Biden to nominate Garland as AG
President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate Judge Merrick Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, as attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday,
If confirmed, Garland, a centrist judge who sometimes has disappointed liberals with his rulings, would inherit a department that grew more politicized under President Donald Trump than at any point since Watergate.
Garland will face vexing decisions about civil rights issues that boiled to the surface this year, whether to investigate Trump and his administration, and how to proceed with a tax investigation into Biden’s son Hunter.
The nomination is expected to be announced Thursday. It will end weeks of deliberation by Biden, who had struggled to make a decision as he considered who to fill for a position that he became convinced would play an outsized role in his presidency. Biden’s nominations are expected to broadly win confirmation as Democrats are poised to take control of the Senate.
Biden, who served as the longtime top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee and chaired it from 1987 to 1995, was said by aides to have weighed what makes a successful attorney general and put pressure on himself to make the right pick.
Outside groups also pressed him during the transition to appoint someone who’s a minority and would take a far more confrontational position with law enforcement.
Biden also intends to nominate Lisa Monaco, a former homeland security adviser to President Barack Obama, as deputy attorney general; Vanita Gupta, the head of the department’s civil rights division under Obama, as the No. 3; and Kristen Clarke, a civil rights lawyer, as assistant attorney general for civil rights, which is expected to be a major focus of the department under Biden.
Garland initially was considered a long shot for attorney general, in part because he’s seen as politically moderate. In close cases involving criminal law, he has been significantly more likely to side with the police and prosecutors over people accused of crimes than other Democratic appointees. He also leaned toward deferring to the government in Guantanamo detainee cases that pit state security powers against individual rights.
Moreover, judges only occasionally are elevated directly to the position. The last was Judge Michael Mukasey of U.S. District Court, whom George W. Bush appointed to run the Justice Department in 2007.
Bid en also was said to have considered Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general in the final years of the Obama administration; Doug Jones, the former Alabama senator; and Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts who briefly ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was nominated by Obama in 2016 to fill the position left on the Supreme Court by the death of Antonin Scalia.
While the nomination dismayed some liberals, Senate Republicans — led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — refused to vote on his nomination, saying that it shouldn't be filled in an election year.
Ultimately, Trump filled the vacancy with Judge Neil Gorsuch, a conservative in the mold of Scalia.