The Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked Congress for more than $34 million in new funding to continue its January 6th investigation, NBC News reports. The budget request for 2023 will fund 130 employees, including 80 federal prosecutors, to aid in the “extraordinary,” “unprecedented” and “complex” investigation.
“We don’t have the manpower,” said one official told the outlet, noting that many J6 participants who will eventually be charged haven’t been arrested yet.
Another official said that the cash crunch was a “culmination” of various factors – including the need to provide support for cases moving to trial.
A third official called it a “work-in-progress” as prosecutors from US attorney’s offices around the country are recalled to their offices.
The request comes after federal officials have made around 850 arrests in the nearly 19 months since the incident – just a fraction of the 2,500 people who entered the Capitol, and the “hundreds more who committed serious crimes outside but haven’t yet been arrested.”
The massive trove of evidence — be it body camera and surveillance video or damning content generated by suspects themselves — presents a tremendous challenge for an enormous bureaucracy working with technology that’s often a few years behind the times, at best.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is overseeing the Capitol siege investigation, is also running separate inquiries exploring the fake electors scheme and a conspiracy to obstruct the Jan. 6 electoral vote certification, both of which touch on Trump’s actions in the lead-up to Jan. 6, as well as on the day of the attack. -NBC News
The requested funding comes after it was slashed from the omnibus spending bill passed in March.
In an interview earlier this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland told NBC News that he was “confident” the DOJ would be able to handle the workload regardless of what Congress does.
“Of course, we’d like more resources, and if Congress wants to give that to us, that would be very nice,” Garland said on Tuesday. “But we have people — prosecutors and agents — from all over the country working on this matter, and I have every confidence in their ability, their professionalism, their dedication to this task.”
Former US Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC: “People are concerned about the resources. It’s an enormous amount of cases, and that puts pressure not just on DOJ, but on the courts and probation. It puts pressure on the entire system.”
The request comes as the latest Harvard / Harris poll shows that just 7% of people think January 6th is one of the most important issues facing the country, while inflation and the economy dominate the top two spots.
For comparison, the entire Mueller Russiagate investigation cost $32 million.
Anything to ride this into 2024, eh?
