During a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this Wednesday, a former prosecutor who previously defended Attorney General William Barr as “principled,” now says his assessment was “flat out wrong.”
“I had said for months that…Barr was a principled institutionalist,” former Virginia U.S. attorney Chuck Rosenberg said. “I was flat-out wrong.”
“I had it wrong. I have been deeply disappointed by what I’ve seen,” he added.
View the complete October 9 article from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
Elie Honig, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on Monday demanded Attorney General William Barr answer for Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide. The financier, who was awaiting trial for a host of federal charges including sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, died in his jail cell on Saturday. Details of his autopsy have yet to be released.
Speaking with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, Honig explained that the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), where Epstein was held, is run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of Barr’s Department of Justice.
“Everything that goes into that prison comes out of that prison, moves within the prison is documented somehow … So there really should be a lot of clear answers that DOJ and the Office of Inspector General can and should get,” the former federal prosecutor said. “And if we don’t have answers, we should ask why not.”
View the complete August 12 article by Elizabeth Preza on the AlterNet website here.
This Wednesday, July 24, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller is set to testify before two separate Democrat-led committees in the House of Representatives — and some of the questions will no doubt involve Attorney General William Barr’s response to Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation. That response has drawn widespread criticism from Democrats as well as from some of President Donald Trump’s conservative detractors. And two days ahead of Mueller’s testimony, former Homeland Security advisor Elizabeth Holtzman, a Democrat, and New York University law professor Ryan Goodman recommend on the Just Security website that the House of Representatives refer Barr for criminal prosecution for lying to Congress.
Prior to joining the NYU faculty in 2009, Goodman (a Just Security co-founder) was a law professor at Harvard University. The 77-year-old Holtzman, also an attorney, served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and went on to serve as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council before resigning in 2018.
“Based on the available public record about the Russia investigation,” Holtzman and Goodman declare in their Just Security article, “it’s clear that the Attorney General has repeatedly deceived Congress in a manner that appears to have crossed the line established by federal criminal law. It’s a federal offence if anyone intentionally ‘falsifies, conceals or covers up by any trick, scheme or device a material fact’ or makes a ‘materially false’ statement before Congress.”
View the complete July 22 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
The House will vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for declining to comply with a subpoena for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and related evidence.
The resolution will also target former White House counsel Don McGahn, who has defied a Democratic subpoena to appear before Congress.
The vote, scheduled for June 11, marks a major escalation of tensions between the Trump administration and House Democrats, who have launched a series of investigations into the president’s conduct in office — probes in which the White House has largely refused to cooperate.
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee said Monday that the panel would vote to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with a bipartisan subpoena for documents on a Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), announced the move in letters to Barr and Ross on Monday. He gave them until Thursday to comply and raised the possibility of delaying the vote if they cooperate.
“Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern,” Cummings wrote to Barr and Ross in the letters. “The Trump administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented coverups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations.”
The highly anticipated Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing with Attorney General William Barr provided all the sparks and melodrama that was advertised. While the Republican members of the committee wasted their time flattering Barr and calling for ridiculously unwarranted investigations of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democrats effectively revealed just how devoutly wedded to Donald Trump the Attorney General is.
Barr was unashamedly protecting Trump from any potentially negative perceptions he might have earned due to his flagrantly unlawful activity and obstruction of justice. Barr refused to concede some obvious failures on his part to be an objective servant of the American people, rather than a personal criminal lawyer for Trump.
Even so, Barr couldn’t remember whether or not Trump ever asked him to open an investigation into Trump’s political opponents or critics. He admitted that he didn’t review the evidence in the Mueller report before deciding that Trump was innocent. He denied that directing someone to change their testimony (as Trump did to White House Counsel Don McGahn) was witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He defended his use of the loaded, Trumpian term of “spying” during his previous congressional testimony. He couldn’t even say whether the President’s actions were consistent with his oath of office. So Barr is not just another Trump lawyer, he’s as bad at it as the rest of Trump’s legal team.
Fox News judicial analyst Judge Napolitano on Wednesday accused Attorney General Bill Barr of misleading the House of Representatives when he claimed to be unaware of special counsel Robert Mueller’s concerns with his four-page summary of the Russia investigation — after having received a letter from Mueller explicitly stating those concerns.
Barr was asked about his testimony before the House on Wednesday by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who demanded to know why the attorney general said he was unaware of concerns from special counsel Mueller’s team despite having spoken with Mueller about his concerns.
“I answered a question,” Barr told Leahy. “And the question was related to unidentified members who were expressing frustration over the accuracy relating to findings. I don’t know what that refers to at all. I talked directly to Bob Mueller, not members of his team.”
View the complete May 1 article by Elizabeth Preza on the National Memo website here.
While Democrats grilled Attorney General Bill Barr on Wednesday over his mishandling of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee used their time at the hearing to stoke the flames of conspiracy theories about the investigation into President Donald Trump and his campaign.
Essentially, the GOP and right-wing media have been arguing for years that the Russia probe was built on a flimsy basis that was really just a pretextual excuse to inappropriately surveil (or spy on!) the Trump campaign. This would seem to be completely belied by the Mueller report, which shows that there were many credible bases for investigating crimes, including extensive contacts between people connected to the Russian government and the Trump campaign. And while all that was going on, the Kremlin was, in fact, conducting a wide-ranging criminal effort to interfere in the 2016 election, efforts the Trump campaign knew about and welcomed.
In a back-and-forth between Sen. Ted Cruz and Barr on Wednesday, though, the Texas Republican accidentally elicited information that also completely undermines from another angle the theory that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department and FBI were somehow engaged in an effort to target the Trump campaign.
View the complete May 1 article by Cody Fenwick on the National Memo website here.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr said during his confirmation hearing in January that serving in his future post was “not the same” as representing President Trump and pledged to make law enforcement decisions based only on facts and the law — not politics.
But his handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has called that vow into question. On Wednesday, Mr. Barr defended his actions before the Senate Judiciary Committee, even as he put forward an interpretation of the evidence in a favorable light for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr’s dueling performances underscored tensions inherent in the role of the attorney general, pitting the ideal that the nation’s top law enforcement official should be independent of politics and enforce a neutral understanding of the rule of law against the reality that he or she is politically appointed and part of any administration’s team.
View the complete May 1 article by Charlie Savage on The New York Times website here.
Under questioning from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Attorney General William Barr claimed on Wednesday morning that Trump instructing his top White House lawyer to lie “is not a crime.”
After Barr gave a long answer defending Trump, Feinstein asked a simple follow-up question about the time Trump demanded Don McGahn, who was then the White House counsel, to lie about Trump’s request that McGahn get rid of Mueller.
“You still have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer’s account in order to prevent further criticism of himself — ” Feinstein started to say before Barr interrupted her.
View the complete May 1 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.
