Attorney General Merrick Garland will appear before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Wednesday amid allegations from Republican Chairman Jim Jordan the U.S. Dept. of Justice has been “weaponized.”
“The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, at 10:00 a.m. ET. The hearing, ‘Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice,’ will examine how the Justice Department has become politicized and weaponized under the leadership of Attorney General Merrick Garland,” reads the announcement on the Judiciary Committee’s official website.
“Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” Garland will say, the Associated Press has reported. “I am not the President’s lawyer. I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”
Chairman Jordan is expected to attack the Attorney General over issues including the prosecutions of Donald Trump, a memo allegedly targeting Catholics, Garland’s memo requesting FBI agents work with relevant parties concerned over violent threats to school boards amid the rise of far right extremists, and the investigation into Hunter Biden, the President’s son.
“The ultimate test that we should ask is, what would Donald Trump have done?” conservative attorney George Conway said on MSNBC ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, referring to the investigation and recent indictment of Hunter Biden on gun charges.
“If his son had gotten indicted for anything, and even if his kids have gotten indicted, the attorney general would have been gone,” Conway noted.
“And the other thing about this is it doesn’t matter what Garland does to Republicans, it doesn’t matter,” Conway said.
He then mimicked what he expects Republicans will say during Wednesday’s hearing.
“If you appoint a special counsel, you should have done it earlier. Or you appointed one to fix the case. Or if you don’t appoint a special counsel, how could you be handling the case, you’re not independent? If you want to indict Hunter Biden, it’s, the charges weren’t big, weren’t strong words, weren’t heavy enough. You should have done it earlier. And if you don’t do it at all, it’s obviously to protect them.”
“And so none of that, nothing Garland will say will matter to these Republicans,” Conway concluded. “They’ll go from one thing to completely inconsistent thing in the next moment, it doesn’t matter to them.”
Watch the hearing below starting at 10:00 AM ET or at this link.