The Department of Justice may have sidestepped the legal battles that have slowed the House Select Committee's investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Federal authorities opened a new direction in their criminal probe by requesting transcripts of interviews conducted by congressional investigators, and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner explained why that move was "savvy."
"I think we've all experienced some frustration because it doesn't look like the Department of Justice has been investigating this the way it would ordinarily investigate, you know, even large-scale conspiracy cases because they don't appear to have been sort of carpet-bombing folks with grand jury subpoenas the way we ordinarily would," Kirschner said.
Kirschner praised DOJ investigators for waiting until the Select Committee had conducted its interviews instead of pursuing the same witnesses.
"If the Department of Justice had gone after everybody with grand jury subpoenas, they probably would have been battling witness after witness after witness, these thousand-plus witnesses," he said. "They would have been battling Congress, who gets which witness first and who has the greater priority. Now what the Department of Justice can do is take a thousand-plus transcripts and they can use that to build their criminal investigation.
"I actually think whether this was by design or happenstance, this may turn out to be a pretty savvy way about investigating the case," Kirschner added, "and let's not forget that the chief investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee is frankly a very accomplished prosecutor in his open own right when he served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and I expect this is a really savvy investigation put together by the Jan. 6 Committee."
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