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One tea leaf to read to determine precisely why Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco aren't reversing course on Bill Barr's policies more abruptly is the Andrew McCabe lawsuit, which was stayed on Monaco's third day on the job.

One excuse DOD made for not deploying the National Guard promptly on January 6 is that there was no federal agency to lead the response. But there was one: DOJ. Only, according to the Senate Report on January 6, DOJ did nothing to prepare.

There continue to be questions about how we'll ever get accountability for January 6 without a January 6 commission to do that work. In an exchange yesterday, for example, Bart Gellman asked what questions we'd most want a January 6 commission…

Consider the romance novel ....

Former US Attorney Rudy Giuliani seems to have missed a detail while trying to protect Donald Trump from the damage a search on Trump's attorney's devices could do when it happened to Michael Cohen in 2018. An SDNY filter team cannot share attorney-client communications to which a crime-fraud exception clearly applies. A Special Master can. And Barbara Jones, acting as Special Master in such a situation, already has.

Last week, I argued that based on the existing evidence, Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli may have been overcharged. But both publicly and via discovery, newly identified video appears to substantiate the civil disorder charges against him.

Paul Hodgkins became the first January 6 defendant to plead out today. He faces a sentencing range of 15-21 months.

The Oath Keepers went to some lengths to hide their communications. And then they made their hotel reservations via an interlocking set of bookings and payments that makes plain they were an organized interstate network.

If Donald Trump and his close associates are going to be held accountable for January 6, it will be via a conspiracy charge, almost certainly involving the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. But thus far, we have no idea what evidence of conspiracy prosecutors have.