Trump may 'escape accountability once again' due to DOJ 'missteps': historian

Between special counsel Jack Smith's 37-count federal prosecution and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.'s 34-count case in New York State, former President Donald Trump is facing a total of 71 felony counts. And Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential results are the focus of criminal investigations by Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Fulton County DA Fani Willis for the State of Georgia, although he hasn't been indicted in either of those cases.

Trump's Republican defenders have been attacking Smith, Bragg and Willis as politically motivated, insisting that they have a vendetta against Trump. As they see it, Trump is being persecuted at both the federal level and the state level.

But in an op-ed published by The Guardian on June 21, historian Andrew Gawthorpe expresses a totally different viewpoint. Gawthorpe, who teaches U.S. history at Leiden University in The Netherlands, argues that the DOJ and the FBI have gone easy on Trump.

"In short, the right wants us to believe that (President Joe) Biden and his administration will stop at nothing to put Trump in jail as quickly as possible," Gawthorpe writes. "In fact, the exact opposite is true. Worried about just this type of accusation, the Justice Department under Merrick Garland and the FBI have approached their investigations of Trump much too cautiously."

00:02

02:37

The historian continues, "Far from being persecuted because of who he is, Trump's status as a former president and as the unofficial leader of the Republican Party have led to him being handled with vastly more deference than anyone else would be. The result has been a series of delays and missteps which may allow Trump to escape accountability once again."

Gawthorpe notes that the federal government "first recovered classified material from Mar-a-Lago in early 2022," but he is just now facing an indictment.

"Trump has likewise been slow to face consequences in the federal investigation into his actions leading up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol," the historian adds. "According to a new report by the Washington Post, the Justice Department and FBI delayed launching a probe into Trump's push to overturn the 2020 election for 15 months, again because of fears that they would be criticized for partisanship. The agencies instead pursued cases against rank-and-file insurrectionists, ignoring the existence of evidence implicating Trump and his inner circle until media and political pressure forced them to begin taking it seriously. These delays matter because they make it possible — even likely — that Trump will never truly face accountability for his actions."