Merrick Garland Hits Back At Trump and Other Critics In Testimony For Republican-Led Hearing
Attorney General Merrick Garland hit back at critics like ex-President Donald Trump who have leveled a raft of evidence-free accusations about his department’s handling of investigations into Trump, President Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden.
Garland is scheduled to testify at a hearing of the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee Wednesday entitled “Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
In an excerpt of his opening remarks, Garland took aim at critics who have accused him of colluding with Biden to persecute Trump, go easy on Hunter Biden, and protect the president — without evidence for those accusations. Garland wrote:
There is not one set of laws for the powerful and another for the powerless; one for the rich, another for the poor; one for Democrats, another for Republicans; or different rules, depending upon one’s race or ethnicity or religion.
As the President himself has said, and I reaffirm here today: I am not the President’s lawyer. I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people. Our job is to follow the facts and the law, wherever they lead. And that is what we do.
The attorney general 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.
