One high note was when Garland explicitly noted that (conservatives on) the Supreme Court gutted voting rights in the Shelby County case, and therefore Congress needs to act now to return to the DOJ the power to defend voting rights against state governments hell-bent on racialized voter suppression.
He discussed the horrors of Sedition Day in admirable length, concluding: "The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law - whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead."
One would expect, of course, nothing less. He left far more ambiguous, however, the question about what will be done with people in Congress who conspired to overthrow our government.
Garland then noted that "violence" is happening across America:
"We have all seen that Americans who serve and interact with the public at every level - many of whom make our democracy work every day - have been unlawfully targeted with threats of violence and actual violence."
He mentioned that "election officials and election workers; airline flight crews; school personnel; journalists; local elected officials; U.S. Senators and Representatives; and judges, prosecutors, and police officers have been threatened and/or attacked," and that it was the work of the DOJ to hold the perpetrators to account.
Virtually all of the acts of violence directed at ending our form of government were perpetrated by followers of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Garland, however, chose not to mention that, or even to imply that Trump and the Republican Party following him have been at the core of most of this political violence, to the point that many of them are raising money over it.
The two non-partisan exceptions to Republican-led violence were a man with no discernible political motivation who attacked a federal judge who'd ruled against him, and a handful of anti-fascist protesters (who also distrust Democrats) in Portland and a few other cities who damaged property and engaged police in riots.
None of these represented efforts to overturn a presidential election and end democracy in America.
But instead of calling out the political violence being incited and promoted daily on rightwing media and exclusively by Republican politicians, Garland's sole reference to "white supremacy" was in the context of the era in the 1870s when Reconstruction collapsed.
In this speech he had the opportunity to differentiate between the politically motivated violence that happened on Sedition Day and the more random violence of a lone pissed-off criminal or people protesting killings by police. He could have made that clear.
Instead, he specifically referenced that one criminal (whose picture is sure to pop up soon on Fox "News" as it already is on message boards), who stalked and attacked a federal judge two months ago:
"[I]n 2020, a federal judge in New Jersey was targeted by someone who had appeared before her in court. That person compiled information about where the judge and her family lived and went to church. That person found the judge's home, shot and killed her son, and injured her husband."
This man's crime was completely unrelated to January 6th, unrelated to the politically motivated violence we're seeing on airplanes, and unrelated to the armed white supremacist militias who tried to end our form of government while waving their Trump flags.
So why would Garland conflate that one man's crime with those of 10,000 Trump followers on January 6th in Washington DC and thousands of acts and threats of violence by militia groups around the country since in his very next sentence:
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