Donald Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results. A U.S. House select committee investigating the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, will begin publicly presenting evidence about the event at 7 p.m. Thursday. Credit: REUTERS/Ahmed Gaber
During an interview with MSNBC's Alex Witt, NBC justice reporter Ryan Reilly claimed some of the accused Jan. 6 insurrectionists who have yet to appear in court may walk away without ever going to trial after Donald Trump is sworn in next January.
And for that, he stated, they can thank some FBI agents and officials who are sympathetic to their cause.
Asked by the MSNBC host if the DOJ has enough time to blow through the pending caseload still pending after 4 years, before Trump takes power, Reilly admitted he was skeptical.
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"What the Justice Department typically does here is focus their resources on the most violent crime," he told the host. "That is just generally a DOJ policy altogether, but now that there is a smaller window they really are narrowing down and saying, 'Okay, here is where we can get past the finish line.'"
"But I think there is going to potentially be some resistance eventually from within the FBI, because the FBI is a conservative leaning law- enforcement organization," he cautioned. "There has already been a lot of offices that weren't so enthusiastic about bringing these cases, there is a lot of support for Donald Trump within the FBI, and the question is whether or not any of those officials are going to sort of try to slow walk any of these cases before they were to get them over the line."
"Couple of questions here," host Witt interjected. "First of all, isn't the DOJ and subsequently the FBI supposed to be completely nonpartisan? You said it is conservative-leaning, that may be in the way the individual votes, but in the office isn't it supposed to be completely nonpartisan?"
"I mean, frankly, you are correct that it is supposed to be this nonpartisan organization but that is just not the case of what my reporting has shown over the past several years," Reilly replied. "A lot of these cases have been slow walked by FBI field offices."
"You just don't have people who have the buy-in and there are people who have quit the FBI because they didn't like how these January 6th cases were going," he elaborated. "They bought into the same propaganda that a lot of this same people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th bought into."
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