Tag: Bill Barr asking as Trump’s Roy Cohn

Bill Barr is the most dangerous Trump official — and it could put him on a collision course with Chief Justice Roberts

AlterNet logoOver the last three years, Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have often been frustrated by the law. Here is just one example that was recently reported in the New York Times.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

Continue reading “Bill Barr is the most dangerous Trump official — and it could put him on a collision course with Chief Justice Roberts”

Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation

New York Times logoThe move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump.

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.

View the complete October 24 article by Katie Benner and Adam Goldman on The New York Times website here.

Don’t forget Bill Barr: He’s running the Justice Department like it’s the legal arm of the Trump Organization

AlterNet logoWhen the smoke finally clears from the impeachment morass, we’ll still have the case of the Justice Department that Attorney General William P. Barr has turned into a personal law firm to protect Donald Trump.

There have been almost daily developments showing that Barr’s Justice Department has been extending its efforts to provide both justifiable and legally questionable efforts to shield Trump, to pursue investigations into the actions of critics of the president and to interpret anything in the legal area in the president’s favor.

In short, Barr has become more Trump’s lawyer than America’s chief criminal law enforcement officer.

View the complete October 13 article by Terry Schwadron from DC Report on the AlterNet website here.