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WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden’s attorney general nominee on Saturday (February 20) pledged to depoliticize the Justice Department and vigorously prosecute Donald Trump supporters who attacked the United States Capitol.
In testimony prepared for his confirmation hearing Monday and Tuesday, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland indicated he wants to remove the stain of political interference Trump left on the department.
He said that, if confirmed, he would reaffirm “policies that protect the department’s independence from partisan influence in police investigations (and) that strictly regulate communications with the White House.”
He also vowed to create clear guidelines for the FBI’s investigations, amid allegations that the agency drifted deeply into politics by investigating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then Trump in 2017-2018.
In an apparent reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, Garland also said that enforcing equal justice for people of color remains an incomplete and “urgent” task, 150 years after the Justice Department was founded after the Civil War.
Minorities still face discrimination in housing, education and the job market, and suffer more than others from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, Garland said in his statement.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the Department’s Civil Rights Division, with the mission of ‘defending the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society,'” Garland said.
“That mission is still urgent because we still don’t have the same justice.”
Garland also said the country faces a serious threat of extremism, as exemplified by the deadly January 6 attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which closed the legislature when lawmakers met to certify Biden’s victory in the elections.
The Department of Justice has already indicted about 230 people in that act and is investigating hundreds more, with the possibility of charging some of seditious conspiracy.
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“If confirmed, I will oversee the prosecution of the white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government,” he said. Garland.
Garland, 68, worked at the Justice Department before becoming a judge nearly 24 years ago.
Seen as a moderate liberal, in 2016 he was nominated by then-Democratic President Barack Obama to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
But Republicans determined to turn the upper court to the right stalled the nomination, allowing Trump in 2017 to run a conservative candidate.
Garland, who must be confirmed by the evenly split Senate, is expected this time to garner enough support from Republicans for his nomination to pass.
