I think that there is and will continue to be a real reluctance to actually prosecute Trump on the part of the Senate.
The Senate doesn't have prosecutorial powers.
True—There’s always the DOJ. My understanding is that there is a turf war with the committee refusing to turn over materials—yet. There are possibly impending charges in NY and GA.
I sympathize with
Rep. Zoe Lofgren's reaction to the news that the DoJ felt blindsided by the Jan 6 committee for not turning over transcripts of Hutchinson's earlier testimony behind closed doors. Logren was surprised that the DoJ was caught off-guard:
“You know, I was surprised that the prosecutors were surprised. What are they doing over there? They have a much greater opportunity to enforce their subpoenas than our legislative committee does,” Lofgren told Todd.
Asked if she thought it was a fair characterization that the House panel had blindsided the Justice Department, she said she did not think so.
“We’re not an arm of the Department of Justice. We’re a legislative committee. They have subpoena power. They could subpoena Ms. Hutchinson. I’m surprised they had not done so. We interviewed her four times. I think that’s publicly known at this point. And the fourth interview was very compelling,” she added.
I've complained in this thread about DoJ foot-dragging before, and this is exactly what I was talking about. It's not that the DoJ has to rush into hasty indictments without sufficient evidence. They are being extremely lazy if they think that they can sit back and let a congressional committee do their work for them. Merrick Garland has an obligation to pursue criminal investigations of this sort, and very little of what we are learning now about what happened on January 6 is new in terms of what has already been reported on earlier. The main news here is now that we have testimony under oath, and the Justice Department is upset that they didn't see it coming. They have more power than a legislative committee to secure that kind of testimony under oath. I suspect that they didn't pursue it, because they can't handle the truth and wish it would just go away.