Key Donald Trump people give away that they expect Merrick Garland’s DOJ will take them down
When the Department of Justice indicted and arrested Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, it temporarily silenced the “Merrick Garland is doing nothing” crowd. But now that same crowd is perking up again across social media, and in many cases insisting more loudly than ever that Garland has simply decided to let Donald Trump and his people “get away with it all.”
Here’s the thing, though: key people in Trump world don’t see it that way. There’s a reason former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark and Trump election lawyer John Eastman have decided to plead the fifth to the January 6th Committee.
Pleading the fifth is not legally considered an admission of guilt. But as a practical matter, you don’t plead the fifth unless you think you’re going to be criminally charged. In other words, folks like Clark and Eastman are expecting to be criminally charged and put on trial – and they’re afraid that answering the committee’s questions could help lead to their conviction.
So if key Trump people like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman expect to be criminally indicted for the things they did in Donald Trump’s name, why don’t people on social media see it that way? The short answer is that they have criminal defense lawyers explaining the realities of how multi-layered federal criminal probes work, and most folks on social media are just listening to whichever pundit is fretting the most loudly that day.
We’ll likely see even more key Trump people pleading the fifth in the coming days and weeks. Each time it happens, it’ll be yet another signal that Trump world expects Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to end up bringing criminal charges against the highest-level January 6th plotters and those who helped Trump attempt to tamper with the election results.
