There has been no delay

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Even now that it’s abundantly clear to everyone involved that the DOJ is criminally targeting Donald Trump on multiple fronts, there’s still quite a bit of griping on social media about how long it’s taken, and how badly Attorney General Merrick Garland has supposedly been dragging his feet. But this is simply not how any of this has played out.

For the record, there’s been no delay โ€“ none โ€“ in how the DOJ has proceeded. It spent eight months flipping Capitol attackers upward until it took down the Oath Keepers leaders and flipped some of them against Trump world. Then it immediately launched a Trump grand jury, which has spent the past five months steadily working its way upward through Trump world, and is now targeting people like Peter Navarro who are directly under Trump in the criminal hierarchy.

The timeline shows steady nonstop progress from the time Garland took office until now. No gaps. No time off. No one at the DOJ has been sitting around helpless. That’s all just fiction made up by gripers on social media, easily disproven by the timeline itself.

If you don’t like the pace at which the DOJ has steadily worked its way up the chain, blame 250 years of legal precedent. In this kind of criminal probe, you don’t get a conviction against the kingpin unless you painstakingly work your way up like this first.

I don’t necessarily like having to defend the DOJ on this, because I don’t know what the end result of the DOJ’s probe will look like, and whether I’ll be satisfied with it. But at this point it’s obvious most legal pundits on here are just making up doomsday DOJ nonsense. You have to stop indulging them.

It’s not about having “patience” or “faith in the system.” Those are nonsense words. It’s about understanding how things work, so you’ll have realistic expectations โ€“ not fictional expectations that lead you to mistakenly panic or become enraged when your expectations aren’t met. Here’s an example that may sound trivial, but actually conveys the point quite clearly:

If you think it takes two minutes for a pizza to be delivered, you’re going to panic and/or become enraged when it hasn’t arrived after five minutes. But that’s you not understanding how anything works, nothing to do with reality.

Then your lack of familiarity with pizza delivery is compounded by self anointed experts who falsely insist that the pizza place is doing “nothing” and if your pizza were going to arrive it would have already happened within two minutes. So now you’re really spun around.

At that point you care more about bashing the pizza place and getting revenge, than you do about getting your pizza, because you think your pizza is gone anyway. Meanwhile, the delivery person has been steadily driving it to your house all along.

When the pizza delivery car comes down your street within a reasonably expected timeframe, you just yell “it’s too late to matter” and angrily chase the driver away. Now you don’t get pizza at all, because you misunderstood the realistic timeframes for how pizza delivery works.

Then you angrily bash the pizza place on Twitter, and the pizza pundits inform you that if the pizza place would just fire your driver and replace him with Sally Yates, she could definitely deliver the pizza in under two minutes. And you believe it.

Then someone with years of pizza delivery experience tries to explain how things actually work, but at this point you’re so outraged you just accuse them of being “naive” or an “optimist” since everyone knows we’re doomed because that pizza didn’t arrive within two minutes.

And eventually even the person with years of pizza delivery experience gets tired of being bashed by angry ranters for speaking facts, and sees the pizza pundits going viral for pushing doomsday nonsense, and then decides to also start pushing doomsday nonsense.

This entire scenario sounds comically absurd. Nothing like this would ever play out with regard to pizza delivery. And yet in the realm of political punditry, which is infinitely more important, this pizza scenario plays out all day every day and utterly dominates the industry.

The DOJ hasn’t “waited” to do anything. It hasn’t “dragged its heels.” It isn’t “behind the curve.” It isn’t “too late to matter.” It isn’t any of these social media slogans. In reality, the DOJ has moved at a steady pace with the kind of comprehensive multilayered probe required to take down the kingpin in a criminal conspiracy. You don’t have to like it. But it is the only way that these things succeed.

One more thing to keep in mind: at every point along the way, the doomsday pundits have insisted that unless the DOJ immediately brought charges against Donald Trump, we’d all be doomed. And at every point along the way, the lack of charges from the DOJ hasn’t “doomed” us in any way. These types of pundits have been proven wrong at every turn. So they’re obviously just as wrong today when they insist that the DOJ’s criminal case against Trump is too late to matter. These types are simply playing on your worst fears in order to go viral. The more you educate yourself about how these kinds of criminal probes actually work, the less susceptible you are to such manipulation. Knowledge is power.

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