Garland Pledges No Interference in Hunter Biden Probe
Garland #Garland
Attorney General Merrick Garland told members of Congress on Wednesday that he would not interfere with the work of the U.S. attorney in Delaware investigating the finances of President Joe Biden’s son.
“I promised to leave the matter of Hunter Biden in the hands of the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware, who was appointed in the previous administration. And I have carried through on that pledge,” Garland said in response to a question from GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on investigators’ ability to follow the case or to bring charges.
“The U.S. attorney has been advised that he has full authority to make those referrals you’re talking about or to bring cases in other districts if he needs to do that,” he said.
The comments came during an appearance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee – Garland’s first of the new Congress – where the attorney general was peppered with questions over a bevy of issues, ranging from immigration law and abortion-related protests to school board meetings and fentanyl overdoses.
Garland’s comments on the Hunter Biden investigation were perhaps the most politically charged of his testimony. He declined to get into specifics about that investigation or any others. The senators also did not spend a notable amount of time asking Garland about special counsel investigations into the handling of classified documents by both President Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Republicans on the panel interrogated Garland on a range of topics, at some points raising their voices at him, but many of their comments coalesced around the view that the Justice Department under Garland has been politicized – a view Garland strenuously and repeatedly rejected.
At one point, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, accused the Justice Department of enforcing “two tiers of justice.”
“There is one for people with conservative values, for parents, for people of faith. And then there is another tier of justice that applies to the Washington liberal elites, political elites,” she said.
Garland denied the accusation, repeating that the department deals with crimes equally, regardless of the ideation behind them.
The accusations from the right are not new. In the House, Republicans stood up a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of the federal government after they took control of the chamber last month.
Garland even appeared to preemptively address the criticisms in his opening remarks.
“The department’s career workforce has demonstrated extraordinary resilience after years of unprecedented challenges. They have conducted themselves with the utmost integrity, without regard to any partisan or other inappropriate influences,” Garland said.
Several GOP senators, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, pressed Garland on the department’s handling of protesters demonstrating in front of the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices in the wake of the leak of the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned the federal right to an abortion.
The senators expressed outrage that no protesters had been charged under a statute making illegal attempts to influence federal judges by picketing near their homes.
“You spent 20 years as a judge, and you’re perfectly content with justices being afraid for their children’s lives, and you did nothing to prosecute it,” Cruz said, raising his voice at Garland in one of the most heated moments of the hearing.
Garland repeatedly defended his actions during a fiery back and forth, saying that arrest decisions are up to the law enforcement agents on the ground and that he sent 70 U.S. Marshals to protect the justices’ homes.
“I ordered the marshals do something that the United States marshals had never in history done before, which was protect the justices’ homes, residence and lives, 24-7,” Garland said.
Others pressed Garland on the flow of fentanyl over the southern border and into the U.S., which Garland said the department was addressing “with enormous urgency.”
And several Republicans also questioned Garland on crimes related to abortion clinics and pregnancy centers, accusing the Justice Department of over-enforcing the law against anti-abortion protesters while being more lenient on pro-abortion actors.
“We treat like cases alike,” Garland responded to questions from Blackburn, who went on to underscore her point by highlighting the firebombing of a pregnancy resource center in Tennessee. Garland assured Blackburn that the department was concerned about those kinds of crimes.
Democrats for their part also used the hearing to highlight their priorities, as well as dispute statements from their colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
Chairman Dirk Durbin, Illinois Democrat, pushed Garland on the online sale of illegal drugs and the law that bars social media companies from being liable for those sales on their platforms. Garland agreed that the government has “to do something” to force the companies to act on the issue.
And two other senators asked Garland about an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster, which became the target of intense scrutiny and congressional hearings after a controversial rollout of tickets for pop star Taylor Swift’s latest tour.
Garland declined to comment on a potential investigation as a matter of department policy, but he did manage to get a Swift quote into the record.
The Justice Department, he said, knows the importance of antitrust enforcement “all too well.”
Copyright 2023 U.S. News & World Report