Why the Potentially Deadly Delay in the January 6 Trump Indictment?

Seven Possible and Related Explanations

Like others, I have been puzzled over the lateness of the most recent US federal indictment of the fascist Donald J. Trump, who tried to block the peaceful transfer of power and stay in the White House after he clearly lost the presidential election of 2020 – an unprecedented crime in US-American history.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith may have held back so far from charging insurrection, the only charge for which conviction would make Trump ineligible for a second term under the US Constitution (see the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment), but the latest indictment this month is no small matter. Trump will be tried for high state crimes: for conspiring to overturn the election, to interrupt Congress, and to violate every Americans’ right to vote and have that vote counted.

This may be Trump’s third indictment, but it is by far and away the most significant one and the first to come down in connection with his conduct as president.  He has been indicted at the state level in New York for engaging in a hush-money scheme before he was elected in 2016. Smith is also prosecuting Trump in federal court in Florida for his treatment of classified documents after Trump (grudgingly) left the White House.

The latest indictment is for Trump’s effort to cancel the US-American bourgeois-democratic rule of law republic itself while he stood in that republic’s top office. Trump is the only defendant charged even though the indictment lists a handful of co-conspirators. Smith’s newest charge accuses Trump of spreading lies – of disseminating the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him while knowing that this claim was false.

This is all a very big deal, to say the least.  The wannabe fascist strongman Trump, who wanted his frothing backers armed with AR-15s as they attacked the US Capitol on January 6, will go on trial for an attempted coup that escalated to the point of a mass physical attack on the federal government’s representative branch two years, seven months, and eight days ago.

Smith was certainly appointed by US president Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland to convene a grand jury with the understanding that historic felony charges against the tangerine-tinted Republi-Nazi would likely ensue.

We are looking at a high stakes conflict between the nation’s two dominant capitalist-imperialist political organizations, one of which, the Democratic Party, clings to what’s left of bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy” (such as they are),  while the other one, the Republican Party, has crossed over into Christian white nationalist neofascism including the embrace of brazen election fraud and political violence.

As Trump says, there’s no in-between here.  “Either they win, or we win.”  If he loses, he’s a potential federal prisoner or at least a muzzled probationer and home arrestee with the ignominious distinction of being the first former US president to become a felon.

If Donald “I am Your Retribution” Trump wins, he is coming from the world’s most powerful office with vengeance for his political enemies with his rabid dog base and party behind him. He will bring an army of right-wing policy wonks who are working up schemes to expand executive branch power beyond anything ever seen in US history. With the Christian Fascist Supreme Court he and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) created already in place and a Republikaner takeover of Congress (a distinct possibility given the Senate election line up for 2024), we could well be looking at US fascist triple branch federal consolidation in 2025-26: Amerika Ube Alles!

Why so late with the January 6 indictments?  It is now entirely possible that the Trump legal team can delay his January 6 trial and verdict (and also his classified document trial and verdict) long enough for him to win back the White House and then cancel all the federal charges against him and issue pardons for himself and others involved in his efforts to literally overthrow the bourgeois-democratic republic and replace it with a fascist state.  The preponderant majority of what is alleged and shown in Smith’s January 6 indictment was known and made public a year ago if not before and compiled in the US House January 6 select committee’s detailed report released last winter.

The fascist transgressor Trump really should have already been indicted, tried, and convicted for his election subversion and coup attempt by now. And the charges for which he should already be behind bars ought to include insurrection, which would prohibit him from holding any future state or federal office.  As The New York Times reported eleven days ago:

“Last December, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 recommended that the Justice Department charge Mr. Trump with inciting insurrection among other offenses. For reasons that remain unknown, prosecutors chose not to include in the indictment any evidence from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. In a gripping testimony last year in front of the House Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Hutchinson described how Mr. Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence on Jan. 6, urged them to march to Capitol anyhow — and even sought to join them…Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that Mr. Trump had demanded that security checkpoints be removed outside his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House, even though he had been warned that some in the crowd had been spotted with weapons. ‘They’re not here to hurt me,’ she quoted Mr. Trump as saying…In theory, Mr. Smith’s team could bring new charges against Mr. Trump at almost any time, using accounts like Ms. Hutchinson’s to support an accusation that Mr. Trump played some role in encouraging the violence at the Capitol. The incitement charge recommended by the House committee is written quite broadly, making it a crime to ‘incite, assist with or participate in’ a rebellion or an insurrection against federal laws or government authority.”

