Senator Adam Schiff said in a recent interview that Attorney General Merrick Garland proceeded too cautiously in pursuing criminal cases against Donald Trump, arguing that Garland’s effort to restore the Justice Department’s image of non-partisanship delayed investigations into the former president and his inner circle.
In an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Senator Adam Schiff criticized Merrick Garland’s approach as attorney general, saying he did not act quickly enough in pursuing former President Donald Trump.
Schiff rejected Republican claims that the Justice Department was weaponized under Garland, calling them “a complete fiction and fabrication,” according to a transcript of the conversation published by The New Yorker. He said the department moved "with alacrity" against the “foot soldiers” who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but “not at all for an entire year against the higher-ups.”
Asked by Remnick whether Garland moved too slowly or too cautiously, Schiff replied, “I absolutely do. Yeah.” He argued that Garland’s caution stemmed from a desire to repair the department’s reputation after what Schiff described as political abuses during Trump’s first term. “The Justice Department in the first Trump [administration] was abused and made partisan, and he wished to restore the department’s reputation for independence,” Schiff said. “Now, what they did in the first Trump Justice Department is peanuts compared to today. But nevertheless, Merrick Garland wanted to restore the reputation of the department for strict nonpartisanship. And that made him very reluctant to pursue an investigation of the president. Too reluctant.”
Schiff contended that this reluctance had concrete legal and political consequences. “Ultimately, that gave the Supreme Court the time it needed to drag things out further and make the case against Trump go away completely when it could have been brought to fruition,” he said in the interview. He added that, had the Justice Department acted sooner, “we might be in a very different place today,” suggesting that earlier prosecutions could have altered the trajectory of the cases surrounding Trump.
In Schiff’s view, Garland’s “laudable aim” of demonstrating strict nonpartisanship, when taken too far, “amounted to a kind of immunity for the president.” He argued that by moving slowly at the top while acting swiftly against lower-level rioters, the department unintentionally strengthened Trump’s position as legal challenges wound their way through the courts.
