Merrick Garland’s DOJ Is A Threat To The Republic – The Federalist

Its become painfully obvious over the past year that the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland has been weaponized and politicized to the point that it represents an active threat to the rule of law and the separation of powers. Its not too much to say that Garlands DOJ has become a threat to the republic.

Just take this past week. On Thursday, following an historic 6-3U.S. Supreme Court rulingthat struck down a New York law for violating state residents Second Amendment rights, a DOJ spokeswoman released a statement saying we respectfully disagree with the ruling.

The ruling is of coursea great victory for the Constitutionand a long-overdue vindication of New Yorkers Second Amendment rights. The law in question had been on the books for more than a century, and made it nearly impossible for ordinary people to obtain a concealed-carry license, The unconstitutional law forced New Yorkers to prove to a municipal bureaucrat that they needed a gun for self-defense. In practice, this made it almost impossible for law-abiding citizens in New York to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms.

But neither the law in question nor the Supreme Courts decision implicates federal gun laws in any way. There is no reason for the DOJ to weigh in on the matter or express any opinion whatsoever on the ruling. Only an utterly politicized Justice Department hoping to undermine the Supreme Courts constitutional authority and sow the seeds of nullification would issue such a statement.

But thats not nearly the worst thing Garlands DOJ did this week. In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning, more than a dozen federal investigatorsraided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official with the Trump administration. Why? Because Clark had the temerity to investigate claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.

That made Clark a target for the House Democrats Jan. 6 committee, whose Soviet-style show trial spent a good deal of time Wednesday implying that Clark, who once oversaw 1,400 lawyers and two divisions at DOJ, is traitor who tried to overturn the results of the election.

This should come as no surprise, since the entireraison dtreof the Jan. 6 committee is to smear anyone who questioned the outcome of the election or raised concerns about its unprecedented irregularities as a coup-plotter responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection. In fact, Clarks only crime is that in a sea of attorneys who didnt want to lift a finger to investigate the election, he looked for options and fought to uncover the truth.

Of course, hes not the only one the DOJ targeted this week. The same day Clarks house was raided, FBI agentsraided the home of Michael McDonald, Nevadas top GOP official.

His crime, according to the Justice Department and the Jan. 6 committee, was signing a document with five other Nevada Republican Party electors after the 2020 election signaling their support for Trump. Among the signatories of the purely symbolic document was state GOP secretary James DeGraffenreid, whom FBI agents tried but failed to find on Wednesday.

These are just a few of the people against whom the Jan. 6 committee has unleashed Garlands Justice Department. So far, the committee hassubpoenaed more than 100 lawmakers, local officials like McDonald and DeGraffenreid, internet and communications companies, Trump White House officials, and others. Make no mistake: the committee is using the DOJ as a weapon against its political enemies, and Garland is allowing it to happen.

We should have seen this coming. From the outset of his tenure, Garland has betrayed a willingness to use the DOJ as a partisan weapon. There was theraid on Project Veritas founder James OKeefes homelast November, and preceding thatmonths of illegal spyingon his organization.

Even worse, in some ways, was theunprecedented memoin October designed to threaten and silence parents whose only crime was to speak out about the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Garland smeared them as domestic terrorists and directed the Department of Justice and the FBI to launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.

But this rise in criminal conduct was pure fiction. Garland got it from a letter sent to President Joe Biden by the National School Boards Association, which made vague and unsubstantiated claims about threats and acts of violence against school board members from parents opposed to critical race theory. Less than a week after the letter was sent, Garlands memo appeared. It was a transparent ploy to get the federal government to intimidate parents into silence and suppress their First Amendment rights, which Garland was happy to do.

At every turn, Garland has shown himself hostile to the Bill of Rights and to law-abiding Americans who exercise those rights, and beholden to Democrat partisans and left-wing advocacy groups. He has brazenly allowed political influence to direct the Justice Departments considerable powers.

If you think Garlands DOJ isnt a threat to the republic, then you need to start paying attention, because the weaponization of federal law enforcement under Biden and Garland is almost certainly going to get much worse.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Merrick Garland's DOJ Is A Threat To The Republic - The Federalist