In an interview, Attorney General Merrick Garland forcefully pushed back on claims from Donald Trump and his supporters that the federal cases against the former president are timed to disrupt his 2024 campaign – and said that if President Joe Biden asked him to take action against his predecessor, he'd resign.

What You Need To Know

  • The Justice Department is blasting Republicans’ effort to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt over his refusal to turn over unredacted materials related to the special counsel probe into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents
  • The department in that letter rejected Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comers' demand to turn over the unredacted audio of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter
  • The department said it has so far complied with all of the other asks from the House Judiciary and Oversight committees
  • The pushback could potentially set up a scenario where the president would have to exert executive privilege to halt the release of the audio recording

"I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard," Garland told CBS News' "60 Minutes" on Sunday. "And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen."

In terms of timing, Garland said that "the Justice Department has general practices about not making significant, overt steps or charging within a month or so of an election, and we are clearly outside that time frame in these cases."

"Prosecutors, special counsel, they follow the facts and the law where they lead," he added.

When asked if the charges, and their timing, were meant to harm Trump's reelection changes, Garland said "that's absolutely not true."

"Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan," he said. "They don't allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations."

The Justice Department is at the center of not only indictments against Trump that include an effort to overturn the 2020 election and wrongly keeping classified documents, but also cases involving Biden’s son Hunter, the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol and investigations into classified documents found in the president’s home and office. Garland has appointed three separate special counsels.

Garland said the president has never tried to meddle in the investigations, and he dismissed criticism from Republicans that he was going easy on the president’s son, Hunter, who was recently indicted on a gun charge after a plea deal in his tax case fell apart. Hunter Biden is due in a Delaware court this week.

“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends,” he said. ”We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”

Garland choked up when talking about his concerns over violence, particularly as judges and prosecutors assigned to the Trump cases got death threats.

“People can argue with each other as much as they want and as vociferously as they want. But the one thing they may not do is use violence and threats of violence to alter the outcome,” he said. “American people must protect each other. They must ensure that they treat each other with civility and kindness, listen to opposing views, argue as vociferously as they want, but refrain from violence and threats of violence. That’s the only way this democracy will survive.”