Nathan News

WASHINGTON — Over the past year and a half, the Justice Department has approached former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results with an evidence-tracking strategy that critics say seemed to be on the verge of paralysis – and that limited discussion of his role, even within the ministry.

Then came Cassidy Hutchinson.

The electrifying public testimony delivered last month to the House panel on Jan. 6 by Ms. Hutchinson, a former White House aide who witnessed many key moments, prompted senior Justice Department officials to discuss more directly about Mr. Trump, sometimes. in the presence of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Assistant Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco.

In conversations at the department the day after Ms Hutchinson’s appearance, some of which included Ms Monaco, officials spoke of the pressure the testimony created to examine Mr Trump’s potential criminal culpability and whether he intended to break the law.

Ms Hutchinson’s revelations appeared to have paved the way for addressing the most sensitive topic of all: Mr Trump’s own actions before the attack.

Ministry officials said Ms Hutchinson’s testimony did not change their investigative strategy to work their way methodically from lower-level actors to the upper echelons of power. “The only pressure I feel, and the only pressure our line prosecutors feel, is to do the right thing,” Garland said this spring.

But some of his bombshell claims — that Mr. Trump knew some of his supporters at a January 6, 2021 rally were armed, that he desperately wanted to join them as they marched to the Capitol, and that the best lawyer in the White House feared Mr. Trump’s conduct could result in criminal charges – was largely news to them and caught their attention.

Open discussion of Mr. Trump and his behavior had been rare, except as a motive for the actions of others, a subtle but significant shift that was underway even before Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony.

A small team of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington have stepped up their investigation into a scheme to install fake state voters, spearheaded by lawyers who were in frequent contact with Mr. Trump. And the Justice Department watchdog is investigating efforts by Jeffrey Clark, a former department official who discussed the plan with Mr Trump, to overturn the election results.

A flurry of recent subpoenas related to the voter inquiry and raids related to the Inspector General’s investigation of Mr. Clark – which were made with the knowledge of senior department officials – suggest that these investigations are are accelerating. At the very least, these moves indicate that prosecutors are closing in on the former president.

The Department of Justice does not publicly discuss the details of further investigations or their outcome, so as not to prejudice criminal prosecutions or imply that people are guilty before being charged with a crime.

The policy, longstanding but more vigorously enforced recently, has infuriated critics, including President Biden, who accuse Mr Garland of being too slow and cautious. The congressional committee tasked with the attack, which resumes public hearings this week, used testimony, particularly that of Ms. Hutchinson, to pressure the department to act more aggressively.

Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming and vice chair of the committee, urged her colleagues to make a criminal referral to the department in hopes of forcing Mr. Garland’s hand.

On Monday, Andrew Weissmann, lead prosecutor in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, sharply criticized Mr Garland’s “bottom-up” investigative approach in a New York Times guest essay , saying the department should instead work from Mr. Trump’s speech to supporters on the Ellipse outward.

But Mr. Garland’s message has always been clear: the Department of Justice investigates crimes, not people.

His response: “As long as it takes and whatever it takes to do justice – according to the facts and the law.”

Mr. Garland’s stoicism belies that Mr. Trump, still a dominant force in Republican politics, is casting a shadow over the department’s investigation a year and a half after his supporters ransacked the Capitol.

Investigators initially focused on the rioters who had attacked police officers, stormed the building and threatened the media. But as evidence mounted that members of far-right extremist groups had engaged in a seditious plot, a tense internal debate erupted over how to widen the sphere of potential defendants.

Some prosecutors wanted to compile lists of their colleagues and see what they might know, according to two people familiar with the plan. Senior FBI and Justice Department officials shot him dead. It is unconstitutional to investigate a person solely on the basis of their association with a group, and it goes against department policy, which states that a person’s actions may only be investigated if there is evidence. Link her to a crime, they argued.

On his inauguration day, March 11, 2021, Mr. Garland attended a detailed briefing on the status of the investigation presented by Michael R. Sherwin, the head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington which oversaw the investigation. Mr. Sherwin presented Mr. Garland with a strategy that included four teams of prosecutors, labeled A through D: ‘Team B’, already made up of 15 lawyers, had begun investigating linked ‘influencers and public officials’ on offense, according to a copy of a memo shared with The New York Times.

