Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, facing the prospect of a contempt vote in Congress, on Tuesday denounced attacks on the Justice Department by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, including one he labeled a “conspiracy theory” and others he called “baseless and extremely dangerous falsehoods.”
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, the usually mild-mannered Mr. Garland bluntly pushed back against Republican demands that he turn over audio of a special counsel’s interview of President Biden over his handling of classified documents. He linked those calls to other criticism they have directed toward prosecutors at a time of “heinous threats of violence being directed at the Justice Department’s career public servants.”
“These repeated attacks on the Justice Department are unprecedented, and they are unfounded,” he said. “These attacks have not, and they will not, influence our decision making. I view contempt as a serious matter. But I will not jeopardize the ability of our prosecutors and agents to do their jobs effectively in future investigations. I will not be intimidated.”
The remarks amounted to a vigorous defense of the integrity of federal law enforcement as Mr. Trump and his allies have aggressively impugned it, a campaign they stepped up after his conviction in New York State court last week on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.
Republicans voiced anger at the outcome of that case — and three other criminal indictments against Mr. Trump, all of which they portrayed as an organized Democratic conspiracy — along with the separate issue of Mr. Garland’s refusal to turn over the audio of Mr. Biden’s interview.
Mr. Garland had assigned a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate how classified documents accompanied Mr. Biden when he left the vice presidency. Mr. Hur concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Mr. Biden knowingly retained classified files without authorization.
The White House has turned over a transcript of Mr. Hur’s interview with the president, but Republicans subpoenaed the audio. Last month, Mr. Biden invoked executive privilege — a constitutional prerogative to lawfully keep secret certain internal information concerning the executive branch — and Mr. Garland declined to comply with the G.O.P. demand.
In response, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight Committee have recommended holding Mr. Garland in contempt.
Before the hearing, the Justice Department sent Congress a four-page Office of Legal Counsel memo approving the invocation of privilege, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. It said the transcript was sufficient to meet lawmakers’ legitimate oversight needs and producing the audio would undermine “the department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations in the future — in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important.”
But the hearing frequently veered away from the issue of executive privilege and toward grievances Republicans have with the various criminal proceedings against Mr. Trump, including federal and Georgia cases involving his attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election and a federal case over his retention of classified documents.
Against that backdrop, several Republican lawmakers, including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and Tom McClintock of California, highlighted that a former Biden appointee in the Justice Department, Matthew Colangelo, had joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office in December 2022 and participated in the trial against Mr. Trump. Mr. Colangelo was previously the top deputy to the department’s No. 3 official.
Mr. Gaetz accused Mr. Garland of “dispatching” Mr. Colangelo to “get Trump.” But Mr. Garland said he had nothing to do with Mr. Colangelo’s decision to apply for a position prosecuting white-collar crime in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“I’m saying it’s false,” Mr. Garland said. “I did not dispatch Mr. Colangelo anywhere.”
In his opening statement, Mr. Garland also denigrated the broader Republican claim that the Justice Department — which had declined to move forward with a case related to the Mr. Trump’s hush-money payment during the 2016 election — was behind the decision by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to proceed with the matter.
The attacks on the Justice Department accompany “false claims that a jury verdict in a state trial, brought by a local district attorney, was somehow controlled by the Justice Department,” Mr. Garland said. “That conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself.”
They also come as House Republicans have threatened to pull funding that would curtail the Justice Department’s operations. A day earlier, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, proposed forbidding federal grants to state prosecutor offices that investigate former presidents. He also proposed defunding the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing two criminal investigations into Mr. Trump.
As the hearing began on Tuesday, Mr. Jordan declared: “Justice is no longer blind in America. Today it is driven by politics. Example No. 1 is President Trump.”
Democrats on the committee dismissed the actions of their G.O.P. colleagues as performative antics. Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, referring to Mr. Jordan’s opening statement, said Republicans’ real problem was that the justice system would hold accountable even a former president who had committed crimes.
“They are about to nominate a convicted felon, and they do not know how to cope with that,” Mr. Schiff said. “They do not know how to cope with the justice system that, in fact, treats Donald Trump the same as it would any other citizen, and so they have to push these conspiracy theories that they know are patently false.”
Among the more extraordinary claims by Mr. Trump and his allies in recent weeks was the false statement that the Biden administration authorized the F.B.I. to kill him when the F.B.I. conducted a court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 to retrieve classified documents.
The claim was based on a distortion of the standard Justice Department use-of-force policy that is routinely included in search warrant documentation packages. Mr. Garland noted that the same policy “was part of the package for the search of President Biden’s home” as well.
“This is dangerous,” Mr. Garland said when asked about the consequences of such an assertion. “It raises the threats of violence against prosecutors and career agents. The allegation is false.”
