WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick Garland rejected Republican attacks on the justice system during a grueling House committee hearing Tuesday that followed the conviction of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on 34 related criminal charges to a scheme to conceal illegal efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election with silent payments to a porn star.
Garland, who Republicans want to scorn unless he turns over audiotapes of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, said he would not be intimidated by threats of contempt and called some politicians’ attacks on the Department of “Unprecedented” justice. and “unfounded”.
Garland noted that despite conspiracy theories spread by some members of the Republican Party, the Justice Department had no control over the actions of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump in connection with hush payments made to adult film actress Stormy. Daniels during the 2016 campaign.
The conspiracy theory that the jury’s verdict was “somehow controlled by the Department of Justice” is “an attack on the judicial process itself,” Garland said.
Garland said that “career agents and individual prosecutors were singled out simply for doing their jobs” and that there were “baseless and extremely dangerous falsehoods” being spread about the FBI’s law enforcement operations, as well as “heinous threats of violence directed at the servers career public officials at the Department of Justice.”
Last month, Trump and his allies spread a conspiracy theory that Biden had called on the FBI to assassinate the former president during the 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in connection with the subsequent classified documents case. , in which Trump pleaded not guilty. .
In fact, the FBI chose a date to search Mar-a-Lago when it learned that the former president was hundreds of miles away. Following the search, a Jan. 6 participant showed up at an FBI office in Cincinnati with an AK-15-style rifle and was later killed by police.
In the aftermath of Trump’s conviction, numerous individuals – including the prosecutor, judge, witnesses and even would-be jurors – were targeted by online attacks. Trump suggested there could be a “breaking point” for the public if he were sentenced to house arrest or prison on July 11.
“We will not give up on defending democracy,” Garland said during his testimony on Tuesday.
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