PRP Letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland

Presidential Reform Project Co-Directors Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith sent the following letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

Bauer and Goldsmith urge Attorney General Garland to restore crucial norms to the Justice Department that will strengthen the agency’s political independence. The letter highlights reforms DOJ should enact in the following areas—overall Department independence, investigations of prior investigations, pre-inauguration investigations of Presidential candidates or campaigns, other significant norms to be translated into written Department policy, and Special Counsel policy.

From the letter:

On behalf of the Presidential Reform Project, we write to urge you to adopt several reforms within the Justice Department in order to reaffirm and strengthen “the norms that will ensure the Department’s adherence to the Rule of Law,” as you put it in your confirmation hearing. Merrick Garland, Testimony before the U.S. S. Comm. on the Judiciary (Feb. 22, 2021). These proposed reforms summarize a much longer treatment of each of these reform issues in our book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (2020).

Read the full letter to Attorney General Garland here: