FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jeff Hauser, [email protected]
On June 9, the American public will tune in to the first of six televised hearings from the Jan. 6 Committee. These hearings will be a crucial opportunity for Americans to get a fuller understanding of what happened on January 6, 2021, and which Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials, including Trump himself, broke federal laws in an attempt to undermine the election.
But presenting evidence that Trump and his cronies broke the law is one thing; holding them accountable for their crimes is another. The Justice Department is the only body capable of prosecuting those who raided the Capitol. This is the most important chance in at least a generation to hold to account the powerful criminals who would undermine the government from within. And this chance is in the hands of Attorney General Merrick Garland. If he squanders this opportunity, his failure to uphold the law may be one of the final nails in the coffin of American democracy.
“From Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, to George H.W. Bush’s pardons of the Iran-Contra scandal’s architects, to Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer’s acquiescence to the financial fraudsters who generated the Great Recession, America has seen a precipitous decline in equality under the law,” said Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser. “Declining accountability for political elites presaged the end of accountability for criminal corporate elites. But dispassionately empowering a jury of their peers to assess the potential criminal liability of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators would lay the groundwork for a rebirth of fairness. The worst possible politicization is allowing guilty people to go uncharged because the Department of Justice fears criticism for following the law where it leads.”
Jeff Hauser joined the Left Anchor podcast earlier this spring for an episode on “The Hapless Merrick Garland,” and why Garland is so reluctant to charge Trump and his co-conspirators. The discussion builds upon a critique Hauser has levied many times before, including for NPR in June 2021. The Washington Post’s profile on Garland last July included his critique that Garland’s institutionalism is fatally flawed.
“Garland believes that a thorough de-Trumpification of the Justice Department would … be called partisanship and would call into question the institution of the Justice Department, but the institution has already been called into question,” Hauser explained to The Washington Post. In truth, trust in the Justice Department’s commitment to fair enforcement of the law can only be re-established through holding accountable the people who attempted to undermine that central pillar of democracy: our elections.
###
IMAGE: “DC Capitol Storming IMG 7985” is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
