Garland Rebukes Attacks on Justice Dept.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, facing the prospect of a contempt vote in Congress, lashed out at House Republicans on Tuesday, accusing his critics of seeking to undermine the rule of law, peddling conspiracy theories and spreading falsehoods.

The usually mild-mannered Mr. Garland pushed back against the false accusation that the Justice Department was somehow behind the prosecution and subsequent conviction of former President Donald J. Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. The case was brought by Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who as a local prosecutor is not under the control of Mr. Biden or his administration.

“That conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself,” Mr. Garland said in an opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee.

His remarks amounted to a vigorous defense of the department as Mr. Trump and his allies have escalated their attacks on law enforcement after his conviction in Manhattan court last week and as the former president has been shadowed by other criminal cases.

Among Mr. Trump’s more extraordinary claims in recent weeks was the highly misleading statement that the Biden administration was prepared to kill him when the F.B.I. conducted a court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 to retrieve classified documents.

“This is dangerous,” Mr. Garland said in response to a question by Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, about the consequences of such an assertion. The claim, the attorney general said, distorted a standard Justice Department use-of-force policy that had also applied to a search of President Biden’s Delaware home.