Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America’s slide into Putinism?
Political bombshells here at home tie Donald Trump tightly to a criminal conspiracy on January 6. Will the attorney general find the courage to act?
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America’s slide into Putinism? | Will Bunch.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/merrick-garland-indict-trump-january-6-20220306.html
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Indeed, a federal investigation that so far has netted charges against more than 700 smaller fish hasn’t ensnared any swamp creature larger than James or Rhodes, who pleaded not guilty to the same seditious conspiracy charge. The big kahunas — Stone, his pal Michael Flynn, Trump January 6 advisers like Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon, as well as Trump himself — have not been charged (although Bannon faces trial for ignoring the House Committee’s subpoena), and legal watchers have seen scant evidence such a probe is far along.
That, in a nutshell, is the true significance of last week’s legal filing by the House committee. In announcing its strong evidence of Trump’s criminality around January 6, the committee also made it all but inevitable it will eventually send a criminal referral against Trump to Garland at the Justice Department. This will likely come after public hearings, probably this spring, that will lay out the case of the United States vs. Donald J. Trump. The pressure will mount on Garland to do something America has never done — charge a president with a crime.
That’s why what’s happening right now in Ukraine should be a game-changer. We are watching, in real-time, the moral implosion of a powerful, nuclear-armed nation that’s just a few years farther down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism than the United States. Putin’s delusional but deadly invasion of a sovereign democracy has elevated the question: How do you stop a madman? And when? In Sunday’s Washington Post, veteran journalist Dan Balz reports the biggest worry of America’s western allies in working so closely with the Biden administration against Russia is their fear that U.S. voters — or U.S. vote counters — will return Trump to the White House in 2024.
Yet fear has ruled our own response to Trump’s criminality. The latest deer in those headlines has been newly elected Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who stunned his top career staffers by aborting their ongoing criminal investigation into Trump’s role in the dodgy finances of the Trump Organization. It’s totally legit to worry that the milquetoast-y Garland — whose prosecutors have already pulled their Trump-related punches in other matters — is the next frightened deer standing on the roadway between January 6 and real justice.
One of the few positives to emerge from the horrors taking place in Eastern Europe is the reminder for a politics-weary world of what actual courage looks like, in the unexpected persona of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A former comedian and actor, Zelensky has shown the power of looking directly into a camera and speaking plain truths, about the barbarity of Putin’s invasion and the will of his own people to resist it. It’s something that some of America’s political leaders — but especially Merrick Garland, facing the decision of a lifetime — should watch, and study. That’s because speaking the plain truth about what Donald Trump did, and acting upon that truth, is the only surefire way to prevent an American Putin.