After January 6th, there was a lot of energy around prosecuting Trump after the second impeachment failed to remove and more importantly disqualify him. When Biden selected Garland to be his AG, there were concerns about whether he had the temperament to aggressively go after Trump. For over a year, we had no evidence that the Justice Department was even investigating him (they were).
For the most part, I was confident that the DOJ was doing the needed background work to prepare for prosecution. If you were going to prosecute a former president, you'd better have everything nailed down tight. I still feel that way. The biggest catastrophe would be a Trump acquittal of crimes he's clearly guilty of, because the DOJ did sloppy work.
However, it does feel like that timeline needed to be pushed up. As Josh Marshall writes, the lack of urgency within the DOJ has now gotten us into a scenario where Trump is going to try and slow walk and delay trials until after the election. The challenge now for Jack Smith is to expedite Trump's bullshit delaying tactics and get the trial going this spring. If Trump can be convicted before the Republican Convention, there's a chance - however slim - that we can avoid the possibility of Trump on the Republican ballot in November.
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