A “battle royale” is taking place in the Justice Department over whether to charge former President Donald Trump, Bob Woodward said on Friday.
The Watergate sleuth shared what he said were the legal and political aspects of the investigation surrounding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “Legally,” the matter is “in the hands of” Attorney General Merrick Garland, Woodward said, touching on what has become a touchy subject among some people eager for Trump to be prosecuted.
“There is a battle royale going on in the Department of Justice, in the administration, about whether or not to charge Trump,” he said after telling the Morning Joe crew that they have discussed this before. “I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that.”
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The Justice Department has levied hundreds of charges against people accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, and recent activities, including the issuing of subpoenas in several states, indicate an expanded focus on efforts to use invalid alternate electors to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. The Justice Department inquiry is operating alongside investigations by the Jan. 6 committee and a top prosecutor in Georgia, who is looking into efforts to overturn the election results in that state. Trump has dismissed all of the investigations as political witch hunts against him. Garland, who has said he and prosecutors are keeping tabs on the Jan. 6 committee hearings, vowed in January to pursue Jan. 6 perpetrators “any level.”
MSNBC has become a common forum for discussion about whether Trump will be prosecuted in connection to the Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, as the House Jan. 6 committee argues the former president and his allies engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” and holds a summer slate of hearings.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, lamented the Justice Department’s pace. “It is unprecedented for Congress to be so far out ahead of the Justice Department in a complex investigation,” Schiff told host Ari Melber on Wednesday. “The idea that a year and a half after these events, they would not have talked to these witnesses — even the Fulton County district attorney is way ahead of them — I think is cause for great concern,” he said. One day prior, Andrew Weissmann, who was known as Mueller’s “pitbull,” appeared on MSNBC and said he had heard from people in the Justice Department following his essay urging prosecutors to “rethink” their “bottom-up approach.”
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who became famous at the Washington Post for how they helped expose the Watergate scandal in the Nixon administration roughly 50 years ago, marked the anniversary last month by calling Trump the “first seditious president.” Woodward also said, “There is an abundance of overwhelming evidence that this was a criminal conspiracy to subvert a lawful function of government. It’s in the law. It just says that that is a crime.”
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Exploring the other aspect of the Jan. 6 situation on Friday — that is, the “political” side — Woodward stressed there is a hard truth to swallow, even though many of Trump’s own followers don’t buy his claims of a stolen election and as Trump leans toward announcing another bid for the White House.
“We have to face the reality that Trump has the largest political machine and following in American politics now, other than maybe an incumbent president,” Woodward said.
