She became the Attorney General of Germany in June 2006, an office which she held until reaching the age limit in 2011.
In April 2007, Harms announced that the government would not pursue charges against Donald Rumsfeld and 11 other U.S. officials in connection with the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal, stating the accusations did not apply, in part because there was insufficient evidence that the acts occurred on German soil, and because the accused did not live in Germany.
[1] In September 2007, following a six-month investigation, her office stopped a major terrorist attack against American and German targets by arresting three Islamic militants and seizing a large amount of potentially explosive chemicals and military-grade detonators.
[2] In another much-discussed move in 2008, Harms overturned Marinus van der Lubbe's conviction of setting the 1933 Reichstag fire, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998.
[3] Harms, who is considered an expert in law regarding fiscal offences also works as a lecturer at the Ministry of Finance's Bundesfinanzakademie since 1990, and she held various other lectureships.