Attorney General Merrick B. Garland spent more than 40 years trying to transcend partisan combat in the apolitical pursuit of prosecutorial and judicial independence. But over the past seven years, he has found himself embroiled in a succession of bruising political controversies.
It began in 2016, when Mr. Garland — an appellate judge widely regarded as moderate — was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, only to be blocked by Senate Republicans in a brazen and ultimately successful power play to stack the court with conservatives.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Garland was preparing for his confirmation hearings as attorney general, drafting remarks that focused on a return to “norms” and “regular order” at the Justice Department after four years of chaos and political meddling, when Trump loyalists ransacked the Capitol.
He took office two months later. Since then, Mr. Garland has presided over a period of unrelenting turmoil. That has included two federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump and one against the president’s son, Hunter Biden, along with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the improper retention of classified documents by the man who nominated him, President Biden.
Mr. Garland, 70, was born in Chicago to middle-class Jewish parents and attended Harvard, where he got undergraduate and law degrees. From there, he followed a classic trajectory for ambitious young lawyers in Washington: clerking for a liberal Supreme Court justice, William J. Brennan Jr., working as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti in the Carter administration and serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Washington office.
He rose quickly through a succession of top department posts in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, taking over the critical post of principal deputy attorney general in 1994, handling many of the department’s day-to-day operations. In that role, Mr. Garland oversaw domestic terrorism cases, including the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, taking the unusual step of personally representing the government at preliminary hearings of defendants like Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, who were ultimately convicted.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, where he established a reputation as a strong advocate for First Amendment rights with a marked pro-law enforcement bent.
In one of his best-known cases, Mr. Garland was part of an appellate panel that in 2003 unanimously ruled that federal courts did not have standing to hear challenges from detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.
As attorney general, he has bolstered the department’s civil rights and environmental divisions, and largely succeeded in restoring a sense of stability among line prosecutors.
But his tenure has been defined by Mr. Trump and the events of Jan. 6.
From his first months, the monumental task of prosecuting more than 1,000 cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol has dominated much of his job.
In August 2022, he signed off on a search of Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, to retrieve sensitive government documents the former president had brought there and refused to return. In November, he appointed a special counsel to take over both that investigation and the election inquiry against the former president, which culminated in two indictments of Mr. Trump this summer.
And if he has become a target of the right for taking those actions, he is no darling of the left, either — drawing intense criticism for the deliberate, some say sluggish, pace of the Trump prosecutions.
THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS