Attorney General Bill Barr has once again made a mess of his role at the top of the Justice Department, and it revealed once again why neither he nor President Donald Trump can faithfully fulfill their constitutional duties.
Questions about the integrity of the Justice Department arose immediately when Jeffrey Epstein, the registered sex offender and financier with ties to powerful people like Trump and President Bill Clinton, was arrested over the weekend on sex trafficking charges. Epstein had previously come under scrutiny by the feds for these same allegations, but for unknown reasons — perhaps his connections to powerful people — he got away without any federal charges and faced a relatively light penalty from a state prosecution in 2008.
So it was natural to wonder, since Trump is now president, whether the new prosecution will face any undue influence. Some legal experts were worried that Barr might use his position at the top of the Justice Department to insert himself into the federal prosecutors’ decisionmaking if he thought it might help Trump, and I argued Monday that the mere appearance of this possibility was enough reason for him to recuse from the case.
View the complete July 10 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.