garland s speech where he talks about how the department is completely committed to going after every january 6th perpetrator at any level, whether they were present or otherwise criminally responsible, and that is to address, i think, a concern that people had that not only were some people not being held accountable, ultimately, but they weren t even being scrutinized, a little inside baseball, if you re on the public information office s e-mail list like i am and i m sure your producers are, eight minutes before merrick garland gave that address today, we received an e-mail that contained an advance excerpt from the speech. often an entire speech is embargoed and e-mailed to press so they can have a chance to, and there was only one paragraph sent out, and it was that paragraph about the commitment to hold anyone accountable at any level whether they were present or not, which seems to me in context not to be mere boilerplate, but to try to send a message to everyone without saying
his daughter, his son, and others, his chief of staff, what his reaction was. and as the famous 187 minutes or 3 hours and 7 minutes during which donald trump didn t do anything, even though as we know now he was implored to do so based on reporting by his daughter, by sean hannity, by members of congress, and the fact that he didn t do anything, as, you know, is coming out from these witnesses that you say they re focusing on, the fact that he didn t do anything is consistent with his state of mind earlier in which he would have intended to incite the crowd. if he was mortified by the violence, if he was mortified by what his supporters were doing, if he didn t want them to do those things and he thought they were misconstruing his exhortations to them in the speech he gave on january 6th, then he would have sprung into action earlier. so i think all of that evidence from all of those witnesses who were in around him or people who were themselves in and around the vicinity of the whit
so the question is what are we going to do about it? what are they going to do about it. i think the speech was a good speech overall, and i understand why some people might have a mixed reaction to it. bear in mind, the justice department has certain norms and traditions that are tested from time to time, but you don t, you know, go in front of the public and give detailed updates about what s going on behind the scenes, and who you re investigating and who the targets are, and who you ve interviewed and everything else. they re in a great disadvantage in that regard as compared to the january 6th select committee who whenever they want they can release texts between sean hannity and other folks, they can release excerpts of testimony, they can talk about who s come in, they can talk about who s cooperating and who s not. people have a very very good sense of what aggressive tactics and approaches are being taken by the 1/6 committee. the justice department doesn t have that. what i
said, a lot of people have come around to that point of view, whether they believe it or not. some people believe it, and i think have been radicalized by t and a lot of important officials including members of the senate and other powerful officials in the republican party don t believe it. they know what happened was wrong, but they go along with it because they think it s electorally helpful to them. and they are using those people in a way, they have coopted them, right, and they have acted upon whatever it is, i don t want to say that it s their ignorance or them not being them being unaware that they are being used by their own elected officials. in his speech today, the attorney general merrick garland pushed back against the criticism that this is taking too long to get accountability for the attack on the capitol, and our jeffrey toobin summed it up, garland s speech this way, just be patient. i d say the response is, okay, but what are we going to do about it?
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