attorney general firing back, rebuking republican claims the department of justice is being weaponized. these repeated attacks on the justice department are unprecedented and they are unfounded. reporter: in an intense, more than five-hour hearing, garland today defiant, even as he faces the threat of being held in contempt by house republicans for refusing to release the audio of president biden s interview with the special counsel over biden s handling of classified documents. i will not be intimidated. and the justice department will not be intimidated. reporter: and garland for the first time blasting false allegations that the doj and biden were behind the manhattan district attorney s prosecution and conviction of former president trump on 34 felony counts. that conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself. reporter: but republicans accusing the doj of playing politics, clearly angry about the manhattan jury s verdict.
you had a trial that the southern district, a case they failed to bring. alvin bragg pushed this case, got a manhattan jury, a judge who, by and large, sided with the prosecution on balance throughout the case and somehow brought a conviction from a manhattan jury. and i think, certainly, new york s legal system is going to be under a cloud after this, and i think given what has been going on with lawfare generally out there that the american people are really becoming upset about an institution that they bought thought was an arbiter for these kinds of disputes and instead has become a political player. paul: bill, we ve always thought that you have to put your trust in juries. right. paul: the jury system is what we have, and they are the closest to the case based on the facts that they heard in that six weeks. what do you make of this then?
like many and point out that he s a, he s a coward. he had every chance to defend himself. and the other thing is i cds up sean hannity and laura ingraham, these people talking about a manhattan jury, i got news for your manhattan juries are pretty good. the crime rate manhattan is way lower than it is in florida. i don t know what these people are running away from, but the crime rate manhattan yaks specifically is very low in jury say are willing to convict people if they re guilty. but what they re not going to do is they re going to config guilty people. that s as simple as that. you don t defend yourself. they re going to find you guilty as you know, president biden very, very briefly today, address the trump verdict. do you think he and his campaign should talk more about this? i do not i think it should talk about things that they re going to do. i wished him talk more about replacing the minimum wage. i wish i had talked more about how to getting people tools to deal with t
his predecessor rejected doing, but he revived these misdemeanors with three inventive ways of charging them, got a manhattan jury pool, a manhattan jury selected and very favorable jury instructions. so by the time all of that kind of crescendoed at the end of the week, i wasn t shocked. once you heard there was a verdict, it was pretty clear that it was probably going to be a conviction. paul: so, i mean, do you think this was a foregone conclusion, or were there steps that the defense could have taken that would have been better? well, i mean, there s always room, you know, to do the armchair quarterback at the expense to of fellow lawyers. i think that the defense strategy overall was the right one which was to focus on the credibility of michael cohen, don t pick fights with other witnesses that are basically either friendly or not hurting you and draw all of the jury s attention to the idea that you can t possibly convict anybody no matter what your thoughts are about that pers