U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland denied any wrongdoing in how he runs the Department of Justice after facing widespread accusations of political bias.
Garland made the remarks during an interview that aired Sunday night on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” with co-host Scott Pelley.
“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats,” Garland said. “We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends. We don’t have one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, for the rich or for the poor, based on ethnicity. We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”
Garland said that he could not speak about the two federal criminal cases against former President Donald Trump because it was an ongoing case and that Department’s policy is that he cannot comment about it.
“One reason is to protect the privacy and the civil liberties of the person who’s under investigation,” Garland said in explaining why the rule exists for all investigations. “It’s to protect witnesses who also may or may not become public later in an investigation. And then finally, it’s to protect the investigation itself. Investigations proceed in many different directions, eventually coming to a fruition, a decision to charge or not charge about a particular thing or not. And if witnesses and potential subjects knew everything that the investigators had previously looked at and were about to look at, it could well change testimony. It could well make witnesses unavailable to us.”
Garland addressed critics who say that he timed the prosecutions to hurt Trump in the 2024 election.
“Well, that’s absolutely not true,” he said. “Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations.”
Garland said that he is not in communication with President Joe Biden or anyone else in the administration in regards to the cases against Trump.
Pelley then asked Garland what he would do if Biden asked him to take action in the cases involving Trump.
“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” he said. “And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen.”
The segment noted that Biden himself is also under criminal investigation by a special counsel over his own handling of classified materials.
Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was recently indicted on federal gun charges in a separate special counsel investigation and remains under investigation over other business matters.
Garland said that he will make the results of the special counsel’s report public “to the extent permissible under the law, that is required to explain their prosecutive decisions, their decisions to prosecute or not prosecute and their strategic decisions along the way.”
“Usually, the special counsels have testified at the end of their reports, and I expect that that will be the case here,” he added.