I n the Washington Post, Attorney General Merrick Garland has published a full-throated defense of the Department of Justice’s independence from political influences. Garland, who is currently facing an effort by House Republicans to hold him in contempt of Congress for his continued refusal to release a recording of former special counsel Robert Hur’s White House interview with President Biden, decried “false claims that the department is politicizing its work.”

Garland rightly deplores threats of violence — unlawful intimidations whose perpetrators are regularly prosecuted and convicted of serious crimes — against federal agents and federal prosecutors as “heinous.” Far less credible, however, is his insistence that the Justice Department “makes decisions about criminal investigations based only on the facts and the law” coupled with his dismissal of well-founded criticisms of the department’s legal decisions as “falsehoods” and “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, Garland’s defense defies what is obvious even to casual observers of his DOJ.

For years, Garland’s lawyers have been attempting to punish conservative state governments for using the established democratic process to enact conservative social policies their constituents support. As just one example: Last year, D.C.-based DOJ lawyers asked a federal court in Tennessee to invalidate a duly enacted state law that prohibits health-care providers from giving puberty blockers and other cross-sex hormones to children.

Using loaded, hyper-ideological language like “medically necessary care” to describe chemical interventions to prevent young children from experiencing puberty, the department sought to use the judicial system to overturn a piece of legislation passed overwhelmingly by the people of Tennessee’s elected representatives and signed into law by their elected governor.

Contrary to Garland’s claim that the DOJ’s prosecutorial decisions are “based only on the facts and the law,” the department has clearly succumbed to influence from political biases and progressive social priorities. Just last week, the DOJ announced that it had obtained an indictment against Dr. Eithan Haim, a Texas general surgeon who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital for secretly conducting transgender surgeries and treatments on minors. The hospital had violated a directive by the state’s governor as well as its own public commitment to discontinue such procedures.

Garland’s prosecutors accuse Dr. Haim of felony violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), despite the fact that the redacted documents he leaked to journalists did not identify any individuals and appear to have complied with HIPAA’s provisions regarding patient anonymity. One of Dr. Haim’s lawyers noted the extremely unusual nature of the prosecution and said it seemed the DOJ’s case was principally motivated by the fact that “the [federal] government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say.”

The DOJ’s prosecution of Dr. Haim is just the latest of a slew of prosecutorial decisions in politically-charged cases involving hotly-contested social issues. Last month, the DOJ sought and obtained years-long prison sentences against ten pro-life activists — including a 75-year-old woman in poor health — for occupying a Washington, D.C., abortion facility. The tactics of the pro-life activists in that case — namely, forcibly entering a building and refusing to leave in an attempt to disrupt operations — are similar in kind to what we have seen in recent weeks from many anti-Israel demonstrators on college campuses (at Princeton, for example). The latter, of course, are not being singled out by high-powered D.C. prosecutors for harsh, years-long jail terms.

Last month’s draconian sentencing is in line with a trend of stepped-up felony prosecutions of pro-life activists by this DOJ’s prosecutors. It’s part of a pattern of obviously politically influenced investigatory and prosecutorial maneuvers under this administration that can be traced back to earlier incidents. Recall Garland’s now-infamous October 2021 memo opening the door to the criminal prosecution of parents for their conduct at local school-board meetings. That memo, of course, was inspired in large part by a letter from the National School Boards Association to Garland. It suggested that parental opposition to progressive-dominated school boards’ decisions on Covid-19 school closures and the teaching of critical race theory could amount to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and ought to be prosecuted by the DOJ.

It’s clear that Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has a long and checkered history of bending to political demands and pressures from the likes of socially progressive activists seeking to punish moral and political opposition to practices like abortion and transgender operations on minors. Not even criminal investigations and prosecutions are immune from such pressure.

Threats of violence against anyone, federal agents and prosecutors included, are wrong and illegal. But that is not what is going on when observers — especially members of Congress and others trying to conduct legitimate and necessary oversight — quite reasonably call into question the political impartiality of this DOJ’s practices.

Members of the public, the media, and the political opposition are well within their rights to push back against what they perceive to be the transformation of the Department of Justice into an ideologically tainted vehicle of pursuing political retribution against Americans who challenge prevailing dogmas of social progressivism. This administration may embrace those dogmas as unquestionable orthodoxy. But they are by no means settled questions, and they continue to divide reasonable people of goodwill across the country. There’s nothing illegal about that.