Editor's note: Due to technical difficulties, this email is landing in inboxes later than anticipated. We apologize for the delay! With help from Allie Bice, and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. JOE BIDEN keeps finding himself at odds with his own Justice Department. Just in the past week, the Biden White House has felt compelled to publicly distance itself from Attorney General MERRICK GARLAND three separate times. “[T]he issuing of subpoenas for the records of reporters in leak investigations is not consistent with the President’s policy direction to the Department,” press secretary JEN PSAKI said Friday, after news broke that the Biden Justice Department had continued pursuing Trump-era demands for New York Times’ reporters emails. (DoJ later relented.) “This provision is inconsistent with my Administration’s policies and values,” Biden said as the DoJ filed a brief Monday arguing that it would violate the law to grant Puerto Rican citizens eligibility for social security payments. And when the DoJ decided Monday to continue defending former President DONALD TRUMP in a defamation lawsuit brought by E. JEAN CARROLL, a writer who accused him of raping her in the 1990s, White House spokesperson ANDREW BATES said that “the White House was not consulted by DoJ on the decision to file this brief or its contents.” The president and his team have “utterly different standards from their predecessors for what qualify as acceptable statements,” Bates added. And that’s likely only the beginning of the White House-DoJ tensions. Other cases on the horizon are poised to potentially further the divide. On Monday, a top Justice Department attorney urged a federal appeals court to block a California state law seeking to end the use of private prisons in the state — even though Biden promised during the campaign to stop relying on private jails and issued an executive order in January to end such contracts for criminal detention. “The United States has been told...there are no people with whom you can contract to perform this function,” DoJ lawyer MARK STERN told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals . “You could have the same kind of restriction on any sort of research facility that the federal government might fund.” A spokesperson for California Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM , a Democrat, said they would not back down from a fight with the Biden Justice Department. “These for-profit prisons do not reflect our values and the state will continue to defend AB 32 to phase out their use,” the spokesperson said in an email. Asked if the White House supported Newsom’s law, a White House official said they were “not going to weigh in specifically” and referred us to DoJ. Persisting in arguments made by the Trump administration, the DoJ lawyer argued that the California law unconstitutionally intrudes on federal authority by seeking to limit federal contracting activity. The divisions aren’t just on policy either. Garland and the White House have had stand-offs over senior positions at the Justice Department, with Garland pushing to install many of his own former clerks. The two sides have also not issued their promised memos that govern which WH-DoJ contacts are permissible — and which are off limits. They declined to comment on when those memos would be made available. Garland has not publicly addressed his disagreements with the White House but may have to when he testifies in front of a Senate appropriations subcommittee tomorrow at 2 p.m. The series of spats are a byproduct of Biden’s decision to prioritize the Justice Department’s independence after Trump’s repeated attempts to politicize the agency during his presidency. Those sensitivities have been heightened by the fact that there is an ongoing federal investigation into Biden’s son, HUNTER BIDEN . And they contributed to Biden’s decision to select Garland, who has a reputation as a Boy Scout with an independent streak, over former Sen. DOUG JONES (D-Ala.), who has a relationship with Biden going back decades. “More than anything, we need to restore the honor, the integrity, the independence of the Department of Justice that’s been so badly damaged,” Biden said in January when introducing Garland. “You don’t work for me.” Some people on Biden’s transition team believed that stance was a bit naive; that no Justice Department is ever completely independent of the White House and that all the current tensions were predictable. In a statement, Bates said that Biden is “proud of standing up for these bedrock values and for protecting the rule of law from political interference.” The Justice Department declined to comment. Former Justice Department spokesman MATTHEW MILLER recalls a similarly rocky patch for the White House-DoJ relationship in 2009 when Obama aides were taken by surprise by backlash to a Justice Department brief that critics said compared same-sex relationships to incest. Gay groups expressed outrage, a top White House official lamented the language used and DoJ later filed a more politically palatable brief. “This is the hardest time for the Justice Department — this first year,” he told West Wing Playbook. “The civil litigation calendar stops for no one. It has nothing to do with what the White House’s planned message of the day or the week is. It is just a schedule of little time bombs that go off for the first year,” he said. Of course, the current DoJ-WH tensions look mild when compared to the Trump administration. By June 2017, Trump had abruptly fired FBI director JAMES COMEY, Deputy AG ROD ROSENSTEIN had appointed ROBERT MUELLER as a special counsel to probe ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and Trump’s relationship with AG JEFF SESSIONS had soured. It would never recover. Still, Miller said that the current DoJ could have “figured out a way not to” defend the E. Jean Caroll case, if they didn’t want to. “There’s probably a bit of an overcorrection,” Miller said. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you BILL RUSSO? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. You can also reach Alex and Theo individually. | 
