‘Dangerous for our democracy’: Merrick Garland slams GOP’s attacks on DOJ

Attorney General Merrick Garland has a stark warning for all of us: The GOP’s attacks on the Justice Department put our democracy in jeopardy. Those attacks, he writes in his op-ed for The Washington Post, range from sending bomb threats to FBI offices to senior Republican lawmakers peddling conspiracy theories about the DOJ plotting against convicted felon Donald Trump.

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.

Garland warns that “unfounded attacks against the Justice Department’s employees are dangerous for people’s safety. They are dangerous for our democracy.”