Referenews

Earlier this month, Garland appointed a special counsel to determine whether laws were broken in connection with the presence of the apparently-classified records at the Penn Biden Center in Washington and later at Biden’s Delaware home.

Asked if he had any regrets about the way the matters had been handled thus far, Garland called the law enforcement decisions “appropriate” and unaffected by politics.

“That is what we’ve done and that is what we will continue to do,” Garland said, flanked by a Justice Department task force handling fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn the federal constitutional right to abortion.

While Garland said Monday that the Justice Department has pursued the Trump- and Biden-related cases “without regard to who the subjects are,” there remain special protections for a sitting president under longstanding Justice Department legal opinions. Those opinions preclude criminal charges against a president while he remains in office, but they do not rule out the possibility of such charges once a president leaves office.