WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland told a House committee on Wednesday that Republican threats to defund the FBI would be "catastrophic" if carried out and that the Justice Department did not exist to do anyone's political bidding.
Garland pushed back against Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Department of Justice for its handling of the indictments of Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
"Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate," Garland told the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
"I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people."
Some of Trump's hardline Republican allies have called for a defunding of the FBI to protest its investigation into and prosecution of more than 1,140 Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to overturn his election defeat.
Garland warned that carrying out that threat would leave the nation "naked" to everything from the "malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party" to "domestic violent extremists."
"I just cannot imagine the consequences of defunding the FBI," Garland said. "They would be catastrophic."
Wednesday marked Garland's first testimony before Congress since two historic firsts: the department's criminal charges against a former U.S. president and against a sitting president's adult child.
It also comes a week after the Republican-led House launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, related to Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings and as congressional inaction threatens to cause the fourth partial U.S. government shutdown in a decade beginning next month.
The White House has dismissed the impeachment probe as politically motivated and unsubstantiated. The committee's ranking Democrat, Jerrold Nadler, on Wednesday accused Republicans of wasting "countless taxpayer dollars" on investigations into Biden "to find evidence for an absurd impeachment."
Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Garland last autumn, has twice secured indictments of Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified records and for his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has pleaded not guilty to those charges and to two state criminal indictments he faces in New York and Georgia.
The former president has repeatedly verbally attacked Smith, potential witnesses, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the election subversion case, saying the prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.
Republicans have also been critical of the department's handling of a five-year-long tax investigation into Hunter Biden, 53.
The younger Biden was set in July to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts and to agree to enroll in a program to avert a gun charge as part of a deal with the then-U.S. Attorney for Delaware, David Weiss.
The deal collapsed after a federal judge questioned its terms.
Shortly before that, an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower who worked on the criminal tax probe also claimed that the Justice Department stymied Weiss from pursuing more serious tax charges by failing to appoint him sooner as special counsel, so that he could pursue the cases in either Washington, D.C., or Central California. Hunter Biden lives in California.
Amid mounting Republican criticism, Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel so he could continue to investigate and possibly pursue tax charges in other federal districts.
Weiss' office this month charged Hunter Biden with three counts related to purchase and possession of a firearm while he was using illegal drugs. He intends to plead not guilty.
Republicans on Wednesday grilled Garland about the Hunter Biden case.
"Has anyone from the White House provided direction at any time to you personally or to any senior officials at the DOJ regarding how the Hunter Biden investigated was to be carried out?" Republican congressman Mike Johnson asked.
"No," Garland said.
The attorney general also defended how the investigation was carried out under Weiss, saying he never "intruded" into Weiss' work and telling Congress that Weiss always had "full authority to conduct his investigation" as he saw fit and only recently sought special counsel status.
Ironic how they had no problem with Trump treating the DOJ as his own personal attack dog.
There's no irony to conservativism, because there's no objective idealism. It's not even like they are moving the goalposts. It's like every conservative has a tetherball post strapped to their back, and they play wherever they happen to be standing at the time. What they did yesterday was decided based on where they were yesterday, which is not necessarily where they will be tomorrow. Their goal is to win whatever battle they want to win at the time they want to win it, and because they are righteous, anything they do to achieve victory is inherently justified by them wanting to do it. That's what conservativism has always been.
While they are not in power, their goal will be to dismantle the organizations that have power over them. When they are in power, their goal will be to strengthen their own power and keep it for as long as possible.
In the short term you're not wrong. But assuming they have no long term goals ignores history. They're following a strategy created in the 1950s, and it took a couple of generations before it bore fruit.
Except that the strategy is to create distrust and instability to take and maintain power. Conservatives are not trying to spread freedom or democracy or equality. Conservativism is defined by who is a member of the conservative in-group. In the 1950s, it was the white capitalists that benefitted from institutional and economic racism, so they developed the Southern Strategy to align the conservative party with the Klan. When that became a problem, they shifted to attack intellectualism as elitist and anti-business. They attack government itself. They aren't fighting for an ideal, as evidenced by how quickly they will abandon any ideal when it suits them.
Consider abortion. Trump is now saying he won't ban abortion because that's what helps him right now. Other conservatives are criticizing Trump because that's what helps them right now. Banning abortion isn't the goal, it is the means to maintain power. Christians want power over women, and Republicans want to win elections. But conservatives want abortions when they need them, because they aren't actually opposed to abortion.
Take any ostensibly conservative position. It might seem like a foundational pillar of their platform, but give it a shove and you'll find conservatices will evolve on the position or abandon it entirely the moment they benefit directly.
The way to take and hold power is to create an in group that the law protects, and an out-group that the law restricts. Convince enough voters that they are members of the in-group, and then religiously protect those interests. Who is in, who is out, and what interests, those are all negotiable ephemera, existing in the moment as needed.
They also want to take control by reassigning government functions to private interests. It's easier to dismantle the government before sale when people think it's useless as it is.
Or appointed an AG that was 10000000000000000% politically motivated.