Merrick Garland's 'flawless' work in Oklahoma City crucial in white supremacy fight
The message was a stark one. “America is in serious decline,” the person wrote. “Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”
It reads like an entry on a message board popular with the insurrectionists who broke into the US Capitol on 6 January – expressing a sentiment at once shocking and shockingly routine in 2021 America.
But the words are from 1992 America, written in a letter to a newspaper by Timothy McVeigh, who three years later would carry out the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in US history. An anti-government, white supremacist army veteran, McVeigh set off a truck bomb underneath a day care facility in a federal building, killing 168 people including 19 children.
The attack spawned the largest criminal case in US history. With conspiracy theories threatening the public trust even in those relatively innocent times for the truth, and the contemporaneous murder trial of OJ Simpson having fed widespread disillusionment with the American justice system, federal prosecutors knew that they would be working under a microscope.
But the lead prosecutor dispatched by Washington to Oklahoma a day after the bombing, Merrick Garland, demonstrated a particularly honed sense for what the investigation required and how to deliver it, according to former colleagues.
Now, after 23 years as one of the country’s top appeals court judges, Garland, 68, is once again returning to a lead prosecutor role, tapped by Joe Biden to run the justice department as attorney general – with the threat from anti-government extremists again on the agenda.
“We had tremendous confidence in him, and I think his handling of that very challenging situation was flawless,” said Jamie Gorelick, Garland’s boss at the time of the Oklahoma City attack and one of the country’s longest-serving deputy attorneys general. “If you look at his background, he was very well suited for working both with the FBI and the other investigative agencies, and well-regarded by all of them, and he had a wonderful way of bringing people together on the ground.”
Stewing in pernicious lies about election fraud spread by Donald Trump, the United States is once again facing a rising threat of violence from anti-Washington extremists and white supremacists, according to a rare bulletin warning issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security – and the Oklahoma City attack is riding high in some minds.
“The Oklahoma City bombing and its legacy are critical to understanding the domestic extremist movements of today,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a report last year.
In spite of his being the target of an infamous Republican stunt four years ago that blocked his nomination to the US supreme court, Garland is expected to be confirmed by the US Senate as attorney general in the coming weeks.
People who know Garland from his work in Oklahoma believe that the country could have no better ally in the fight against homegrown extremism, a broad job whose challenges include not only prosecuting the recent insurrectionists but also preventing the next attack, disrupting extremist groups on social media, rooting out white supremacists from police forces and the military, and restoring public trust in the rule of law.
“He played a pivotal role here, but I think, fast-forward to 2021, and he can play a remarkable role in bringing our country back together,” said Kari Watkins, executive director of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. “Judge Garland is a unifier. He brought families to the table, he brought survivors, first responders to the table that were still dealing with loss, and surgeries, and putting their lives back together.”
Federal authorities have charged at least 150 people in the invasion of the Capitol, in which five people died including one police officer and one woman trampled to death. Two additional police officers died by suicide “in the aftermath of the battle”, police said.
Asked how Garland might handle the challenge ahead, Gorelick pointed to their work together in the mid-1990s on a wave of bombings and arsons of African American churches in the south carried out by white men, and to separate prosecutions of attacks on abortion clinics.
“I would say that his experience in Oklahoma City – and the work we needed to do in response to the church bombings that took place when we were at main justice in the mid-1990s, as well as the abortion clinic bombings – grounded him in the importance of civil rights,” Gorelick said, “and in the importance of coordinated and strong approaches to dealing with the enforcement of our laws relating to civil rights and protecting the country against terrorism of any sort.”
In a speech accepting Biden’s nomination one day after the Capitol attack, Garland invoked the historical roots of the justice department as an agency to “slay the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan and its offshoots” and “ensure civil rights which were under militant attack”.
Those principles “echo today in the priorities that lie before us, from ensuring racial equity in our justice system to meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism,” Garland said.
Through each turn of his career, Garland’s work in Oklahoma City has been revisited and commended. After he was nominated to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia by Bill Clinton, Garland received a letter of support from Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Frank Keating.
“Merrick distinguished himself in a situation where he had to lead a highly complicated investigation and make quick decisions during critical times,” Keating wrote.
Nominating him for a supreme court seat, Barack Obama called Garland’s work on the Oklahoma City bombing case “particularly notable and inspiring”.
“In the wake of the bombing, he traveled to Oklahoma to oversee the case, and in the ensuing months coordinated every aspect of the government’s response,” Obama said, “working with federal agents, rescue workers, local officials, and others to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Informed by the attorney general, Janet Reno, while he was still en route to Oklahoma that he would be conducting an initial court appearance with McVeigh on a military base that same evening, Garland made a defining decision, insisting over the objections of military police that the hearing be open to the media, to ensure transparency and discourage conspiracy thinking.
During the investigation, Garland chose which agency would take the lead in pursuing which line of evidence. With the Simpson trial in mind, he insisted on pristine procedure in the collection of evidence, repeatedly seeking subpoenas and search warrant requests – “everything by the book”, said Gorelick.
He advocated for the relocation of the trial to Denver to avoid accusations of a spoiled jury. He hand-picked the prosecution team and demanded a strong defense counsel. And he made time and space for victims and their families, often reaching out to them personally.
“He used the power of persuasion rather than command,” said Gorelick.
In a videotaped oral history for the Oklahoma memorial recorded in 2013 and viewed by the Guardian, Garland said he was keenly aware of the challenges of bringing a major case to trial years after the crime.
“It’s the issue about conspiracy theories, about ‘Maybe somebody else did it’ or ‘You hadn’t done everything’, or ‘You hadn’t found – ’,” Garland said in the oral history. “I wanted to be sure we had done everything we could possibly do to find every person who was involved.
“We just wanted to be sure that we – when we had somebody, that it was the right person, and that it wasn’t the wrong person, and that we had the evidence necessary to convict.”
McVeigh was convicted by a jury on 11 out of 11 charges, sentenced to death and executed in 2001. His main accomplice, Terry Nichols, was convicted and is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. Two other accomplices became key witnesses for prosecutors.
“That case turned out to be something the world was watching – I think eerily close to where we are as a country today,” said Watkins. “People are watching to see what happens.”