'Unconscionable': Watergate prosecutor says AG Garland played into Trump’s 'delay' strategy

22 March 2024

One member of the team that prosecuted the explosive Watergate scandal in the 1970s said Attorney General Merrick Garland's slowness in prosecuting former President Donald Trump is only helping him avoid justice.

During a Friday segment on MSNBC's The Reidout, former Watergate special prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks told guest host Jason Johnson that it's important anyone charging an ex-president with crimes should make sure to due their due diligence. But she opined that Garland's race against the clock to obtain a verdict before election day is his own fault.

"You want to make it exactly as good as it could possibly be, you want to cover every possible error that could possibly come up, and make sure you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. You don't want to aim for the king and lose. On the other hand, the length of time this has taken is unconscionable," she said. "Those [delays] were very predictable. His past history of cases would show you that delay, delay, diversion, distraction, those are his best legal defenses."

Wine-Banks referred to a New York Times article published earlier on Friday, in which journalists Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman reported that "Garland and his team appear to have underestimated Mr. Trump’s capacity for reinvention and disruption, in this case through delay."

"If, as the article suggests, Merrick Grland didn't foresee the delays that Trump would bring to this case? I find that hard to believe," she added. "It was predictable."

The ex-prosecutor also criticized the Garland DOJ's traditional strategy of focusing resources on lower-level players in an effort to get them to "flip" on higher-profile targets. She said that while the rioters who ransacked the US Capitol "deserved to be prosecuted," the DOJ should have instead prioritized investigations into decision-makers who played a more direct role in allegedly orchestrating the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

"You saw it happen live," Wine-Banks said.

Wine-Banks added that during the Watergate prosecution, secretaries and top aides to some of the major power players in the Nixon administration yielded the most evidence. She referenced Cassidy Hutchinson — the former aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack — as one prime example of a key witness for the DOJ.

"Why weren't they looking at the aides to all these top people? That would have been a better place to start," she said. "Staring maybe not with the chief of staff to the president, but the chief of staff to the chief of staff, and look what we got from her."

"I would have diverted all the resources to looking at Donald Trump and his top aides," she added.

Watch Wine-Banks' segment below, or by clicking this link.

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