'Dereliction of duty': Legal expert makes case that DOJ should already be prosecuting Trump

Donald Trump appeared to be in big trouble after the Jan. 6 insurrection, when his supporters acted on his election lies and tried to interrupt the process for certifying a new president, but nearly a year later there's little indication that he'll face consequences.

There's no sign of a criminal investigation of the twice-impeached one-term president or his inner circle for the insurrection or his related attempts to overturn his election, while the Department of Justice has chosen instead to go hard after rioters who broke misdemeanor laws by storming inside the U.S. Capitol, reported New York Magazine.

"The Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be pursuing misdemeanor trespass cases at the Capitol more aggressively than potential felony charges for Trump, and Garland appears to have left the responsibility of investigating whether the president of the United States broke federal law to local prosecutors in Georgia," wrote the magazine's Ankush Khardori, a former federal prosecutor. "It is a baffling course of inaction that poses serious long-term risks to our constitutional order, and time is running out to do anything about it."

The House select committee investigating the insurrection has gathered information from nearly 300 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents, including a series of damning emails and text messages from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows that were revealed this week, but Khardori argued that the best way to get to the bottom of it all was to conduct a criminal investigation of the former president's actions.

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"If the Justice Department has not begun a criminal investigation focused on at least Trump’s conduct on the Raffensperger call, it represents an enormous failure on the part of Garland and the department," Khardori wrote. "The ongoing criminal investigation in Fulton County is no substitute: It is far from clear, for instance, that the office could secure access to potentially crucial evidence from within the White House or, more generally, that it has the institutional capacity to pursue someone who has proved elusive to well-resourced investigators elsewhere."

That would also set a potentially problematic precedent that local prosecutors are free to criminally investigate former presidents for conduct that's illegal under federal law and might be more appropriately prosecuted by the Justice Department, and Garland's failure to act could encourage more high-level governmental misconduct around future elections.

At some point, perhaps in ways that we cannot fully envision, and sooner rather than later," Khardori wrote, "the country will pay the price for this dereliction of duty."

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