WATCH: Garland delivers remarks on guns and crime at ATF forum

Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered remarks before a Police Executive Forum for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on Thursday.

Watch Garland’s remarks in the player above.

“You are asked not only to combat violent crime, but also to serve as first responders to some of our most entrenched social problems,” he said during the event. “In doing this work, you and your officers regularly face extremely dangerous situations and bear witness to tragedy that thankfully, most Americans never have to see.”

Garland has been at the center of major news stories during his tenure. On his first day as attorney general, Merrick Garland pledged a return to what he called the “norms” of the Justice Department and said he would work to eliminate the perception of political interference. But in the two years since he took office, the former federal judge has found himself in the middle of a political firestorm of historic proportions.

The case against Donald Trump — the first former president to face federal criminal charges — brought a crush of protesters to the Miami courthouse last week, as well as a torrent of social media broadsides from Trump and an onslaught of criticism from Republicans.

The decision to charge Trump, who is running for president again, is perhaps the most consequential in the history of the Justice Department. The ultimate call on that came from Garland, whose demeanor leans to the mild.

Even the day when prosecutors informed Trump about the charges was outwardly quiet in the halls of the stately Justice Department headquarters. That stillness carried into the night amid the furor unleashed when the former president broke the news on his social media platform.

It was hardly the first time that Garland had kept a poker face while under a high-profile glare. He had stayed mum when his nomination for the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2016 languished long enough to break a century-old record before it expired.

Garland spent two decades as a judge, and that experience seemed to come through in his folded hands and stoic expression when he made his public comments on Wednesday about the charges against Trump. The attorney general stressed that he had followed the rules and regulations for special counsels and he punctuated each word as he defended investigator Jack Smith as a “veteran career prosecutor.”

“We live in a democracy. These kind of matters are adjudicated through the judicial system,” Garland said as he took about three minutes worth of questions from two of the gathered reporters at the start of a meeting with U.S. attorneys on violent crime.

That repeated mantra of commitment to the rule of law has not soothed Republicans who are standing by the indicted former president and reframing the charges as an unfair political persecution.

Those close to Garland say he has long had a careful, thoughtful presence and does what is needed, with few outward displays of emotion. Still, this moment is likely not an easy one, said friend Robert Post, a professor at Yale Law School who first got to know Garland when they served as clerks together in the late 1970s.

“I’m sure he is saddened by the spectacle of a former president being indicted for the kinds of crimes that we see Trump indicted for,” Post said. “He’s the least partisan person that I know. He cares about the law first and foremost.”

Smith’s appointment as special counsel after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign was another effort to uphold Justice Department norms and the principle that the agency follows the facts and the law, not politics, said Anthony Coley, who previously served as Garland’s chief spokesman at the department.

“For the attorney general, the rule of law is not just some lawyer’s turn of phrase. For him, the rule of law is foundational element of our democracy,” he said.