The real reason the DOJ was able to shut Steve Bannon and Donald Trump down
When the DOJ got the court to reject Steve Bannon’s pre-trial stunts on Monday, it wasn’t due to random luck or happenstance. It was due to preparedness. It’s why the DOJ does a massive amount of gruntwork before bringing indictments. It’s how you win at trial once you do bring indictments. Whatever Bannon and Donald Trump were trying to do with that executive letter, the DOJ was fully prepared for it – and immediately stopped it in its tracks.
When occasional details do leak out about the DOJ’s January 6th criminal probe into Trump world, we’re always reminded that the DOJ is in fact way ahead of where anyone thought it was. Prior to Monday’s court filing, would anyone have guessed that the DOJ had already interviewed Donald Trump’s attorney and gotten him to confirm that Trump never even tried to grant executive privilege to Bannon? It’s those kind of details that win or lose federal criminal cases.
Think about how differently Monday’s court hearings could have gone, if the DOJ didn’t already have an answer up its sleeve to everything Bannon was trying. Even though Bannon’s arguments were baseless, if the DOJ hadn’t been able to immediately counter them with something, he might have won or gotten his delay.
Does the “hurry up” crowd really want the DOJ issuing major criminal indictments before they’re fully supported? Trump and his people would just get most of the indictments thrown out or get acquitted at rrial. Then they really would “get away with it all.”
Imagine ordering a pizza delivery, and after it hasn’t arrived within two minutes, deciding that the pizza place lacks a sense of urgency and concluding that if the pizza hasn’t come by now it’s never coming. That’s how silly most commentary about the DOJ sounds.
Back in the real world, building the kind of comprehensive criminal case that actually wins at trial takes a monumental amount of time and effort – particularly in these kinds of cases, where the Feds have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the bosses were knowingly instructing the underlings to commit the crimes in question. If the DOJ had rushed out flimsy indictments against the upper echelons of Trump world, there’s a strong chance those indictments would have already resulted in losses. Keep that in mind the next time someone yells that the DOJ should “hurry up.”
