Judge's damning ruling on Trump will 'reverberate throughout the office' at the DOJ: Ex-FBI official
Donald Trump in the White House. (vasilis asvestas / Shutterstock.com)
March 28, 2022
Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi explained to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace how the Department of Justice likely reacted when a federal judge issued a ruling stating that former President Donald Trump likely committed a felony.
Specifically, Figliuzzi described everything stopping at the Justice Department and the FBI when a well-respected, long-time federal judge says something akin to what U.S. District Judge David Carter did on Monday.
"It reverberates through the office," he said.
"The Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021," Carter said in a decision Monday. "The illegality of the plan was obvious."
"You stop what you're doing at the FBI, at the U.S. Attorney's Office and you say, 'Wow. We have a federal judge who's actually told us out loud what we have been wondering and now you have to take some action,'" explained the former counter-intelligence deputy. "There's no rule that says you don't go to a manual and says if a federal judge says this you do this, but the impact is that you stop what you're doing and almost if you don't take action now to open a case if you haven't already, you now owe it to the judge, any U.S. Attorney worth a darn and now this is the attorney general of the United States, is going to feel compelled if he never does anything to explain himself to the judge. That is the respect, the gravity that's attached to the federal bench. If this happened anywhere else in America the local FBI, the local U.S. Attorney's Office would stop and have a meeting and figure out what do we do?"
Wallace noted that it's likely the reason that the news alert landed with a boom in the inboxes across Washington. She asked about the so-called "Coup Memo," the document written by John Eastman to justify the election overthrow. The judge said that the felonies were likely committed by Trump and by Eastman. So, she asked, where are the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland?
"It is everyone's question, 'why,'" Figliuzzi explained. "You know where I am on this. I have seen indications that something is happening. I don't see evidence of coordination and I get worried that the committee is in front of DOJ and doing things that they might like and then people telling me — who I trust — [to] calm down. 'Calm down. Give us space. We are doing our job.' So, I think DOJ is paying close attention and further, I think they have a strategy here and I still hold out hope that they're going to put the name Donald J. Trump in the subject line of a federal investigation."
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