After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.
At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.
“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.”
With that, he set the course of a determined and methodical, if at times dysfunctional and maddeningly slow, investigation that would yield the indictment of Mr. Trump on four counts of election interference in August 2023.
The story of how it unfolded, based on dozens of interviews, is one that would pit Mr. Garland, a quintessential rule follower determined to restore the department’s morale and independence, against the ultimate rule breaker — Mr. Trump, who was intent on bending the legal system to his will.
Mr. Garland, 71, a former federal judge and prosecutor, proceeded with characteristic by-the-book caution, pressure-testing every significant legal maneuver, demanding that prosecutors take no shortcuts and declaring the inquiry would “take as long as it takes.”
As a result, prosecutors and the F.B.I. spent months sticking to their traditional playbook. They started with smaller players and worked upward — despite the transparent, well-documented steps taken by Mr. Trump himself, in public and behind the scenes, to retain power after voters rejected his bid for another term.
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.
In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.
“I think that delay has contributed to a situation where none of these trials may go forward,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said in a recent interview on CNN, citing the Justice Department’s approach as a factor. “The department bears some of that responsibility.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to review Mr. Trump’s claims of presidential immunity in the case has now threatened to push the trial deep into the campaign season or beyond, raising the possibility that voters will make their choice between Mr. Trump and President Biden in November without Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence being established.
It has resurfaced a question that has long dogged Mr. Garland: What took so long?
It would take the department nearly a year to focus on the actions contained in the indictment ultimately brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel Mr. Garland later named to oversee the prosecution: systematic lies about election fraud, the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence, the effort to replace legitimate state electors with ersatz ones.
Officials in the Biden White House have long expressed private consternation with Mr. Garland’s pace. The select committee established by the House in 2021 to investigate what led to the Jan. 6 riot made it an all-but-explicit goal to force the Justice Department to pursue the case more aggressively, and in Georgia, a local prosecutor was going head-on at Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss even before Mr. Garland was sworn in.
People around Mr. Garland, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Justice Department affairs, say there would be no case against Mr. Trump had Mr. Garland not acted decisively. And any perception that the department had made Mr. Trump a target from the outset, without exploring other avenues, would have doomed the investigation.
“Don’t confuse thoughtful with unduly cautious,” said a former deputy attorney general, Jamie S. Gorelick, who sent Mr. Garland, then her top aide, to oversee the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “He was fearless. You could see it then, and you could see it when he authorized the search at Mar-a-Lago.”
Mr. Garland’s allies point to how, by the summer of 2021, the attorney general and his powerful deputy, Lisa O. Monaco, were so frustrated with the pace of the work that they created a team to investigate Trump allies who gathered at the Willard Hotel ahead of Jan. 6 — John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roger J. Stone Jr. — and possible connections to the Trump White House, according to former officials.
That team would lay the groundwork for the investigation that Mr. Smith would take over as special counsel a year and a half later.
But a host of factors, some in Mr. Garland’s control, others not, slowed things down.
Department leaders believed that the best way to justify prosecuting Mr. Trump and the Willard plotters was to find financial links between them and the rioters — because they thought it would be more straightforward and less risky than a case based on untested election interference charges, according to people with knowledge of the situation. But that conventional approach, rooted in prosecutorial muscle memory, yielded little.
There were also problems inside the part of the Justice Department leading the investigation, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. The office was racked by personnel issues and buckling under the weight of identifying and prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters — an investigation that became the largest ever undertaken by the department.
Mr. Garland and his team decided early on not to take direct control of the investigation themselves, as the department had done after the Oklahoma City bombing.
And for much of 2021, the U.S. attorney’s office at first prioritized indicting key members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, far-right groups that played a crucial role in the assault, on charges of seditious conspiracy.
Time will tell whether Mr. Garland and Ms. Monaco made the right calls in the period before they turned the investigation over to Mr. Smith, who within eight months brought not only the election-case indictment but the separate charges against Mr. Trump for mishandling classified documents.
But like many before them, Mr. Garland and his team appear to have underestimated Mr. Trump’s capacity for reinvention and disruption, in this case through delay.
A shaky start: January to March 2021
On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Garland was in his attic office in suburban Maryland, drafting remarks he would deliver the next day in Delaware when Mr. Biden was to introduce him as his pick for attorney general.
The speech was to center on re-establishing “normal order” after four chaotic Trump years. Mr. Garland took a break, clicked on a livestream of rioters breaching the Capitol and realized, in a flash, that he would need to revise not only his speech, but his approach to the job.
He was still fine-tuning his language as his wife drove him to Wilmington the next morning.
The rule of law is “the very foundation of our democracy,” said Mr. Garland as Mr. Biden, whom he barely knew, looked on.
In February, while Mr. Garland awaited Senate confirmation, J.P. Cooney, a veteran prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office who ran the group investigating the riot’s ringleaders, drafted a proposal to fast-track elements of the investigation. It would also include seizing the phone of Mr. Stone, a longtime Trump associate who was part of the group that had been camping out at the Willard Hotel before Jan. 6 strategizing about how to keep Mr. Trump in office.
The F.B.I. and Justice Department balked at Mr. Cooney’s plan.
Mr. Cooney had prosecuted Mr. Stone in 2019 for obstructing a congressional investigation, only to have Trump appointees intervene to recommend a lower range for his sentence — before Mr. Trump wiped it away. Some at the department worried Mr. Cooney might be trying to settle unfinished business, according to…
