and clashes over” the sufficiency of evidence against Trump. And slow-moving Democratic President Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, wanted to first “restore public trust” in his department after its politicization under Trump and other past presidents.

Meanwhile “prosecutors below them chafed,” blaming top officials for being too hesitant to investigate, much less indict, Trump and his team, the Post reported.

Never mind that Trump openly urged his heavily armed partisans to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, knowing full well they had weapons—and their intent. Never mind that his consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, was even more explicit about invading in a speech preceding Trump’s. Never mind Trump’s pre-invasion tweeted order to the gathering insurrectionists: “Be there! It will be wild!”

Never mind that after they invaded, Trump condoned the insurrection, sitting in the White House watching the chaos, for two and a half hours, and resisting pleas that he call a halt and order them to disperse. He finally did, praising them and reluctantly telling them to go home.

Instead the DOJ and FBI officials briefing Garland just after the AG took office handed him an 11-page memorandum outlining an investigation plan working from the bottom—the invaders—up. It didn’t mention indicting either Trump, his top staffers, or both.

In just one example of what DOJ has yet to announce an indictment on, Trump and his team openly boasted about sending ballots from what turned out to be “fake electors” voting for Trump from key swing states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, to Congress in time for the early-January ballot count.

But DOJ didn’t give a “go” sign to probe that scheme until April 2022. In another, Giuliani openly lied to Georgia state legislators, in a public session about “election fraud” in the Peach State, when there was none. His law license is suspended, but there’s no indictment yet.

The delay is important. By the time Garland moved last November and appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to lead both the insurrection investigation and the probe into Trump’s illegal theft of top-secret and highly classified papers—including a plan on how to go to war with Iran—from the White House, precious time had been lost for what would be a long, drawn-out legal process in any case.

And Garland’s hand was forced as he had to distance himself from direct oversight of any Trump investigations. Trump had just announced he was seeking the White House, again.

Indicted Trump on 37 counts

Smith indicted Trump on 37 counts of violating the Espionage Act. His other team is still working on the invasion case. And DOJ’s delays in turn have pushed back Fulton County (Atlanta) DA Fani Willis’s potential racketeering indictment of Trump for trying to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020.

The FBI’s and Justice Department’s stalling and delays, as reported by the Post, are in direct contrast with the Bureau’s well-known penchant for fast activism, especially under its tyrannical right-wing former director, J. Edgar Hoover. Such activism included:

• In 1919, without a scintilla of evidence, the FBI, then called the Bureau of Investigation, helped Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, launch infamous raids on thousands of suspected subversives—all of whom were leftists and labor leaders, and Socialists of various stripes. Many were deported, almost all without hearings or trials. Hoover was already in control.
• The FBI repeated its performance, again with little to no evidence, in the Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy era, this time singling out alleged Communists, all with the successful aim of mortally wounding the labor movement. Even a Supreme Court ruling didn’t stop Hoover’s snoops.
• In an attempt to discredit him and disrupt the civil rights movement, the Bureau’s agents tapped Dr. Martin Luther King’s telephone and circulated scurrilous stories about his alleged philandering and left-wing ties.
• Under Republican President Richard Nixon, Hoover launched the COINTELPRO program, basically to counter Nixon’s White House “plumbers”—a group headed by an ex-FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy.

“Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize’ the activities of these” civil rights, anti-war and Black Panther “movements and especially their leaders,” a Wikipedia summary says.

• And, of course, then-FBI Director James Comey flip-flopped in a key disclosure of the 2016 election campaign. He publically reopened the bureau’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official e-mails on a private unsecure server. Comey made the announcement with fewer than three weeks to go before the election, damaging Clinton and violating Justice Department policy.

Despite what Hoover said and what legions of right-wingers believed then and still believe today, none of the “threats” whom FBI agents leaped to probe–including the labor leaders, peace activists, the Socialists, the Communists or Clinton–were threats to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. The right-wing’s tactics, including the FBI’s raids, are constitutionally questionable, at best.

Trump was and is such a threat, as his own statement on his Truth Social platform early last December shows. After all, when he took the oath of office, he swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He sang a different tune six months ago, and acted differently long before that, the Post story summarized:

“We should terminate all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to overturn the 2020 election and return him to the Oval Office, Trump declared.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.