AG Garland: DOJ’s Actions Based on ‘Facts and Law’

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Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Biden administration’s Justice Department pursues criminal investigations “based only on the facts and the law.”

Garland wrote an opinion column for The Washington Post to fight back against claims that President Joe Biden’s DOJ has become weaponized against opponents. The column appeared Tuesday, a day before the House could vote on whether to hold Garland in contempt of Congress.

“The Justice Department makes decisions about criminal investigations based only on the facts and the law,” Garland wrote. “We do not investigate people because of their last name, their political affiliation, the size of their bank account, where they come from or what they look like. We investigate and prosecute violations of federal law — nothing more, nothing less.

“We do this not only because of the principles that have long guided our work, but also because we know that our democracy cannot survive without a justice system that ensures the equal protection of law for all its citizens.”

The House Oversight and Accountability and Judiciary committees approved a resolution last month finding Garland in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas for material from special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents by Biden when he was a senator, vice president, and private citizen.

However, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for November’s election, was indicted in four separate criminal cases centered around allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the country overall and in Georgia, mishandled classified documents, and falsified business records to hide a payment to an adult film actor.

Trump was found guilty in the paperwork case in the blue city of New York, where the former president’s defense team accused the presiding judge of issuing many partisan rulings.

Garland said politics played no part in the persecution of Trump. Garland cited what he describes as “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.”

“Those [theories] include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney [in New York] and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department,” Garland wrote.

“They come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI’s law enforcement operations that increase the risks faced by our agents.

“They come in the form of efforts to bully and intimidate our career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out.

“They come in the form of false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election.”

Garland said mainstream media reports “indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees.”

“We will not be intimidated by these attacks,” he wrote. “But it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work.”