Merrick Garland says he’s ‘watching’ Jan 6 hearings amid calls for Trump to face criminal charges

Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that he’s following the January 6 hearings amid calls for former President Donald Trump face criminal charges.

During a press conference on gun violence on Monday, CNN Justice correspondent Evan Perez asked Mr Garland if he has had a chance to look at the hearings conducted by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot and if he’s learned anything that could be useful for the Justice Department.

“I am watching and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live,” Mr Garland said. “I can assure you that the January 6th prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well.”

He added that he wouldn’t be able to say what his own “personal response” to the hearings would be.

“The Justice Department’s long-standing position is that we don’t comment on ongoing investigations,” Mr Garland said. “We do that both for the viability of our investigations and because it’s the right thing to do with respect to the civil liberties of people under investigation.”

“Our investigations generally proceed quietly and in secret so that we don’t tell witnesses where we are, we don’t want them to know, we want truthful answers. As we approach, we want to be able to do our subpoenas and search warrants without any risk,” Mr Garland said. “Eventually that information comes out ... in the form of our search warrants and affidavits, it comes out in our orders ... in our pleadings and eventually if there are charges.”

“But for our investigations to proceed in an efficient way, we have learned, over many, many years, that this is the way our investigations should go,” Mr Garland added.

“We have charged well over 800 people now in connection with January 6th, some of them have pled, but others are facing proceedings. And for us to comment about evidence, some of which regards them, some of which regards others, could affect their cases and could affect our ability to proceed in an effective way,” Mr Garland said, adding that the investigation isn’t constricted “in any way”.

Mr Garland’s refusal to comment on the investigation comes as members of the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol siege are pushing the department to pursue criminal charges.

“There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election, that I don’t see evidence the justice department is investigating,” Adam Schiff, a Democratic committee member from California, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “I would like to see the justice department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump.”

Fellow committee member, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, told CNN’s State of the Union that “one of the conventions that was crushed during the Trump administration was respect by politicians for the independence of the law enforcement function”.

“Attorney General Garland is my constituent, and I don’t browbeat my constituents [but] he knows, his staff knows, US attorneys know, what’s at stake here,” he added. “They know the importance of it, but I think they are rightfully paying close attention to precedent in history as well as the facts of this case.”