This shone through during 5½ hours of hostile questioning from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor,” he said, underscoring that he has tried to rebuild a norm of Justice Department independence that former president Donald Trump eroded.
Mr. Garland undercut House Republicans’ claims that Mr. Biden obstructed justice in the Hunter Biden probe, testifying under oath that he has never had any conversations about the case with anyone at the White House. Meanwhile, he said he kept his distance from the investigation into the president’s son by declining to intervene with U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who filed gun charges against Hunter Biden last week.
“The way to not interfere is to not investigate an investigation,” said Mr. Garland to questions about some of the probe’s specifics. He said he did not make the decisions that led to a Hunter Biden plea deal falling apart in July, or that allowed the statute of limitations to expire on some potential charges. His denials of wrongdoing are believable. Either Mr. Garland — a longtime trustworthy public servant who served as a well-regarded judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — is lying to Congress under oath, exposing himself to criminal liability, or there is less than advertised to Republicans’ claims against Mr. Biden, Mr. Garland and the entire Justice Department.
Despite all this, Mr. Garland found little support from his Republican interlocutors — except, notably, Rep. Ken Buck, a conservative from Colorado who has emerged as a skeptic of the House GOP drive to impeach Mr. Biden. Mr. Buck pointed out that Republicans would have attacked Mr. Garland if he hadn’t kept Mr. Weiss on, if he had fired Mr. Weiss because he felt he wasn’t moving aggressively enough, if he hadn’t approved Mr. Weiss’s request for special-counsel powers and even if he’d picked someone else besides Mr. Weiss for that job.
The congressman also noted that Mr. Garland keeps in his conference room a portrait of Elliot Richardson, who, as attorney general, resigned in protest when directed by President Richard M. Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Imagine how much more tense the country would be if Mr. Biden had selected, instead of a respected judge, a partisan loyalist to be attorney general. The decisions Mr. Garland has made, including some that appeared suspect at first, such as the call to search Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, so far appear to have been the wise ones.
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