President Joe Biden's administration must hold his predecessor to account to restore public confidence in the law, according to several legal experts.
Merrick Garland vowed to "supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6," and at least one legal expert said former president Donald Trump and his enablers are "the common denominator" behind that violence, as well as other crimes great and small that led to hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths and nearly toppled U.S. democracy, wrote columnist Wajahat Ali for The Daily Beast.
"The Biden administration needs to bring what I call a 'season of reckoning' for the corruption and grift that we have suffered through the last four years," trial attorney Katie Phang told Ali.
Phan believes the new administration must eliminate the Office of Legal Counsel's guidance that sitting presidents cannot be indicted for crimes, which prevented special counsel Robert Mueller from holding Trump accountable for obstruction of justice described in his report on Russian election interference.
"The easiest thing for Garland to do is to pick up those obstruction charges [articulated in the Mueller Report], literally all the investigative work has already been done," said Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.
Mystal encouraged Garland to "follow the money" that would eventually lead to Trump's adult children, who he believes are "complicit in the entire graft and corruption of everything that's gone on."
Legal experts also agreed that Garland charge all 800 individuals who set foot inside the Capitol as Congress certified Biden's election win.
"It would be a big mistake to adopt a 'Too Divisive to Jail' message," said law professor and author Jennifer Taub. "While some people may believe moving on and ignoring the offenses committed by Trump and his enablers would bring the country together and encourage harmony, quite the opposite is the case. If being too divisive creates immunity, it will only encourage the worst behavior and partisan based violence and crime."
