WATCH: Every Time AG Merrick Garland Mentioned It Was Trump Who Appointed Hunter Biden Prober At GOP-Led Hearing

There was one key point Attorney General Merrick Garland stressed repeatedly as Republicans grilled him over the investigations into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and it involved ex-President Donald Trump. He stressed it a lot.

Garland testified at a hearing of the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee Wednesday entitled “Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice,” which began with a defiant statement from Garland and went on to be a contentious spectacle of grandstanding on a variety of topics — but particularly the Biden investigations.

Many exchanges were characterized by Garland refusing demands to get more granular on subjects by citing his promise to remain hands-off, and Republicans casting his reluctance as stonewalling.

But as Garland testified, he is not directly involved with the investigations in question, but rather has appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to conduct investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and into Trump’s conduct surrounding the effort to overturm the 2020 election that culminated in deadly violence on January 6.

He appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to conduct an investigation into classified documents that were first discovered and turned over by Biden’s team, which led to the discovery of an additional small set of documents bearing classification markings.

And most recently, in August, Garland dropped a big announcement: he named David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who had already been overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden — to be special counsel investigating Hunter Biden.

Those investigations have resulted in indictments of Trump on 44 felony counts, three charges against Hunter Biden, and no charges against President Biden as yet.

But at Wednesday’s hearing, Garland repeated, over a dozen times, the fact that it was Trump who appointed Weiss as U.S. attorney (he was confirmed by an unopposed voice vote), that President Biden retained him in order to demonstrate he wouldn’t interfere in the investigation, and that Garland elevated Weiss to special counsel at Weiss’s request.

Watch every time Garland made this point above, via the House Judiciary Committee.