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It’s no accident that The Wall Street Journal ran an “exclusive” hagiographic piece on Merrick Garland’s “by-the-book, play-no-favorites approach” the day the attorney general is set to be grilled by Congress. The administration wants to paint the AG as a fair-minded dispenser of justice.

In truth, while Garland might occasionally — only when faced with no real options — put the Biden administration in an uncomfortable political position, he has regularly weaponized the agency to target the president’s political enemies, from pro-life protesters to concerned parents to presidential candidates.

Even as I write this, Garland is refusing to hand over audio recordings of Joe Biden’s interviews with former Special Counsel Robert Hur, despite a congressional subpoena. Even as the DOJ stonewalls Congress, it is prosecuting the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for crimes for which the Hur tape supposedly “exonerates” Biden.

Garland’s claims of executive privilege are risible. If Biden’s audio can be withheld from the public simply because someone somewhere might manipulate the tape using AI, then any audio of any president can be denied the public.

Also, why is this DOJ’s concern? Considering the Hur transcript has already been released — and we know that Biden lied about it — there is even less justification for withholding the audio. And considering the DOJ has apparently cleaned up all the “uhs” and “ohs” and garbled words in the transcript, the tape would likely further cement the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

So, the real problem here isn’t the deep fake; it’s the unedited tape. Withholding the audio is obviously politically motivated. Which is unsurprising, since Garland has been one of the most partisan AGs in memory.

While Garland was raiding the home of the former president over a classified document dispute, he was letting the statute of limitations on the foreign influence-peddling by the president’s family run out.

While left-wing pro-Hamas protesters were rioting and targeting Jews, Garland was still fearmongering over the coming MAGA extremist revolution, inflating the threat with bogus statistics.

While Garland did nothing about those (likely) illegally picketing the homes of federal judges and attempting to intimidate them and influence cases — even after an assassin tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh — the DOJ was deploying armed teams to raid the homes of pro-life families and prosecuting elderly anti-abortion protesters for praying in front of “clinics.”

Even as Democrats are yammering about saving democracy, the DOJ has been working to undermine the electoral choices of voters in red states like Texas. Abortion is not a (pretend) constitutional right anymore. The DOJ does not care.

The DOJ is restarting censorship efforts under the guise of stopping foreign interference, and also targeting X owner Elon Musk, who has opened his platform to more neutral speech. It’s quite the happenstance, right?

Not only did Garland form a “task force” to investigate local parents who were protesting authoritarian Covid restrictions and racist curriculums, but he refused to dissolve the effort even after the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter that sparked it.

Of course, it was the Biden administration that prompted the organization to use the term “domestic terrorism” to give the DOJ justification to get involved in the first place. Even The New York Times acknowledged that “Garland did not detail any specific threats of violence or offer reasons for the increase in harassment and threats.” The only reason to get involved was to chill speech and intimidate parents.

No matter.

Even the case against Hunter Biden, used most often by the left to brandish Garland’s alleged Solomonic credentials, is a farce.

Let’s not forget if the Justice Department had its way, the case would have disappeared. To begin with, Garland ignored the law and appointed a counsel from within the government. David Weiss, whose office was filled with Biden allies, was prepared to give Hunter an astonishing immunity deal, not only on felony gun and tax charges, but for a slew of unrelated serious potential offenses, including failure to register as a foreign agent, bribery, and corruption.

It was only because of the whistleblower testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler that Weiss was forced to ask Hunter to plead guilty to two piddling misdemeanor counts. And the immunity deal was only quashed because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who pointed out there was not a single precedent in which immunity was offered for “crimes in a different case,” rejected it.

In his remarks to Congress today, Garland promised that he “will not back down from defending our democracy,” despite the “repeated attacks” and “conspiracy theor[ies]” regarding the DOJ. Some conspiracy theories exist, no doubt, but most criticisms of Garland’s work are legitimate. Treating criticism of his corrupt tenure as an attack on the “judicial process itself” has it backward.  Demanding no one question the actions of state institutions is authoritarian. If the system were working properly, Garland would be impeached.

But in their efforts to save “democracy” — a concept that’s been stripped of any meaning — Democrats have justified deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies. For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice but a way to exact political justice.

Garland is one of the leaders in this fight. Whether it’s because he is a weak man willing to do what’s expected of him or because he is corrupt makes little difference. 

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.