Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a speech today to his fellow employees at the Department of Justice. The occasion was to mark tomorrow's anniversary of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and on American democracy. In essence, it was a progress report from the attorney general, and a defense of his own department's actions since. The speech broke no real news, but then it wasn't really designed to. Whether it will change any minds is doubtful, although it might at least give Garland the benefit of the doubt for another few months.

Garland has been criticized by many, mostly those on the left. The Justice Department is moving too slowly, his critics charge, and has only managed to get a handful of very minor sentences so far from the courts. No higher-ups have been tried, and no instigators or masterminds have been charged with anything at all. This is all admittedly very disappointing, a full year after the incident.

But, as Garland points out, there were some extenuating circumstances. The first being that they had to chase down and arrest almost all of the defendants, due to them all being left free to walk away after the riot was finally quashed. Nobody was rounded up and stuck onto prison buses the day it happened, to put this another way. Things would have gone a lot faster if that had happened, obviously. The investigation has been enormous -- unlike finding and bringing to justice a single "lone wolf" terrorist or a small cell, there were literally hundreds upon hundreds of people complicit in what happened. Which equates to a monstrously-large investigative and prosecutorial effort. Plus, there has been the pandemic to deal with, which has led to delays throughout the year.

Garland did use the occasion to recommit the Justice Department to being fair and completely impartial, and promised that the investigation would continue for as long as necessary no matter where it led. Those were important words for him to say.

In any case, what follows is a review of the speech itself. The full transcript can be found on the Justice Department's website. Videos of the speech are also available (it clocks in at about a half an hour), but I have to warn that Garland is not a very animated speaker. It's not a barn-burner of a speech, it is instead sober and delivered mostly in a monotone. Garland, to be blunt, is not a politician -- but that isn't really a problem, since this wasn't really a political type of speech.

The speech began with Garland thanking his direct audience, the employees at the Department of Justice. Then he launched into the obvious reason why he was giving a speech today:

And second, as we begin a new year -- and as we prepare to mark a solemn anniversary tomorrow -- it is a fitting time to reaffirm that we at the Department of Justice will do everything in our power to defend the American people and American democracy.

We will defend our democratic institutions from attack.

We will protect those who serve the public from violence and threats of violence.

We will protect the cornerstone of our democracy: the right to every eligible citizen to cast a vote that counts.

And we will do all of this in a manner that adheres to the rule of law and honors our obligation to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone in this country.

This was followed by a sobering recap of the events of January 6th, 2021, which are indisputable. Despite being incontrovertible, however, both Republican politicians and those in the right-wing media echo chamber have spent the entire past year downplaying the seriousness of what took place, likening the insurrectionists to mere "tourists." Garland provided a rundown of the actual facts of what happened that grim day to counteract such gaslighting:

Over the course of several hours, outnumbered law enforcement officers sustained a barrage of repeated, violent attacks. About 80 Capitol Police and 60 D.C. Metropolitan Police were assaulted.

As our own court filings and thousands of public videos of the event attest,

• Perpetrators punched dozens of law enforcement officers, knocking some officers unconscious.
• Some perpetrators tackled and dragged law enforcement officers. Among the many examples of such violence: One officer was crushed in a door. Another was dragged down a set of stairs, face down, repeatedly tased and beaten, and suffered a heart attack.
• Some perpetrators attacked law enforcement officers with chemical agents that burned their eyes and skin.
• And some assaulted officers with pipes, poles, and other dangerous or deadly weapons.
• Perpetrators also targeted, assaulted, tackled and harassed journalists and destroyed their equipment.

With increasing numbers of individuals having breached the Capitol, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives -- including the President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence -- had to be evacuated.

As a consequence, proceedings in both chambers were disrupted for hours -- interfering with a fundamental element of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.

Those involved must be held accountable, and there is no higher priority for us at the Department of Justice.

Garland gave credit to the heroism of the police officers involved, which included reading the names of five who have since died and asking for a moment of silence for them.

Garland then got to the real meat of the speech, which was to defend the Justice Department's actions in the intervening year since the attack. He noted that only a small number of perpetrators were arrested at the scene, and itemized the massive efforts launched to identify and bring to justice as many of the rioters as possible. He rattled off some statistics which showed what an enormous job this has been:

So far, we have issued over 5,000 subpoenas and search warrants, seized approximately 2,000 devices, pored through over 20,000 hours of video footage, and searched through an estimated 15 terabytes of data.

