Dear Reader,
Today is January 6th. We’ve reached the first anniversary of that day of violence and betrayal. And we appear even more divided now than on the day the Capitol was defiled.
There will be remembrances, moments of silence, calls for unity, witness testimonials, replaying of video footage, and bleak predictions for the future. There will also be lying, deflection, gaslighting, and whataboutism.
And there will be the casting of blame. Who was responsible and will they be held accountable. Notably, this morning President Biden offered an unofficial indictment of his predecessor in an unexpectedly tough takedown. Biden was brutal in his denunciation of Trump’s conduct around last January 6th.
But here were the money lines in Biden’s speech, trending on Twitter as I write this: “You cannot love your country only when you win. You can’t obey the law only when it is convenient. You can’t be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.” Biden also reminded everyone of this fact about Donald Trump: “He’s not just the former President. He’s a defeated former President.”
The cheering has been understandably loud and plentiful:
- Per Professor Laurence Tribe, who brought a superlative: “We have just heard one of the greatest speeches in American history. President Biden rose to the challenge.”
- Per Matthew Dowd, who brought alliteration: “Fabulous forceful factual speech by President Biden. Bravo.”
- Per Jonathan Capehart, who felt a touch of religion: “We need a church organ to accompany @potus speech.”
It was a good political speech, voicing many of his supporters’ thoughts, bordering on cathartic.
But there was perhaps a more anticipated speech than Biden’s in the run-up to this anniversary. That was the one delivered by Attorney General Merrick Garland yesterday, ostensibly to the staff of the DOJ but really intended for the public.
The Attorney General, who is emphatically not a politician either by temperament or position, had a different job yesterday. His obligation was not to rhetorically blame or indict, but to reassure the public that the Department of Justice is actively and aggressively searching for factual evidence of blameworthiness on the part of everyone involved, high or low.
Among other things, Garland updated us on the stats:
- 725 defendants arrested and charged
- 5,000 subpoenas and search warrants issued
- 15 terabytes of data reviewed
(I consider it a personal grammatical victory that when the AG recited the number of early guilty pleas, he said “145 defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors.” Note that the chief law enforcement officer in the land and former appeals court judge says “pled” not “pleaded.”)
But the main purpose of the speech, as far as I could tell, was not to take inventory or even to thank Department personnel for their service and sacrifice. The money section of Garland’s speech was more vegetable than red meat, and that is as it should be. It was this:
“The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they might lead.”
Note the deliberate language and deliberate delivery. All January 6th perpetrators. At any level. Whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible.
That may sound like boilerplate but in context it was much more than that and the words placated many observers, including former prosecutors and sitting members of Congress, who have fretted that the ringleaders were not in Justice’s crosshairs. If there were any doubt about what Garland was intending to convey, consider this: eight minutes before Garland was set to speak, DOJ’s chief public information officer, Dena Iverson, sent an email to her distribution list providing an advance excerpt from the speech. Often the press will receive an entire embargoed address or substantial excerpts when prominent officials speak. Iverson’s email provided just one paragraph from a 25-minute speech, and it was the paragraph I quoted above. They didn’t want anyone to miss the point. So the words may have seemed generic, but they were pointed.
Remember, Garland doesn’t have the luxury of an elected state Attorney General, who feels free to lay down the gauntlet as to Donald Trump with public statements whenever she sees fit.
Nor does Garland have the luxury of the 1/6 Select Committee, which is free to announce which witnesses have talked and which refused or to release actual bits of evidence whenever they wish, like some of the eyebrow-raising texts Sean Hannity sent as the insurrection was unfolding.
Garland has few luxuries and many constraints. As he forthrightly noted, his indirect and general formulations “may not be the answer some are looking for. But we will and must speak through our work. Anything less jeopardizes the viability of our investigations and the civil liberties of our citizens.” That is absolutely fair and right.
The speech was a good one. But Garland himself has directed our attention to the proper target. If the Department must speak through its work, then it is to be evaluated by its work. And the great unknown is what work its lawyers and law enforcement agents have done; we know about the 725 arrests of those who “were present” but little to nothing about the investigation into those who were not present but who, in Garland’s words, were “otherwise criminally responsible for the assault.” Those would be the enablers, the funders, the inciters. Have agents sought to interview White House staff, Trump’s outside advisors, or members of the so-called War Room at the Willard Hotel, who would shed light on the upper level perpetrators of 1/6 and, more importantly, on the state of mind of the sitting President who, for three hours and seven minutes, did less than zero to stop the violence he encouraged? We don’t know. We will have to wait to find out.
I agree that the Department must speak through its work, but I hope we hear about the fruits of that work before too long.
My best,
Preet
