Attorney General Merrick Garland praised his employees on Thursday for their impartiality in the wake of his Justice Department pursuing some of the most politically fraught prosecutions in history.
Garland spoke about DOJ “norms” more than a dozen times during his remarks, which he delivered to the department’s workforce during an annual conference of U.S. attorneys in Washington, D.C.
“Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this department to be used as a political weapon, and our norms are a promise that we will not allow this nation to become a country where law enforcement is treated as an apparatus of politics,” Garland said.
That comment, in particular, was met with resounding applause in the room. But elsewhere, critics took issue with Garland’s emphasis on impartiality and his rejection of politically motivated prosecutions.
Former longtime federal prosecutor Jim Trusty, who worked on former President Donald Trump’s defense team, told the Washington Examiner that Garland’s speech felt “a little late.”
“For him to wax eloquent about ‘we will never be politicized,’ well, explain your own actions,” Trusty said.
Trusty pointed to, as an example, Garland’s press conference in August 2022 addressing the FBI executing a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in Trump’s possession. Trusty said it was, in his view, unethical for the attorney general to remark on a target in a case who had not yet been charged. Trusty also highlighted special counsel Jack Smith, whom Garland appointed in 2022, urging expeditious trials against Trump last year.
“I’ve never seen anything like the press conference [Garland] had right after Mar-a-Lago or a prosecutor pushing for a speedy trial in a complex case where the defendant is not incarcerated,” Trusty said. “It made no sense other than politics.”
Garland saying he does not discriminate based on political views is not a new, but his speech on Thursday marked one of his most forceful defenses yet of the DOJ.
It came after his deputies have, in the last two years, brought a string of controversial, white-collar indictments against prominent political figures from both parties.
They brought two indictments against Trump, the first time a former president had been criminally charged. They successfully brought two indictments against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, the first time a president’s child was found guilty or pleaded guilty to federal crimes. Additionally, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the one-time chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted and convicted on federal corruption charges and forced to resign from Congress.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the House, criticized Garland’s “pep rally,” telling the Washington Examiner in a statement that the attorney general and Vice President Kamala Harris have misplaced prosecutorial priorities.
“Neither she nor her employee Merrick Garland have any response to the question—why have they targeted Trump and pro-life moms with prosecution, but have done nothing about illegal immigration, or opioids, or violent BLM rioters,” Gaetz said.
In the era of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Garland’s DOJ has wielded the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against a record number of anti-abortion activists. However, his department, has, on rare occasions, also brought the charge against supporters of abortion access who have attacked pregnancy counseling centers.
The DOJ has also aggressively pursued pro-Trump activists who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, charging about 1,500 people over the last three years with crimes ranging from assaulting a police officer to minor trespassing violations. Republicans, including Gaetz, have found the prosecutions to be overzealous compared to how the DOJ reacted to Black Lives Matter rioters in the months and years after George Floyd’s death. While the worst rioting occurred during the Trump administration, Harris, at the time, also advocated bailing the suspects out of jail regardless of how violent their offenses were.
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Former U.S. Attorney John Fishwick of Virginia, an Obama appointee, told the Washington Examiner that Garland’s “judge-like” demeanor has been both a strength and a weakness.
“He has outsourced the Trump and Hunter Biden prosecutions to avoid appearing partisan,” Fishwick said. “However, like a judge, he has wanted to appear above the fray, but an attorney general has to be in the fray. Trump has attacked DOJ mercilessly, but Hunter Biden’s legal team has taken shots at [special counsel David] Weiss, and hence DOJ, as well. Garland’s above-the-fray approach has permitted much criticism of DOJ to go unanswered.”
