Elie Honig is a CNN senior legal analyst and former federal and state prosecutor, and author of "Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department." The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN. Watch Honig answer readers' questions on "CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta" on weekends.
(CNN)At his confirmation hearing in February 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland said all the right things about the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He vowed to fully prosecute the "heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy." When asked if he would look "upstream" to hold accountable the people who had organized and incited the insurrection, Garland vowed to "pursue these leads wherever they take us."
Thus far, Garland's actions have not matched his rhetoric. On Garland's watch, the Justice Department has made an inexcusably weak showing in its January 6 prosecutions. Most recently, the Justice Department has offered lenient plea deals, many of them for misdemeanors -- enabling several January 6 insurrectionists, including the individual who wore a "Camp Auschwitz" T-shirt to the attack, to reduce the charges against them.
Back when I was a first-year federal prosecutor, we'd get assigned every few months to do "misdemeanor duty." We'd have to go over to the courthouse and process the pettiest of federal cases -- smoking in a Veterans Administration hospital, low level theft of mail, a fistfight at a federal...
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