Merrick Garland: Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end

by Merrick Garland, attorney general of the United States,

Last week, a California man was convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI field office where hundreds of agents and other employees work. In one of his threats to the FBI, the man wrote: “I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions.”
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These heinous threats of violence have become routine in an environment in which the Justice Department is under attack like never before.

In recent weeks, we have 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.

These attacks come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president.

They come in the form of conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself. Those include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.

They come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI’s law enforcement operations that increase the risks faced by our agents.

They come in the form of efforts to bully and intimidate our career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out.

They come in the form of false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election. Such claims are often made by those who are themselves attempting to politicize the department’s work to influence the outcome of an election.

And media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees.

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