Staff Reports
In a twist fit for a riveting courtroom drama, Attorney General Merrick Garland made a bold move this week by giving a hard pass to subpoenas from the Republican arm of Congress that he just wasn’t feeling. Garland’s spunky statement came after GOP bigwigs on the Hill started throwing around words like “contempt” and trying to snag audio recordings from special counsel Robert K. Hur’s deep dive into President Biden’s classified info handling. According to the Washington Post, Garland wasn’t having any of it.
The attorney general reportedly sent a memo over to the president asking him to whip out that executive privilege card on the recordings, worried that letting them run free could make it harder to get folks to spill the beans in future investigations. Garland, with the sass of a teacher catching a student passing notes in class, told the House Judiciary Committee that these Republicans were just dying to get their hands on sensitive law enforcement info for no good reason. He even threw in a jab about how this was just the latest episode in the saga of folks taking swings at the Justice Department’s mojo.
WATCH: Attorney General Merrick Garland Opening Statement: "I will not be intimidated and the Justice Department will not be intimidated. We will continue to do our jobs free from political influence and we will not back down from defending democracy." pic.twitter.com/smgZOv9boA
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 4, 2024
On the other side of the ring, the Republicans clapped back, claiming Garland was turning the Department of Justice into a weapon of mass destruction. They pointed fingers at the recent legal smackdown on former President Trump and the big “guilty” stamp a jury in Manhattan dropped on him. Despite the White House tossing over transcripts of Biden’s sit-downs, where Hur apparently spilled the tea on the president’s questionable memory skills, the GOP crowd insisted the audio recordings were the missing puzzle pieces they needed to decode everything.
In the midst of the heated House showdown, Garland stood his ground and declared he wasn’t about to be scared off by threats of contempt. He gave a sassy retort about how contempt was no joke but he wasn’t about to let it mess with his team’s work on future cases. He made it crystal clear that he wasn’t about to play politics and back down from backing democracy. It was a showdown worthy of a Wild West face-off, but with legal jargon and congressional drama instead of tumbleweeds and spurs.
