Longtime colleague delivers brutal dressing down to Bill Barr: His goal is ‘assigning unchecked power to the president

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. president who has chosen William Barr as his attorney general: Barr held the same position under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. One of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who knew Barr under Bush’s presidency was Donald Ayer, who explains why the attorney general is so bad for democracy in a blistering June 30 article for The Atlantic.

The 70-year-old Ayer (who is now in private practice) served as principle deputy solicitor general under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s and went on to serve as deputy attorney general under Bush in 1989 and 1990. In his article, Ayer explains that given Barr’s “prior service as attorney general in the by-the-book, norm-following administration of George H. W. Bush,” many Americans viewed him as “a mature adult dedicated to the rule of law who could be expected to hold the Trump Administration to established legal rules.”

But Barr, Ayer stresses, has proved to be a Trump loyalist who has “seen fit to support Trump in his lies and abuses.” Ayer is highly critical of Barr’s response to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russian investigation.

View the complete July 1 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.