Merrick Garland Thinks His Justice Department Is Above Criticism
Attorney General Merrick Garland published an op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday, declaring that unfounded attacks on the Justice Department “must end.” It’s strange and unsettling for the chief law enforcement officer of the United States to write such a thing. Whatever the merits of his argument, it doesn’t come off as an argument. It comes off as a threat.
Garland opens with the case of a man recently convicted for threatening to bomb an FBI field office. That’s a crime, of course, and it has no place in American society. Garland goes on to say that in recent weeks the Justice Department has seen “an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work. They are baseless, personal and dangerous.”
You would think, then, that he’s referring to attacks like the bomb threat. But he’s not. In the very next sentence, he says these attacks “come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president.”
So for Garland, a bomb threat is apparently the same as threats by lawmakers to defund the obviously corrupt investigation of former President Donald Trump by DOJ special counsel Jack Smith.
Garland then says that some of these “attacks” come in the form of “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.”
But there’s no law in America against spreading “conspiracy theories”—just ask the entire corporate media that spent years spreading outlandish conspiracy theories about how Trump was a Russian agent. What’s more, many Americans now sincerely believe (with good reason) that in light of the ongoing lawfare against Trump, the judicial process itself is indeed compromised and undeserving of public trust. If these Americans are spreading what Garland thinks are “conspiracy theories” for the purpose of persuading their countrymen that the Justice Department is untrustworthy, that is their right as Americans.
But Garland doesn’t appear to think so. Throughout his op-ed, he elides the stark difference between specific threats of violence (like a bomb threat) and First Amendment-protected speech (like disagreeing with Merrick Garland). We should expect nothing less from the attorney general who smeared concerned parents who speak out at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” But what Garland alludes to is bone-chilling, because he’s saying that “unfounded” criticism of a weaponized and politicized Justice Department is the equivalent of a bomb threat.
The FBI may say the investigation is over and Matthew Crooks acted utterly alone, just another lone gunman, but everybody else seems to be ignoring the ailing law enforcement agency. CBS ran a live update yesterday headlined, “
