In a rare op-ed this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland urged an end to “attacks” on the Justice Department. His call came a day before the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for not complying with a congressional subpoena.
In a Washington Post op-ed published Tuesday, Garland stated that recent weeks have seen an “escalation of attacks far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate oversight,” describing these attacks as “baseless, personal, and dangerous.”
He suggested the attacks were coming from Trump supporters, in response to the recent trial of former President Donald Trump, as well as several other ongoing federal and local government cases against him.
“These attacks come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president,” he wrote, adding:
“They 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.”
He seemed to reference a recently unsealed FBI operations order authorizing agents to use deadly force during the Mar-a-Lago raid for suspected classified documents.
Garland remarked that such attacks “come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI’s law enforcement operations, increasing the risks faced by our agents.”
Garland also referenced accusations from Trump himself, that the cases against him was part of a Democrat strategy to hurt him at the ballot box, calling them “false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election.”
Garland claimed it was “absurd and dangerous” that public servants are “being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work.”
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