It's time for Justice Matters, with former Federal Prosecutor and MSNBC analyst Glenn Kirschner.

Today, Glenn evaluates why the FBI and the DOJ resisted opening an investigation into Donald Trump's role in the January 6th insurrection.

So friends, let me say up front that today's Justice Matters video gives me no joy.

I actually waited a couple of days after reading the Washington Post's deep dive piece that exposed something or confirmed something that I feel like we already knew.

We knew it intuitively and we knew it based on the publicly available evidence.

We knew it based on what we saw with our own eyes and we heard with our own ears.

And that is that the FBI and the DOJ failed to meet the urgency of the moment and delayed opening an investigation into Donald Trump and his high-level criminal associates

for more than a year after the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol after the insurrection.

But friends, we learned a good bit more from the Washington Post reporting like how FBI and DOJ leadership kept shutting down the requests of career prosecutors to investigate Trump.

Here is the headline of that original Washington Post piece from a couple of days ago.

FBI resisted opening probe into Trump's role in January 6th for more than a year.

In the DOJ's investigation of January 6th, key justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump's orbit.

And this reporting, this important reporting indispensable reporting was done by Carol Lennig and Aaron Davis of the Washington Post.

I will post a link to this sort of deep dive piece in the description of this video.

But more recently the post published a helpful summary distilling out the key takeaways from this deep dive piece.

And I want to read that to you, it's not all that long, and then I want to spend a few minutes talking about those key takeaways.

Headline, takeaways from the Post's examination of DOJ's January 6th investigation.

Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, more than a year elapsed before federal agents began actively probing efforts by Trump and those around him to steal the election.

Here's why the Washington Post found that senior justice department and FBI officials rejected or rebuffed early proposals to investigate actions taken by President Donald Trump and his close allies leading up to the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Those decisions were born out of weariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence would be sufficient to probe whether those actions constituted a crime reporting shows.

As a result, more than a year passed before federal prosecutors and FBI agents embarked on a formal investigation into nonviolent efforts within Trump's orbit to steal the 2020 election.

The delayed start all but assured that the question of whether the former president could face criminal exposure for seeking to thwart an election would remain open when he launched his campaign to retake the White House.

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