Former President Donald Trump has reacted to his federal Espionage Act indictment over the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case by claiming he is the victim of political persecution aimed to take him out of contention for president.
But new reporting from The Washington Post that revealed the FBI and Justice Department were reluctant to pursue Trump at all, and dragged their feet on a separate investigation of his role in the January 6 attack for a year, clearly demonstrates it was anything but, said a CNN panel on Tuesday morning.
"It's a failure by the Justice Department," said panel member and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig. "They are making up for lost time now. Yes, the pace of this investigation has picked up markedly, especially since Jack Smith took over. But — we discussed it at the time — for the first year and a half, DOJ was allergic, categorically allergic, to looking at the real power sources. Yes, they did and have to go after the people who stormed the Capitol, but those are not either/or propositions. DOJ has literally 10,000 federal prosecutors. They should have aimed at the people who stormed the Capitol and aimed high right away."
"There was a real cost for DOJ of not getting to the witnesses first in terms of — and what is so interesting about the Washington Post reporting is that it says that they really, for fear of looking political, didn't go directly after the former president and his closest allies because of that," said anchor Poppy Harlow.
"It shows this is the opposite of a witch hunt," said CNN analyst John Avlon. "It's about due process and the concern about the appearance of impropriety. A lot of times this has been sort of the Boy Scouts versus mob bosses, people willing to do anything and other people trying to uphold not only the law but being allergic to the appearance of impropriety."
"This information came to a head and now we will see," Avlon added. "The seditious conspiracy charges are very hard. We will see whether that gets taken."
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