Accomplice!
In the shoot-from-the-click world of Twitter, when someone you thought of as a fellow traveler denounces you as a bad guy.
The tweets started about four months ago, demanding — with varying degrees of vitriol — that the Justice Department prosecute Donald Trump and high-level confederates for sedition. A capital idea, of course. The thought of them in orange jumpsuits and leg irons, shuffling into court for sentencing, is one of the few things that gets me out of bed in the morning. Hell, I’d stand behind police barricades at the courthouse steps just for a glimpse of that chorus line. Yoo-hoo! Rudy! Meadows! Don Jr.! Stephen Miller! I hope you pledge the best prison gang!
But wishing it don’t make it so, especially in a system that grants wide berth to the executive and carries a high evidentiary burden. With 725 arrests to date, the authorities have made a lot of progress with the on-scene Jan. 6 insurrectionists, 71 of whom have already been sentenced. But the political ringleaders have thus far not been indicted, and in some cases not even subpoenaed for their testimony.
Conspiracy prosecutions such as these tend to resemble drug cases, where you go after little fish to secure their testimony against bigger fish, whom in turn you turn against still bigger fish and so on until you’re slamming a cell door on the world’s most notorious golf cheater. But it’s even harder than that, because the documentary evidence is just sitting there in the National Archives and elsewhere waiting for you as the defense sues and sues in the hopes of keeping possible smoking guns out of your reach until a change in political power.
It may be that indictments are just around the corner. It may be that in search of the best case, the DOJ is for now passing on a less ironclad one. And there’s another possibility, too. Maybe Attorney General Merrick Garland is a scaredy-cat.