It has been more than two weeks since the House voted to hold Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for defying a Congressional subpoena, but Attorney General Merrick Garland has yet to take any action against Donald Trump’s former top adviser—and evincing little urgency in doing so. “We evaluate these in the normal way we do,” Garland said in a press conference Monday, declining to say if a Bannon prosecution was imminent.

That uncertainty could soon pose a problem for the House panel as it seeks to enforce additional subpoenas in its quickly escalating probe into the former president, his allies, and the insurrection they incited January 6: With the DOJ behind them, investigators could succeed where previous Trump inquiries failed. Without the threat of contempt, though, the probe could get stonewalled like so many before it. “Any perception that the rule of law does not apply is a harmful one,” Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, told CNN last week.

For years, Trump and others in his administration refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, hamstringing the numerous investigations Democrats on Capitol Hill launched into his litany of misdeeds. The January 6 probe could be different: Bannon’s antics aside, Trump figures have largely cooperated with the investigation, and the former president has consistently failed in his desperate efforts to undermine the inquiry. His latest loss came late Monday, when his emergency request to keep the National Archives from sending records to the January 6 committee was denied by a Washington, D.C. district judge just a couple hours after he filed it. With momentum behind it, the committee on Monday unleashed a new batch of subpoenas, seeking to compel testimony from several other Trump allies, including John Eastman, the lawyer who drafted a disturbing plan to overthrow the 2020 election following Trump’s loss; Jason Miller, the former Trump campaign adviser; and Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser who encouraged him to impose martial law to stay in office.

But those subpoenas only have teeth if the Garland DOJ proves willing to enforce them. “If Merrick Garland does not prosecute Steve Bannon, all these other witnesses...they are going to have no deterrent either and they are going to see it as a free-for-all to do what they will,” as CNN legal analyst Elie Honig put it. “So there is a lot riding on what Merrick Garland decides to do here.” Discussing the subpoenas Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Joe Scarborough said he was “a little bit confused by exactly what Merrick Garland is doing.”

Garland, who has previously backed investigators seeking accountability for attempts to overturn the 2020 election but who has also been queasy about the appearance of political motivation at the DOJ, has been careful not to indicate either way what he plans to do with Bannon. But as the probe ramps up, so too will the pressure on Joe Biden’s attorney general to act. “If the Justice Department doesn’t hold Steve Bannon accountable,” Schiff told CNN in another appearance Monday, “it only lends credence to the idea that some people are above the law, and that cannot be true in this country.”

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