A new report in the Washington Post sheds some light on why it has taken so long to investigate former President Donald Trump's incitement of deadly riots at the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Specifically, the Post reports that top officials at the United States Department of Justice and the FBI "quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature."
Although Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray were not the ones who quashed the plan by prosecutors, they did embrace the strategy that critics of the plan recommended by holding the rioters themselves and then slowly moving up the chain if the evidence justified doing so.
"In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021," the newspaper writes. "The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack."
The Post's sources say that efforts to investigate potential Trump involvement in the riots was planned by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, who wanted to start with Trump ally Roger Stone and "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander, whom he believed had planned a violent response to the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.
However, others in the department viewed Cooney's efforts as "premature," reports the Post, because he could not turn up enough evidence to definitively link Stone to a crime.