Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America’s slide into Putinism? | Will Bunch

Our world loves mystery — what else explains the boundless popularity of true-crime podcasts? — and yet it rarely seems to require Sherlock Holmes when it comes to unraveling the great political crimes of the 21st century, which take place in broad daylight.

Exhibit A in 2022 is the alarming story arc of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who told the world upon his rapid rise at the end of the 1990s that his plan was to undo the loss of prestige and power that accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union. Putin has since spent two decades executing that project with increasing brutality, including his little-challenged invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, and his barbarous bombing over Syria in the late 2010s. And so the question that looms large over the Russian dictator’s current war crimes in Kyiv and Kharkiv is less a matter of “Why?” and more a matter of, at what point could this downward spiral have been stopped?

Now, consider the curious case of rising authoritarianism in the United States.

It only cut through the (understandable) clutter of wall-to-wall Ukraine coverage for a few hours last week, but the House committee that’s been conducting an exhaustive — if so far mostly behind the scenes — probe into what really happened with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill dropped its own metaphorical bombshell, equal if not greater in political TNT tonnage to the most damning moments of Richard Nixon’s Watergate.

In what could have been a little-noticed legal filing in a lawsuit seeking records from lawyer John Eastman — who was advising then-President Donald Trump on declaring a national emergency that would have thwarted President Joe Biden’s legitimate 2020 election victory — lawyers for the House panel said they had already compiled enough evidence that proves POTUS 45 was involved in a criminal scheme that included a concerted effort to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s win on Jan. 6, as well as fraud in portraying the election as “stolen.”

Douglas Letter, general counsel of the House, wrote in the court filing that the Jan. 6 investigation already “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the law against obstructing Congress, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Sometimes — in the law, and also in journalism — the most powerful thing you can do is not so much reveal things that people didn’t know, but affirm the truth of what we already knew but were reluctant to say out loud. Both the utterly fraudulent nature of Trump’s Big Lie about massive 2020 voter irregularities — laughed out of roughly 50 ridiculous lost court cases — and the shocking role a sitting president played in urging an angry mob to march against the Capitol on Jan. 6 occurred in blinding daylight. Last week, House lawyers essentially filed a brief affirming the nakedness of the emperor’s new clothes.

This occurred in the same week that new pieces of remarkably damning evidence showed up to dot some of the i’s and cross some of the t’s in the conspiracy by Trump and his top associates to attempt what would have been the first coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power in American history.

In a Washington courtroom, Joshua James — a 34-year-old Alabama regional leader of the Oath Keepers, a radical militia-style group heavily populated by former (and some current) soldiers and cops — pled guilty to the serious charge of seditious conspiracy. James admitted that right after the November 2020 election, he’d worked with Oath Keepers’ head Stewart Rhodes and others to block Biden’s victory after Rhodes declared that “we ain’t getting through this without a civil war.”

It was, quite significantly, the first time in more than two decades that federal prosecutors had gained a seditious conspiracy conviction, but possibly the greater importance lies in the possibility that in unraveling the role of the Oath Keepers on Jan. 6, James could implicate higher-up figures. This includes the longtime Trump associate for whom Oath Keepers provided security, the political provocateur Roger Stone. Indeed, there are pictures from Jan. 5 of James himself shepherding Stone around Washington, D.C., in a golf cart.

» READ MORE: Top Oath Keeper reveals a key secret of Jan. 6 | Will Bunch Newsletter

Then, almost on cue, a documentarian emerged with extensive video footage of Stone on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to the insurrection, openly discussing the plot to derail Biden’s election certification — and then urging a presidential pardon for those involved in storming the Capitol. The Washington Post said some 20 hours of tapes reviewed by its reporters showed Stone in contact with far-right groups at the center of the insurrection — assuring them he had continued to have the ear of Trump, who’d recently pardoned Stone.

Indeed, the documentary film also connects Stone to the Oath Keeper James, showing the two men together right before the insurrection at Stone’s suite in the Willard Hotel, not far from the so-called “command center” where other members of Trump’s inner circle plotted strategy. Stone told the Post that its story took quotes out of context and that he was involved in no criminal activity, but the appearance is damning — and apparently Stone thought that, too. He fled D.C. in a hurry on Jan. 6, stating on film that he feared Biden’s by-then-announced Attorney General Merrick Garland, explaining, “He is not a friend.”

Perhaps, but it’s been more than a year into the new administration and Garland has done nothing to suggest he is Roger Stone’s enemy. (Update: As the Jan. 6 uber-blogger Marcy Wheeler noted in response, there’s a strong body of evidence, however, that the Justice Department and other federal agencies have been taking a close look at Stone’s role, dating back to the start of the Biden administration in February 2021. He remains a free man, for now.)

Indeed, a federal investigation that so far has netted charges against more than 700 smaller fish hasn’t ensnared any swamp creature larger than James or Rhodes, who pleaded not guilty to the same seditious conspiracy charge. The big kahunas — Stone, his pal Michael Flynn, Trump Jan. 6 advisers like Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon, as well as Trump himself — have not been charged (although Bannon faces trial for ignoring the House committee’s subpoena), and legal watchers have seen scant evidence such a probe is far along.

That, in a nutshell, is the true significance of last week’s legal filing by the House committee. In announcing its strong evidence of Trump’s criminality around Jan. 6, the committee also made it all but inevitable it will eventually send a criminal referral against Trump to Garland at the Justice Department. This will likely come after public hearings, probably this spring, that will lay out the case of the United States vs. Donald J. Trump. The pressure will mount on Garland to do something America has never done — charge a president with a crime.

That’s why what’s happening right now in Ukraine should be a game changer. We are watching, in real time, the moral implosion of a powerful, nuclear-armed nation that’s just a few years farther down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism than the United States. Putin’s delusional but deadly invasion of a sovereign democracy has elevated the question: How do you stop a madman? And when? In Sunday’s Washington Post, veteran journalist Dan Balz reports the biggest worry of America’s Western allies in working so closely with the Biden administration against Russia is their fear that U.S. voters — or U.S. vote counters — will return Trump to the White House in 2024.

Yet fear has ruled our own response to Trump’s criminality. The latest deer in those headlines has been newly elected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who stunned his top career staffers by aborting their ongoing criminal investigation into Trump’s role in the dodgy finances of the Trump Organization. It’s totally legit to worry that the milquetoast-y Garland — whose prosecutors have already pulled their Trump-related punches in other matters — is the next frightened deer standing on the roadway between Jan. 6 and real justice.

One of the few positives to emerge from the horrors taking place in Eastern Europe is the reminder for a politics-weary world of what actual courage looks like, in the unexpected persona of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A former comedian and actor, Zelensky has shown the power of looking directly into a camera and speaking plain truths, about the barbarity of Putin’s invasion and the will of his own people to resist it. It’s something that some of America’s political leaders — but especially Merrick Garland, facing the decision of a lifetime — should watch and study. That’s because speaking the plain truth about what Donald Trump did, and acting upon that truth, is the only surefire way to prevent an American Putin.

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