(CNN) — As Americans gear up for another tense presidential election, the U.S. legal system is still grappling with how to handle the hundreds of individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to keep former President Donald Trump in the White House.
Over 1,200 Americans have been charged criminally for their alleged actions during the riot, and more than 890 have been found guilty of federal crimes, according to the Justice Department. More than half of those found guilty have been sentenced to prison time.
And Trump, who was also criminally indicted for his alleged actions following his 2020 election loss, continues to propagate false claims of a stolen election and is again vying for the Oval Office.
Even after three years, law enforcement and federal judges are feeling the reverberations of what has become the largest criminal investigation in American history, and the public is still wrestling with how the assault on the citadel of U.S. democracy will define the country’s laws and politics.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday said that “the Justice Department will hold all January 6 perpetrators at any level accountable under the law whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
But there are factors at play that may prevent that from happening.
FBI is still looking for hundreds of people
The FBI and the Justice Department responded to the riot with one of the most sprawling law enforcement investigations in U.S. history, resulting in hundreds of convictions for crimes ranging from trespassing on Capitol grounds to seditious conspiracy.
Yet three years later, investigators have charged only a fraction of the estimated thousands of individuals who breached Capitol grounds that day.
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves told reporters that prosecutors have primarily focused “on those who entered the building or those…
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