Merrick Garland Scorches Trump and Allies For Attacks on Justice Department: ‘Dangerous for People’s Safety’
(Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)
Attorney General Merrick Garland slammed the “conspiracy theories” being pushed that the Justice Department is being weaponized against former President Donald Trump as both “dangerous to democracy” and to personnel.
In an editorial for the Washington Post on Tuesday, Garland said that in recent weeks, there had been “an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work.”
The attacks, he writes, come in the form of House Republican “threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president.”
Referencing Trump’s hush money trial, without mentioning the former president by name, he added that attacks also “come in the form of conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself. Those include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.”
Garland argued that these “conspiracy theories” are “crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself” but vowed not to be “intimidated.”
In defense of the Justice Department, he argued, “decisions about criminal investigations [are] based only on the facts and the law.”
“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,” he wrote.
Showing the kind of violent threats that these “conspiracy theories” and “falsehoods” can exacerbate, Garland opened with the example of a California man recently convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI office and go on a “murder spree” that the man claimed would be “very explainable by [DOJ] actions.”
He added: “Continued unfounded attacks against the Justice Department’s employees are dangerous for people’s safety. They are dangerous for our democracy. This must stop.”
