Merrick Garland's crucial mistake left him 'racing the clock' in Trump case: report

Attorney General Merrick Garland has been criticized for the pace of the Department of Justice's investigation into Donald Trump's effort to overturn his election loss — and a new deep dive report shows he was often frustrated himself with its pace.

Garland gathered his closest aides after he was sworn into office in March 2021 to discuss the possibility that evidence from the Jan. 6 investigation could point to criminal activity by the former president and his inner circle, but at that time it was “simply inconceivable" that Trump would recover politically so the attorney general proceeded with extreme caution, reported the New York Times.

"Prosecutors and the F.B.I. spent months sticking to their traditional playbook," the newspaper reported. "They started with smaller players and worked upward — despite the transparent, well-documented steps taken by Mr. Trump himself, in public and behind the scenes, to retain power after voters rejected his bid for another term."

"In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock," the report added.

Garland told his investigators that he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” but his directive to "follow the money" led nowhere, since most of the rioters paid for their own travel and lodging to get to Washington, D.C. for the insurrection.

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But there proved to be so many of those Trump supporters at the insurrection that identifying, investigating and prosecuting them soaked up precious time and resources, and Garland and his powerful deputy Lisa Monaco grew so frustrated with the pace of the Jan. 6 case that they created a special team to investigate John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roger J. Stone Jr. and the "war room" they set up at the Willard Hotel ahead of the Capitol attack.

Investigators obtained search warrants over the next few months for phones belonging to Eastman and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, as well as Trump adviser Epshteyn and campaign strategist Mike Roman, as they looked into the fake electors plot.

It's not clear exactly when Garland formally approved an investigation of Trump himself, but the investigations unit tasked with the Jan. 6 case at the time began issuing subpoenas for presidential phone logs, schedules and drafts of speeches by May 2022, and possibly earlier, and the DOJ was directly asking witnesses about his actions by that summer.

However, Trump had already started trying to block and delay the investigation, which was already slowed down by issues related to claims of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, and by the time those legal issues were sorted out, the former president announced himself as a candidate for the 2024 presidential election.