A lot of people here and elsewhere complain about how long it is taking to bring January 6 perpetrators to justice. In response to a question from Pramila Jayapal this week, Merrick Garland explained that, in his view, it actually isn’t taking so long. He adds some details (in this clip and elsewhere in the exchange with Jayapal) about the investigation, including how DOJ is attempting to standardize plea deals.
On the question you asked, which is why this is taking so long? This is really not long at all. I’ve been in lots of criminal investigations that took way longer. We’ve arrested 650 people already, and keep in mind that most of them were not investig–arrested on the spot, because the Capitol Police were overwhelmed. So they were people who had to be found, they had to be found by sometimes looking at our own video data, sometimes from citizen sleuths around the country identifying people, then they have to be brought back to Washington DC, then discovery of terabytes of information has to be provided, and then all this was occurring while there was a pandemic and some of the grand juries were not fully operating, and some of the courtrooms were not fully operating. So I’m extremely proud of the work that prosecutors are doing in this case, and the agents are doing in this case. They’re working 24/7 on this.