Biden and Garland have had no choice to go forward with the indictment of Trump for January 6, for reasons I explained in a recent Paul Street Report. But why the potentially deadly delay — no small problem as Trump is currently tied with the dismally dull and uninspiring neoliberal-imperialist president Joe Biden in the polls – this in a nation whose ridiculous Electoral College system requires a Democratic presidential candidate to best his or her Republican opponent by 4 to 5 points to take or keep the White House?

It’s not Jack Smith’s fault. The Special Prosecutor has moved with great speed. The indictment tardiness is on Biden and his centrist Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith late in the game.

Why the nerve-racking lack of proper punctuality in prosecuting Trump’s pernicious putsch-ism? I can’t read Biden and Garland’s minds on this matter, of course.  The best I can do is advance some semi-educated guesses.  Here are my top seven possible explanations for the agonizingly late handing in of the US Department of Justice’s January 6 elementary bourgeois-democratic indictment assignment:  

1. Biden’s desire not to have his administration dominated in the media and politics culture by Trump-related dramas from early on.

2.  Biden’s fear that an actual or imminent January 6 indictment last year would have ginned up the Republi-fascist base to help the party of Trump sweep the 2022 mid-term Congressional and state elections, possibly leading to Biden’s own impeachment this or next year.

3.  Biden’s fear that prompt indictments of Trump would cost him his beloved bipartisan buy-in from Congressional Republicans on some of his key wonkish policy agenda items, led by his infrastructure bill and the “inflation reduction” act that he keeps trying (with little success) to get voters to care about.

4.  Fear that swift indictments would spark right-wing violence and perhaps even civil war.  

5. Biden’s exaggerated belief and naive confidence that Trump can’t win the presidency again because of: the terrible legacy of January 6;  the large number of grave legal difficulties Trump would be certain to be facing by the time of the 2024 election; low unemployment and high job creation under the Biden presidency (what Biden claims as a reflection of “Bidenomics”); mass anger over the Trump-made Supreme Court’s horrific 2022 anti-abortion Dobbs ruling; popular and elite support for Biden’s deadly proxy war with Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.  

6. A neo-Pied Piper wish to keep Trump around atop the Republican ticket for 2024 on the theory that Trump will be easily beatable for the reasons mentioned in point 5.

7.  An extreme desire on Garland’s part to look painstakingly deliberate and legalistic, not over-eager and political, in coming out with indictments.

Why no insurrection charge? I have no theories yet to advance on why Smith and Garland have yet to (I think properly) charge Trump with sparking a violent uprising against the US government (Dear readers: please feel free to tackle that question in the comments attached to this newsletter on the Substack Website). It seems unlikely that they are holding this out as a card for future plea bargaining with Trump since the Orange Fascist Reptile doesn’t plead guilty and it may already be too late to charge him with insurrection soon enough to get a conviction in time to ban him from regaining the White House.   

One offbeat notion out there is that blue states can keep Trump off the presidential ballot by citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (which forbids insurrectionists from holding any future state or federal office) as their justification. But that seems highly unlikely and would probably be irrelevant to the 2024 election’s outcome under the Electoral College, which absurdly brings US presidential elections down to a handful of contested “purple” states where Trump will certainly be on the ballot.

What a wild and ridiculous situation, full of uncertainty. Anyone who thinks the US-American electoral, legal, and governance order, still largely rooted in an 18th Century slaveowners’ and imperialist constitution set up to enforce Minority Rule,  can be safely relied upon to prevent a second and truly disastrous Trump presidency is living in a dream world.