Carol Leonnig

They're swamped, and they basically turn her down and tell her maybe she should pursue this with some state investigators.

Merrick Garland was an extremely respected jurist for his many years, I believe 24 years on the federal bench, had a wealth of experience in the law, was fastidious and methodical.

But as Attorney General, even the people who really admired him and worked for him, some of them told us they were concerned about how allergic he seemed to even the whiff of looking like anything he did was political.

And he said this publicly.

I'm paraphrasing him a little, but he said, you know, it's not enough to be apolitical.

We also have to be sure people believe and that we appear to be above politics.

That guided everything in that first year.

Garland believed that looking directly at Trump or Trump allies would create that improper whiff.

He wanted to go back to a playbook created in the wake of Watergate, in which the Department of Justice siloed itself from the White House, siloed itself from politics, and tried to have this incredibly pristine, almost priestly independence.

But the problem was that not looking at this evidence delayed things for a long time.

He kept saying he wanted to find out if there was some connection between Trump and the riot.

And ultimately, when the Department of Justice finally agrees to launch this investigation, it's not based on evidence that they gained in the riot probe.

It's based on evidence that had been public, at least that's what they formally cite in their documents, evidence that had been public since December of 2020, January of 2021, February of 2021.

Yeah.

The critical change was the House Select Committee.

News was leaking out of that unusual team of very, very aggressive prosecutors like a sieve.

And in January, there were a host of stories about the committee figuring out that these fake elector certificates were critical and that they were coordinated or appeared to be coordinated by Rudy Giuliani and members of Trump's campaign.

And that discovery was extremely embarrassing to the Department of Justice, Aaron and I learned in our interviews.

And we uncovered an email exchange in which a federal prosecutor who had been belatedly assigned alone to look into this case.

Potential linkage to Donald Trump's allies reaches out to that Waleska McClellan days after these barrage of stories are raising questions.