Last week, a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to appear before a federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
It was yet another major legal victory for Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department in its ongoing investigations of Donald Trump.
Yet to listen to critics of Garland, who have pilloried him for more than two years, he has not been aggressive enough in going after Trump. With the former president now indicted in New York, and state and federal investigations of Trump underway in Atlanta and Washington, many of Garland’s detractors want to know: where are the indictments of the former president?
“The real reason Trump hasn’t been indicted for his major crimes,” wrote one critic last month in The American Prospect, “is that the people in charge of that decision — Attorney General Merrick Garland, above all — are all part of the culture of elite impunity that produced Trump in the first place.”
Perhaps that is true. Perhaps there will be no federal indictments of Trump. Perhaps a man who has eluded the long arm of the law his entire life will, once again, escape accountability. But Garland’s critics need to wrestle with two inconvenient facts — the Justice Department is hardly holding back in its investigation of Trump, and an indictment of a former president is not for the faint of heart.
To the former point, Boasberg’s ruling on Pence comes after another federal judge, Beryl Howell, rejected claims of executive privilege and ordered former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and more than a half dozen other former Trump officials to testify to the same grand jury. Federal prosecutors also convinced Howell to pierce attorney-client privilege and require Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran to answer questions regarding the hoarding of classified documents at Trump’s Florida home and also to turn over his notes…
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