Biden’s attorney general puts domestic terror and civil rights at top of agenda
The new attorney general, Merrick Garland, has signaled an ambitious agenda to fight domestic terrorism in America including white supremacists and hate crimes, while bolstering civil rights and voting rights, critical areas that got short shrift from the Trump administration, say ex-federal prosecutors and members of Congress.
The shift at the Department of Justice represents one of the most stark turnarounds under Joe Biden from the Trump era. Under the previous attorney general, Bill Barr, the justice department was often seen as at Trump’s beck and call, the former president accused of treating it as virtually his own legal service.
But while Garland has won high marks for several early initiatives and his priorities, the former high-level judge still has his work cut out to rebuild key parts of the agency, say justice department observers.
In two congressional appearances this month, Garland indicated that the fight against domestic terrorism in the wake of the 6 January attack on the Capitol was his “top priority” and has requested new funding to that end, while making some early moves to expand civil rights and voting rights enforcement too.
On 12 May, Garland spelled out some of his early steps to counter domestic terrorism at a Senate hearing where he stressed efforts to work with foreign allies and tech firms to combat the growing threat of more violence after the Capitol riot, which according to the Washington Post has spurred more than 2,000 criminal charges against 411 suspects,
Garland, who in an earlier justice stint led the investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing that killed 168 people, noted in his testimony that the biggest domestic threat comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and
singled out “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.
Further, in an early civil rights initiative, the day after a grand jury convicted the white former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Garland personally announced that the department was opening an investigation into whether the Minneapolis police department had engaged in a possible pattern of discrimination and excessive force.
To oversee civil rights, Biden tapped two prominent veterans in the field: Kristen Clarke, who still awaits Senate confirmation to become the first black woman to lead the civil rights division, and Pamela Karlan the number two in the division. Both have drawn praise from ex-voting rights prosecutors
Karlan has already waded into the Arizona senate Republicans’ drive to overturn Joe Biden’s election win there by recruiting an inexperienced firm, Cyber Ninjas – run by a man who has indicated he is in sync with Trump’s erroneous conspiracy claims that the election was stolen – to lead a recount of 2.1m votes in the state’s largest county. Karlan last week wrote to a top state Arizona legislator voicing strong concerns that the recount could violate voter intimidation laws and breach ballot security rules.
Some former senior justice department lawyers and members of Congress are hopeful that Garland can reorient policies from those under
Barr and his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, but caution that Garland faces several impediments that could hinder expanding civil rights enforcement and tackling domestic terrorism
Michael Bromwich, a former justice inspector general, said in an interview that “you had a lot of very qualified people in the civil rights division who decided they could not put up with Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions [and so left]. I think they will have a personnel issue because of the hemorrhaging over the last few years.”
Likewise, Bromwich notes that shifting the FBI from its two decades’ focus on foreign terrorism post-9/11 to domestic terrorism will take some work. “The FBI is like an ocean liner, it’s hard to move it,” Bromwich said.
Still, “everybody now acknowledges that foreign terrorism is not as great a threat as domestic terrorism,” he added, noting that the FBI director, Chris Wray, understood the seriousness of the domestic threat and testified before Congress last year that the primary threat comes from far-right and white supremacist groups.
Some members of Congress see other big challenges ahead in rooting out rightwing extremism.
“Donald Trump threw kerosene on an already-growing fire of rightwing extremism,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “Now, the department needs a strategy to look upstream of the Confederate flag-toting insurrectionists of 6
January to the funders, organizers and platforms behind them.”
Similarly, Whitehouse sees some obstacles to curbing growing voter suppression efforts nationwide. “A top priority for big Republican donors is a sweeping, dark-money funded voter-suppression campaign. That’s why Republicans are pushing voter suppression bills in every state house in the country, and why the top operative from the rightwing campaign to capture our courts shifted entirely to votesuppressing last year.
“The Department of Justice needs a strong, talented voting rights team, and the Biden administration as a whole needs a strategy to counter the dark-money forces running that voter-suppression operation.” Whitehouse stressed.
To be sure, Garland’s early policy moves and budget requests suggest he is moving quickly to reorient the department’s priorities
To beef up civil rights work, Garland asked Congress for $209m – or $33m more than the year before – which he has stressed would be needed to prosecute the wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and to ensure voting rights are expanded as Republican efforts to curtail them in many states are now under way.
Further, on 4 May, Garland said in House testimony he was seeking an over $100m increase in the budget to fund fighting domestic terrorism: the new budget is looking for an extra $45m for the FBI to expand its domestic terrorism investigations, and $40m more for US attorneys to manage these cases.
The Democratic congressman Tom Malinowski said in an interview that the changes on Garland’s watch have been encouraging. “I was very happy to see their moves in Arizona and to reestablish the historic roles in enforcing civil rights and voting rights.”
Some department voting rights veterans are hopeful too about the changes under way.
“DoJ was missing in action in the Trump years in terms of civil rights enforcement – especially in the voting rights world,” said Gerry Hebert, who was a senior lawyer in the voting rights section for over 20 years.
But Karlan and Clarke, Hebert said, are: “superstars in the civil rights community … and will be game-changers because they know how vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws improves all Americans Lives.”