We conduct every investigation guided by the same norms. And we adhere to those norms even when, and especially when, the circumstances we face are not normal.
Adhering to the department’s long-standing norms is essential to our work in defending our democracy, particularly at a time when we are confronting a rise in violence and unlawful threats of violence in our shared public spaces and directed at those who serve the public.
We have all seen that Americans who serve and interact with the public at every level — many of whom make our democracy work every day — have been unlawfully targeted with threats of violence and actual violence.
Across the country, election officials and election workers; airline flight crews; school personnel; journalists; local elected officials; U.S. Senators and Representatives; and judges, prosecutors, and police officers have been threatened and/or attacked.
These are our fellow citizens — who administer our elections, ensure our safe travel, teach our children, report the news, represent their constituents, and keep our communities safe.
Some have been told that their offices would be bombed. Some have been told that they would be murdered, and precisely how — that they would be hanged; that they would be beheaded.
Police officers, who put their lives on the line every day to serve our communities, have been targeted with extraordinary levels of violence.
Flight crews have been assaulted. Journalists have been targeted. School personnel and their families have been threatened.
A member of Congress was threatened in a gruesome voicemail that asked if she had ever seen what a 50-caliber shell does to a human head. Another member of Congress — an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient — received threats that left her “terrified for [her] family.”
And in 2020, a federal judge in New Jersey was targeted by someone who had appeared before her in court. That person compiled information about where the judge and her family lived and went to church. That person found the judge’s home, shot and killed her son, and injured her husband.
These acts and threats of violence are not associated with any one set of partisan or ideological views.
But they are permeating so many parts of our national life that they risk becoming normalized and routine if we do not stop them.
That is dangerous for people’s safety. And it is deeply dangerous for our democracy.
In a democracy, people vote, argue, and debate — often vociferously — in order to achieve the policy outcomes they desire. But in a democracy, people must not employ violence or unlawful threats of violence to affect that outcome. Citizens must not be intimidated from exercising their constitutional rights to free expression and association by such unlawful conduct.
The Justice Department will continue to investigate violence and illegal threats of violence, disrupt that violence before it occurs, and hold perpetrators accountable.
We have marshaled the resources of the department to address the rising violence and criminal threats of violence against election workers, against flight crews, against school personnel, against journalists, against members of Congress, and against federal agents, prosecutors, and judges.
In 2021, the department charged more defendants in criminal threat cases than in any year in at least the last five.
As we do this work, we are guided by our commitment to protect civil liberties, including the First Amendment rights of all citizens.
The department has been clear that expressing a political belief or ideology, no matter how vociferously, is not a crime. We do not investigate or prosecute people because of their views.
Peacefully expressing a view or ideology — no matter how extreme — is protected by the First Amendment. But illegally threatening to harm or kill another person is not. There is no First Amendment right to unlawfully threaten to harm or kill someone.
As Justice Scalia noted in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, true “threats of violence are outside the First Amendment” because laws that punish such threats “protect[] individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.”
The latter point hits particularly close to home for those of us who have investigated tragedies ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The time to address threats is when they are made, not after the tragedy has struck.
As employees of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, each of us understands that we have an obligation to protect our citizens from violence and fear of violence. And we will continue to do our part to provide that protection.
But the Justice Department cannot do it alone. The responsibility to bring an end to violence and threats of violence against those who serve the public is one that all Americans share.
Such conduct disrupts the peace of our public spaces and undermines our democracy. We are all Americans. We must protect each other.
The obligation to keep Americans and American democracy safe is part of the historical inheritance of this department. As I have noted several times before, a founding purpose of the Justice Department was to battle violent extremist attacks on our democratic institutions.
In the midst of Reconstruction following the Civil War, the department’s first principal task was to secure the civil rights promised by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. This meant protecting Black Americans seeking to exercise their right to vote from acts and threats of violence by white supremacists.
The framers of the Civil War Amendments recognized that access to the ballot is a fundamental aspect of citizenship and self-government. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to make the promise of those amendments real. To do so, it gave the Justice Department valuable tools with which to protect the right to vote.
In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been drastically weakened.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby County case effectively eliminated the preclearance protections of Section 5, which had been the department’s most effective tool for protecting voting rights over the past half-century. Subsequent decisions have substantially narrowed the reach of Section 2 as well.
Since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative enactments that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect representatives of their own choosing.
Those enactments range from: practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; to redistricting maps drawn to disadvantage both minorities and citizens of opposing political parties; to abnormal post-election audits that put the integrity of the voting process at risk; to changes in voting administration meant to diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators.
Some have even suggested permitting state legislators to set aside the choice of the voters themselves.
As I noted in an address to the Civil Rights Division last June, many of those enactments have been justified by unfounded claims of material vote fraud in the 2020 election.
Those claims, which have corroded people’s faith in the legitimacy of our elections, have been repeatedly refuted by the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both the last administration and this one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them.
The Department of Justice will continue to do all it can to protect voting rights with the enforcement powers we have. It is essential that Congress act to give the department the powers we need to ensure that every eligible voter can cast a vote that counts.
But as with violence and threats of violence, the Justice Department — even the Congress — cannot alone defend the right to vote. The responsibility to preserve democracy — and to maintain faith in the legitimacy of its essential processes — lies with every elected official and with every American.
All Americans are entitled to free, fair, and secure elections that ensure they can select the representatives of their choice.
All Americans are entitled to live in a country in which their public servants can go about their jobs of serving the public free from violence and unlawful threats of violence.
And all Americans are entitled to live in a country in which the transition from one elected administration to the next is accomplished peacefully.
The Justice Department will never stop working to defend the democracy to which all Americans are entitled.
As I recognized when I first spoke with you all last March, service in the Department of Justice is more than a job and more than an honor. It is a calling.
Each of us — you and I — came to work here because we are committed to the rule of law and to seeking equal justice under law. We came to work here because we are committed to ensuring the civil rights and civil liberties of our people. We came to work here because we are committed to protecting our country — as our oath says — from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Together, we will continue to show the American people, by word and by deed, that these are the principles that underlie our work.
The challenges that we have faced, and that we will continue to face, are extraordinary. But I am moved and humbled by the extraordinary work you do every single day to meet them.
I look forward to seeing more of you in person, soon, and to our continued work together.
Thank you all.
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