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.
