86th United States Attorney General
Merrick Brian Garland (born November 13, 1952) is an American attorney and jurist serving as the 86th United States attorney general since March 2021. He served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 2021. After serving as a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, he practiced corporate litigation at Arnold & Porter and worked as a federal prosecutor in the United States Department of Justice, where he played a leading role in the investigation and prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, nominated Garland to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in March 2016 to fill the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. However, the Republican Senate majority refused to hold a hearing or vote on his nomination.
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The great joy of being a prosecutor is that you don’t take whatever case walks in the door. You evaluate the case, you make your best judgement, you only go forward if you believe that the defendant is guilty. You may well be wrong, but you have done your best to ensure that as far as the evidence that you are able to attain, the person is guilty. It is the kind of even-handed balancing that a judge should undertake although of course a judge has the advantage of having somebody speak for the other side.
The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead. Because January 6th was an unprecedented attack on the seat of our democracy, we understand that there is broad public interest in our investigation. We understand that there are questions about how long the investigation will take, and about what exactly we are doing. Our answer is, and will continue to be, the same answer we would give with respect to any ongoing investigation: as long as it takes and whatever it takes for justice to be done — consistent with the facts and the law.
Our job is to pursue justice, without fear or favor. Our job is not to do what is politically convenient. Our job is not to take orders from the President, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate. As the President himself has said, and I reaffirm today: I am not the President’s lawyer. I will also add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people. Our job is to follow the facts and the law. And that is what we do. All of us recognize that with this work comes public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate oversight. These are appropriate and important given the matters and the gravity of the matters before the Department. But singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families. We will not be intimidated. We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.
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As we begin a new year — and as we prepare to mark a solemn anniversary tomorrow – it is a fitting time to reaffirm that we at the Department of Justice will do everything in our power to defend the American people and American democracy. We will defend our democratic institutions from attack. We will protect those who serve the public from violence and threats of violence. We will protect the cornerstone of our democracy: the right to every eligible citizen to cast a vote that counts. And we will do all of this in a manner that adheres to the rule of law and honors our obligation to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone in this country.
The most important thing that a clerk can do for a judge, I tell my clerks, is to prevent me from jumping off the cliff if I don’t want to. That is, sometimes I don’t realize there’s a cliff there at all, that the implications of what I’m doing are really totally wrong, and that sometimes it takes another person or two other people to warn me that you’re just not reading this case correctly, or you’re just not understanding the implications of what a decision in this way would be.”
For myself the balance came from always driving my children to school. So that every day we had that first half-hour, 45 minutes of nothing but uninterrupted time. Sometimes it was just a bunch of sarcasm. Sometimes it was just listening to the radio. But sometimes it was real explanation of what the kids were thinking what they were worried about.