We have received over 300,000 tips from ordinary citizens, who have been our indispensable partners in this effort.

This, Garland reported, has led to charges to over 725 defendants from across the country.

Garland defended the speed of the efforts so far, which has drawn some complaints since it certainly seems to be moving rather slowly from the sidelines. He pointed out that it was standard prosecutorial practice to charge those with lesser offenses first, and then work their way up to the more serious cases. This has also led to a number of very minor sentences for misdemeanors, but as Garland pointed out, that has already begun to change as some of the felony cases have now reached sentencing, and have resulted in much longer sentences.

Then Garland made a promise to the American people:

The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last.

The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law -- whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead.

Because January 6th was an unprecedented attack on the seat of our democracy, we understand that there is broad public interest in our investigation. We understand that there are questions about how long the investigation will take, and about what exactly we are doing.

Our answer is, and will continue to be, the same answer we would give with respect to any ongoing investigation: as long as it takes and whatever it takes for justice to be done -- consistent with the facts and the law.

I understand that this may not be the answer some are looking for. But we will and we must speak through our work. Anything else jeopardizes the viability of our investigations and the civil liberties of our citizens.

. . .

We build investigations by laying a foundation. We resolve more straightforward cases first because they provide the evidentiary foundation for more complex cases.

Investigating the more overt crimes generates linkages to less overt ones. Overt actors and the evidence they provide can lead us to others who may also have been involved. And that evidence can serve as the foundation for further investigative leads and techniques.

In circumstances like those of January 6th, a full accounting does not suddenly materialize. To ensure that all those criminally responsible are held accountable, we must collect the evidence.

We follow the physical evidence. We follow the digital evidence. We follow the money.

But most important, we follow the facts -- not an agenda or an assumption. The facts tell us where to go next.

. . .

The central norm is that, in our criminal investigations, there cannot be different rules depending on one's political party or affiliation. There cannot be different rules for friends and foes. And there cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless.

There is only one rule: we follow the facts and enforce the law in a way that respects the Constitution and protects civil liberties.

This was the core argument of the entire speech. Garland then spent the rest of the speech warning how serious the stakes were and how vital it is that this rising ugliness in American political life be stopped cold. He began by once again itemizing what has already taken place:

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.

Garland pledged to uphold the First Amendment while tackling the problem:

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.

To me, the most unexpected part of Garland's speech came at the end. Garland essentially issued a plea to Congress to reinstate the parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Supreme Court has either eliminated or "drastically weakened." He began with the historical fact that the Justice Department had come into being in the aftermath of the Civil War and that their "first principal task" was to secure the rights of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments for all. Garland then pointed to what has happened since the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act -- especially over the past year -- as Republican-led legislatures and governors have launched the most serious assault on voting rights since the Jim Crow era:

Since those [Supreme Court] 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.

Some might quibble that Garland addressing this problem during a speech about January 6th was incongruous, but it really wasn't. The entire fiasco revolves around the right to vote, the right to have that vote accurately counted, and the right of the people's choice to win the election without corruption or interference from anyone. So the right to cast that vote is an important part of the process and should be seen as linked to the attempt to hijack the last presidential election -- especially since Donald Trump's Big Lie has been the false justification for all these states passing voter suppression laws in the first place.

All in all it was a good speech, as speeches go. It will likely not quiet Garland's critics completely, but at least he laid out his case defending the prosecutors and investigators under his leadership. He tried to calm the rising frustration at the speed of progress by essentially saying the next phase will be much more intense. He also pointed out the effects the COVID-19 pandemic have had on the mechanics of the justice system (such as grand juries and trials).

He did not name anyone in specific and he did not promise to have Donald Trump arrested, so a certain segment of the public is going to be disappointed that Garland's speech didn't contain more dramatic news. He also didn't call for a special prosecutor, a move many Democrats have been pushing for.

My guess is that this speech will largely be forgotten within a few months. Garland's Justice Department will ultimately be judged on results. If more-serious charges are brought to trial successfully, any resulting convictions and lengthy sentences will speak for themselves. If the Justice Department, together with the efforts of the House Select Committee on January 6th, do manage to unveil a larger conspiracy and charges are brought against those responsible for engineering the events of that dark day, then it really won't matter what Garland said today and how his critics responded. Absent that, however, Garland's speech today will merely be a part of a larger disappointment in the ability of the Justice Department to hold those who are truly responsible to full account.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant