Tag: Bill Barr

AG Barr and Betsy DeVos rail against secularism and a ‘culture of disbelief’ at religious broadcasters convention

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump views his alliance with the Christian right as essential to his 2020 campaign, and two Trump loyalists — Attorney General William Barr and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — were clearly pandering to religious conservatives this week during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee and continues through this Friday, February 28.

Barr’s speech was sponsored by the nonprofit group Save the Persecuted Christians, which is headed by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. — a far-right conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe who has claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate the U.S. government and impose sharia law. Before Barr spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Gaffney stressed that he was not sponsoring a panel that would be held later and feature attorney Asma Uddin (who he smeared as a “sharia supremacist”).

During his speech, Barr (who is a Catholic, not a Protestant evangelical) railed against secularism in the United States — telling the crowd, “While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of church and state, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.” Continue reading.

Surveillance standoff ahead as attorney general seeks ‘clean’ reauthorization

Three authorities expire on March 15

With less than three weeks left before three key surveillance authorities expire, Congress is barreling toward another standoff over an extension.

March 15 will bring the expiration of the three provisions, headlined by Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes national security agencies to collect business records.

Attorney General William Barr met with the Senate GOP at their weekly caucus lunch on Tuesday, and senators indicated he argued that Congress should reauthorize with few to no changes and the administration could just make changes it wants by using executive action.  Continue reading.

Bill Barr has thrown DOJ into a tailspin — and prosecutors have felt ‘under siege’ for months: report

AlterNet logoThe first thing federal prosecutors working on Roger Stone’s case heard from their new boss, a Bill Barr loyalist, was that he wanted the sentencing recommendation for Stone weakened. It was Timothy Shea’s first day on the job after being installed as the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, and the Stone prosecutors, just days away from filing their sentencing recommendation, felt “under siege,” according to The New York Times.

Shortly after those prosecutors recommended 7 to 9 years for Stone’s conviction on seven felony counts, Attorney General Barr himself would intervene in the case as Donald Trump groused on Twitter, decrying the recommendation as a “miscarriage of justice.” A day later, all four prosecutors, led by Aaron Zelinsky, quit the case.

But strains between the 600-person office and the Department of Justice began to emerge as far back as last summer during an effort to charge one of Trump’s favorite political enemies, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, with lying to investigators. After Shea’s predecessor, Jessie Liu, tried and failed to secure a grand jury indictment in the McCabe case, her relationship with Barr reportedly soured. Continue reading.

Constitutional law professor: Bill Barr’s ