The choice of a judge is unusual and may reflect an effort by the president-elect to bring in an apolitical leader to bolster the Justice Department’s independence from politics.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to nominate Judge Merrick B. Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, to be attorney general, placing the task of repairing a beleaguered Justice Department in the hands of a centrist judge, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Strong Republican support for Judge Garland helped secure his place in the incoming Biden administration, which greatly values bipartisan support for cabinet choices even as Democrats secured the necessary seats in the Senate to confirm all of Mr. Biden’s nominees.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said last month that he would support Judge Garland’s nomination for attorney general. Three other Republican senators — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine — have said in the past that they would support him to run the F.B.I., citing his integrity and independence.
If confirmed, Judge Garland would inherit a department that grew more politicized under President Trump than at any point since Watergate. He would decide whether to pursue investigations into Mr. Trump, his associates and his former and current cabinet members, a topic that has divided Democrats and even employees inside the department. Mr. Biden himself has said that he is not eager to prosecute the past. But it is unclear whether the extraordinary events that unfolded in Washington on Wednesday — as Mr. Trump said he would never concede the election and his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol — would affect that the issue.
Judge Garland, who has sometimes disappointed liberals with his rulings, will also face vexing decisions about civil rights issues that roiled the country this year and how to proceed with a tax investigation into Mr. Biden’s son.
Mr. Biden’s choice reflects his respect for Mr. Garland’s reputation as a centrist and his belief that he can restore the Justice Department’s independence and inspire a deeply demoralized work force that the Trump administration often treated as an insurgent enemy to be dominated — qualities that Mr. Biden prioritized over requests from progressive groups that the nation’s top law enforcement officer be a woman or a person of color.
The nomination ended weeks of deliberation by Mr. Biden, who had struggled to make a decision as he considered who could fill a position that he became convinced would play an outsize role in his presidency.
Mr. Biden, who served as a longtime top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman from 1987 to 1995, was said by aides to have long weighed what makes a successful attorney general and put pressure on himself to make the right pick. Outside groups also pressed him during the transition to appoint someone who would take a far more confrontational position with law enforcement.
Several civil rights groups — including the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League — and civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton met with Mr. Biden last month to push the president-elect to fill the attorney general slot and other top-tier cabinet positions with diverse appointees. And progressives subsequently inundated Mr. Biden and his transition team, asking for an attorney general with a progressive track record on issues around race and policing, according to multiple people familiar with the outreach.
The choice of Mr. Garland, a white man with a record of favoring law enforcement over people accused of crimes, signaled to some progressives that their concerns were dismissed.
Mr. Biden also intends to nominate Lisa Monaco, a former homeland security adviser to President Barack Obama, as deputy attorney general; Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Mr. Obama, as the No. 3; and Kristen Clarke, a civil rights lawyer, as assistant attorney general for civil rights, which is expected to be a major focus of the department under Mr. Biden.
Ms. Monaco spent much of her time in government service at the Justice Department, where she was a career prosecutor and the first woman to head the National Security Division, expertise that will be immediately called upon as the administration works to understand the full scope of Russia’s recently revealed hacking of the federal government, including the Justice Department’s own systems.
Ms. Gupta and Ms. Clarke are respected civil rights advocates whose work on criminal justice issues and policing could help deflect criticism that Mr. Biden has not been responsive enough to progressives.
One of Ms. Gupta’s responsibilities will be to oversee the division of the department that argues on behalf of the federal government in court, a division that has been demoralized and decimated during the Trump years. Ms. Clarke will lead a civil rights unit that has worked to remove key protections for minorities and was determining whether it would pursue charges against police officers involved in explosive cases in Kenosha, Wis., and Minneapolis that set off months of protests nationwide.
Judge Garland was initially considered a long shot for attorney general, in part because he is seen as politically moderate. In close cases involving criminal law, he has been significantly more likely to side with the police and prosecutors over people accused of crimes than other Democratic appointees. He also leaned toward deferring to the government in Guantánamo Bay detainee cases that pit state security powers against individual rights.
Moreover, judges are only occasionally elevated directly to the position. The last was Judge Michael B. Mukasey of Federal District Court, whom George W. Bush appointed to run the Justice Department in 2007.
Mr. Biden was also said to have considered Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general in the final years of the Obama administration; Doug Jones, a former Alabama senator; and Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts who briefly ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Judge Garland will have to reckon with a Justice Department accused of politicization over Mr. Trump’s efforts to influence investigations and former Attorney General William P. Barr’s willingness to serve his political agenda. Obama-era Justice Department officials have called for the Biden administration to strengthen the department’s independence from politics, and Judge Garland will also have to navigate demands from some Democrats to investigate Mr. Trump.
The decision to appoint Judge Garland appeared similar to one that Gerald R. Ford made after the Watergate scandal. Mr. Ford nominated Edward H. Levi, a university president whose political leanings were unclear, to take over to restore the Justice Department’s credibility. Democrats and Republicans later praised Mr. Levi’s ability to apolitically repair the department.
Judge Garland will most likely face pressure to also try to steer the department’s priorities from the Trump administration’s focus on immigration and violent crime to issues that Democrats have typically prioritized, like policing overhauls and voting rights. But he will also have to make decisions about how to handle the tax investigation of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Republicans, still angry over the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, have called for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter.
Mr. Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was nominated by Mr. Obama in 2016 to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. While the nomination dismayed some liberals, Senate Republicans — led by the majority leader, Mr. McConnell — refused to vote on his nomination, saying that the opening should not be filled in an election year.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump filled the vacancy with Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative in the mold of Justice Scalia.
Judge Garland’s career was significantly affected by the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. Mr. Garland, a Justice Department official at the time, led the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh until a permanent lead prosecutor was named. The department ultimately secured a conviction of Mr. McVeigh, who was executed in 2001.
President Bill Clinton appointed Judge Garland to the appeals court in 1997, and he served as its chief judge from 2013 to February 2020. Though the court is often called the second most important in the nation, after the Supreme Court, its idiosyncratic docket is dominated by cases concerning regulatory agencies and tends to include few major controversies on social issues.
On the court, Judge Garland earned praise from across the political spectrum for the exceptional quality of his opinions, which are considered models of the judicial craft — methodically reasoned, clear, attentive to precedent and tightly tied to the language of the relevant statutes and regulations.
Some of Judge Garland’s most prominent decisions disappointed liberals. He joined in a decision that gave rise to super PACs in the aftermath of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that amplified the role of money in politics, and in more ordinary cases, he often ruled against criminal defendants who said their rights had been violated.
In 2003, he was part of a unanimous three-judge panel that ruled that detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could not challenge their detentions in federal court. The Supreme Court later rejected the appeals court’s reasoning. And he later joined a decision upholding a policy at Guantánamo Bay allowing guards to probe the genitals of detainees seeking to meet with their lawyers.
In 2013, he joined a unanimous unsigned opinion rejecting a request that the government disclose images of Osama bin Laden’s corpse and burial at sea.
“It is undisputed,” the opinion said, “that the government is withholding the images not to shield wrongdoing or avoid embarrassment, but rather to prevent the killing of Americans and violence against American interests.”
Thomas Kaplan, Charlie Savage and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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