Mr. Garland listened intently and thanked Mr. Sherwin for his hard work under difficult circumstances, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Mr Sherwin, who had been appointed by Mr Trump, later appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and suggested the investigation should target the highest levels of government – naming names. “Perhaps the president is guilty of these actions,” he said, infuriating the department’s new leadership.

Within six weeks he had returned home to Miami and Mr. Garland’s team took over.

Mr. Garland’s appointees have wrestled with many of the same thorny questions about the scope of the inquiry as their predecessors. They were unsure whether they could prove that the nonviolent activity aimed at thwarting the peaceful transfer of power violated criminal law, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Those concerns appear to have faded as prosecutors continue to investigate the alternative voter plan and Mr Clark’s actions.

While there has never been a ban, formal or otherwise, on discussing Mr. Trump, senior department officials past and present have made it clear that prosecutors should focus on the path of proof in front of them, not on a road map leading to Mr. Trump. .

Until recently, that involved directing discussions closely on the specifics of specific cases being worked out — rioters, midlevel ringleaders or Trump associates implicated in the state’s voter agenda, according to reports. current and former officials – not on speculative cases.

If career prosecutors uncover evidence linking Mr. Trump to the crimes they are investigating, new procedural hurdles make it difficult to review his actions. In 2016, FBI rank-and-file agents did not need approval to investigate the actions of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump. But Attorney General William P. Barr issued a memo that requires the attorney general, through the deputy attorney general, to approve such a move, which could put additional pressure on Ms Monaco.

Even without that clearance, Ms. Monaco directs the day-to-day operations of the department and oversees all prosecutions, including the January 6 investigation. The team reporting to him repeatedly lobbied the House committee for transcripts of hundreds of interviews he conducted, arguing that the panel’s reluctance to do so before the hearings had concluded was hampering the department work.

Ms Monaco, whose work as a prosecutor in the government’s Enron case in the early 2000s earned her rising star status, sips her coffee from a mug that reads ‘Boring Is My Brand’. She has often expressed admiration for her first boss in government – Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s attorney general – who resisted pressure from the White House and members of her own party by assigning a special counsel to investigate the scandal of Whitewater.

She closely monitors the investigation, mainly through her assistants, who communicate with the investigators. Major developments – like the Hutchinson revelations – are discussed in high-level meetings, according to people familiar with the process.

Ms. Monaco does not micromanage staffing decisions, but she is consulted on important measures, including the hiring last fall of a little-known federal prosecutor from Maryland, Thomas P. Windom, to pull together some of the strands differences in the electoral system.

While Ms. Monaco has been firm in not discussing even the seemingly basic details of the investigation – such as the hiring of Mr. Windom – she has been more candid about the challenges of conducting an investigation that is “among the widest and most more complex than this department has ever undertaken.

That problem has deepened as the investigation has moved from low-level prosecution of rioters to the more complicated task of unraveling the plot by Mr. Trump’s associates to undermine an election. The department has asked to double its legal strength from January 6.

After Mr. Garland was confirmed in March 2021, he adopted a staffing plan initiated by the department’s interim leadership, assigning about 120 prosecutors to the case. They were split between attorneys at department headquarters, including members of the criminal and national security divisions, and investigators working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington.

Over the following months, approximately 20 additional attorneys, in addition to support workers, were added to keep pace with the prosecution of approximately 800 people directly involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Turnover and attrition have been a challenge. Many of the attorneys assigned to these prosecutions were department veterans temporarily assigned to the District of Columbia Attorney’s Office from other cities. Some supervisors at home, facing a post-pandemic surge in violent crime, pushed aggressively for their return.

In March, the department asked for $34.1 million to bring in 131 additional lawyers for the investigation. It was ignored – infuriating senior department officials, who privately noted the contradiction between calls from Congress to expedite the investigation and the denial of the resources the department needs to hire more prosecutors.

Ms Monaco has personally lobbied for the funding herself, while emphasizing her intention to settle for whatever is at hand.

“Whatever resources we see or get, let’s be very, very clear – we’re going to hold these perpetrators accountable no matter where the facts take us,” Ms Monaco said in March.

“No matter the level,” she added.

Alain Feuer and Adam Goldman contributed report.