Tag: Barr defense of Trump

Legal Expert: Barr Made A ‘Serious Error’ In Defense Of Trump

President Donald Trump has repeatedly described special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation as a total vindication of him, insisting that Mueller ruled out the possibility of obstruction of justice. But Mueller never ruled out that possibility; he simply didn’t reach a conclusion on the matter. And Rebecca Roiphe, a New York Law School professor and former Manhattan prosecutor, explains why Mueller was right to do what he did — and why Attorney General William Barr’s response to Mueller’s report is deeply problematic.

Mueller, Roiphe notes inThe Daily Beast, has allowed for Congress to evaluate the obstruction matter — which was exactly what he should have done.

“To be sure, by handing over the lightly redacted results of Mueller’s investigation to Congress, Barr served the purpose of the Constitution and special counsel regulations,” Roiphe observes. “But by making his own call on criminal obstruction, Barr made a serious error.”

View the completeMay 7 article by Alex Henderson of AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

Legal expert Benjamin Wittes tears Attorney General Barr’s aggressive defense of Trump to pieces: ‘It has been catastrophic’

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.