This international criminal web is huge. Merrick Garland and "The Octopus"

[bigtree]

47. what's sad is the literal surrender from people claiming to be so concerned with prosecuting Trump

...most of them couldn't tell you one detail of the actual prosecution.

Can you respond to ANY of the FACTS in the article by HARRY LITMAN, who's not 'Politico' at all, but an anti-Trump former U.S. Attorney and law professor?

You didn't refute ONE thing explained by JACK SMITH in his TESTIMONY as outlined in this article, so I'm going to conclude that you can't. That's the way this works.

All Garland critics seem to know how to do, are able to do, or want to do is attack the prosecutor. And they act as if there's some other prosecution effort somewhere, instead of bothering to confront Trump with these serious and numerous charges.

Now comes this predictable surrender, as if it's easier to pick at the prosecution, than it is to hold Trump accountable. But Garland is supposed to transcend both the Trump-enabling courts AND the electorate.

Garland never went anywhere until voters pulled out the rug from under him. The very same attorney who Garland's deputy, Lisa Monaco, tasked with investigating the Trump WH in the fall of 2021, Thomas Windom, was still in court defending the indictment and evidence when voters effectively ended the case.

If you can't acknowledge that, you don't have a clue about any of it.

No facts, proof of your claims presented here, so I'll leave you to your speculation.

... consolidation of facts to respond to here:

Here's a couple of posits for the kids to take home with them, and bring back to be graded...

How do you get to the TWO multi-felony indictments of Trump for defrauding the election without the efforts of Merrick Garland, much less convictions?

In his report and testimony, Jack Smith clearly said that Donald Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the nation's capitol, and that the evidence of that incitement is in his indictment, along with Trump's coercion of others to alter votes as the basis of his multi-felony indictment.

How does he get to that prosecution without the arrests and convictions Garland's investigators and prosecutors achieved of over 1200 white supremacist, Trump-supporting rioters who his critics dismissed all throughout the prosecution as mere 'foot-soldiers?'

Moreover, how does Jack Smith obtain the evidence to get grand juries to bring indictments against a former president without the efforts of Merrick Garland's prosecutors who not only gathered the lion's share of that evidence from as early as the fall of 2021, but defended that evidence in myriad, successive courts packed with judges and justices obligingly setting the court dates for the unprecedented number of appeals as far in the future as they could.

Most notably, the Supreme Court's maga majority delayed their decision until right before we voted, AND invented immunities for the felon, which should have clued anyone in that they wouldn't allow Trump to be prosecuted before the election under any circumstances.

And, here's a bonus question:

Why wasn't the 17 months or so after the charges dropped more than enough time to hold a trial?

What's this crap about the prosecution delaying anything when they brought charges early enough for any process that wasn't deliberately obstructive? (and don't just excuse the complicit judges and justices just to dump on the prosecution)


Here's some reading while we wait for answers: (only to the points raised, please, kids)

Politico put it succinctly in outlining conclusions in Smith's final report:

___A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. The delay, critics say, made it much more difficult for Smith — once he was appointed in November 2022 — to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 election.

But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.

...It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trump’s last-ditch efforts to remain in power.

The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.

Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.

And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252