If Merrick Garland truly wants to protect the Department of Justice (DOJ) from political interference and salvage the institution's reputation, then he must charge Donald Trump for his crimes related to his 2020 coup attempt. That's the main takeaway from the House committee to investigate the January 6. It is the message the committee clearly hopes will be heard by the attorney general, and was the underlying message of the committee's fifth hearing on Thursday.
Garland is under increasingly sharp criticism for failures to hold high level Republicans accountable for the roles they played in both the overall coup effort and the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Garland's slow-walking a criminal investigation into Trump and his GOP co-conspirators has largely been perceived as an attempt to "depoliticize" the DOJ after Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr did so much to disgrace the agency. But as Thursday's hearing made indisputable, the biggest threat to the DOJ's reputation of independence from politics is Trump himself. As long as Trump is free to worm his way back into the White House, legally or not, the DOJ is in very real danger of being corrupted in Trump's image.
