On April 1, legal/national security expert Benjamin Wittes (editor and co-founder of the blog Lawfare) weighed in on Attorney General William Barr’s response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation and asserted, “For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt.” But that was before Barr’s May 1 testimony on Mueller’s report in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Wittes, in a May 2 piece for the Atlantic, tears Barr’s testimony to pieces.
The 49-year-old Wittes says of Barr’s performance as attorney general, “It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case, it is true.”
Wittes isn’t terribly critical of Barr’s redactions to Mueller’s report, describing them as “not unreasonable, though they were aggressive in some specific areas. To whatever extent he went overboard, Congress has a far-less-redacted version.”
View the complete May 2 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.