“This is Merrick Garland’s Tylenol moment, and by which I mean he has more than a headache but a poisoning on his hands. Both his legacy and our trust that no one is above the law in America are in peril. To meet the moment, Garland would do well to follow the model of James Burke, the former CEO of Johnson & Johnson. In the 1980s, Burke handled two separate public relations crises stemming from Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. In September 1982, seven people who purchased the poisoned pain relief pills from Chicago stores died. Burke went on television to apologize and immediately pulled an estimated 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules off the shelves nationwide, at a cost of $100 million. Within just a month of this tragedy, the FDA mandated tamper-resistant packaging for over-the-counter drugs. In 1986, when a customer in New York died after ingesting a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule, Burke issued another recall, and J&J began only selling the pills in tablet form.”

“Many believed the company would never regain public trust after the poisonings, but Burke’s at-the-time unorthodox candor and concessions worked wonders. At 68, Garland is in a similar situation, but with some distinctions. With the Tylenol scare, we still don’t know who the culprit was. With the poisoning of the Justice Department, we do know—it was an inside job. Still, the only way to restore trust is to address the public, discuss the tampering honestly, and throw out the poison, not ask us all to drink more of the Kool-Aid” – Washington Monthly.