Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori wrote in a Tuesday Politico article that future investigators can look to the mistakes of former President Joe Biden's Department of Justice to know how to correctly pursue President Donald Trump’s countless new acts of corruption over the next few years.
“The list of Trump administration actions that warrant serious investigation grows practically by the day,” Khardori wrote. And journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis’ autopsy of the Justice Department contains “forehead-smacking details” on how they failed to prosecute Trump for his first-term crimes.
“It is not too soon” for the next round of prosecutors to be considering how to pursue Trump’s string of new illegal activities, said Khardori, even if the Supreme Court made it much easier for Trump to avoid federal prosecution, and Trump is eager to pardon criminal behavior for Republicans and allies.
“If Democrats are to avoid making the same mistakes all over again, Leonnig and Davis’ book offers both an engaging and enraging opportunity to learn,” said Khardori, who ticked down five examples on how not to conduct an investigation of a powerful Republican with powerful Republican enablers.
The first rule is “don’t pick key lawyers for bad reasons," which Khardori said Biden did when he chose Merrick Garland to serve as attorney general. Garland was the friend of Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who “urged the president-elect to pick Garland.”
“It was apparent early on that Garland was the wrong man for the moment,” said Khardori. “The Justice Department required serious internal reform and accountability in the wake of the first Trump administration, but Garland was not interested in that work,” and provided no real reason to believe that he would focus on Trump’s obvious federal criminal exposure at his confirmation hearing.
Second, “leaders must actually lead,” said Khardori, pointing out that Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco “were hands-off in the extreme” resulting in countless delays that devoured time until Trump could again win the presidency. Garland did not believe in “snap decisions.”
Third, Garland broke the rule not to “overlook simple things” when he “made the misguided decision to use a 'bottom-up’ approach to the Jan. 6 investigation, in which prosecutors would start with the rioters and work their way up to political figures if the evidence warranted doing so.”
Ignoring Trump’s recorded call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), begging him to “find” votes to secure his presidency was a decision guided more by “hand-wringing and political cowardice than the law or prosecutorial practice,” according to Khardori.
Couple that with Rule 4: “Real accountability requires focus and prioritization,” referencing Garland and his leadership’s decision to ignore “reams of evidence” arising from the Jan. 6 hearings, against the wishes of former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy. Heaphy argued the hearing uncovered more than enough evidence to build a case against Trump and his lieutenants.
Finally, said Khardori, “lawyers are not good political pundits,” meaning “the Biden-Garland DOJ grossly misread the political situation in 2021 and 2022, to disastrous consequences.”
Garland and his advisors believed Trump was already finished politically when they entered office in early 2021, but Trump was actually “holding court” in Mar-a-Lago, twisting the GOP into his image and “plotting to drive from office any Republican he saw as having crossed him or abandoned his futile effort to stay in power.”
“… [P]erhaps because the Biden-Garland DOJ did not view Trump’s return as a real threat, it did not move with real urgency,” said Khardori. “And ultimately this sluggishness inadvertently provided Trump with a crucial period to retake control of the Republican Party and position himself as the leading contender for the 2024 GOP primaries.”
Read Khardori's Politico report at this link.