The political-legal establishment is buzzing about who might replace Attorney General Merrick Garland if Kamala Harris wins the presidential election and how that person should steer a post-Garland Department of Justice in new ways. “My assumption is that members of the cabinet and sub-cabinet will move on and that, if Kamala is elected, she will want to put in her own team,” said former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who went to college with Garland and who brought him in as a senior official to the Clinton Justice Department, reports Politico. She praised Garland for restoring “the integrity and morale of the department” and for being “staunch and successful” on fighting crime and protecting national security. Other Democrats have less charitable assessments of Garland, pointing to missteps that include the appointment of special counsel Robert Hur to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents; the indulgence of special counsel David Weiss' allegedly dubious criminal cases against Biden’s son Hunter, and the delay in investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump for his effort to steal the 2020 election.
Potential Garland successors include people like Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and a former high-ranking official in the Obama Justice Department. Others include North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who previously worked as the state’s attorney general and introduced Harris at the Democratic convention, and and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, another former state attorney general and convention speaker. A long-shot contender is Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who clerked for Garland when he was a judge, and wants the job. While his tenure as U.S. Attorney has been solid, he may be too politically inexperienced to make the leap to attorney general without some more stops along the way. As a former state attorney general herself, Harris likely has a good idea of what the job entails along with some ideas for how it should be done. One common theme is that what the department needs (what the department lacks in Garland) is a more politically confident and adept figure — someone who will not shy away from taking assertive positions in politically charged cases even if doing so upsets much of the public, and someone who can effectively defend those decisions in the political Harris "should be looking for an attorney general who will aggressively — but within the law and the evidence — finish the uncompleted work of securing convictions against all those responsible for Jan. 6, including at the very top,” said a former Obama administration official who has helped vet Democratic candidates for attorney general.
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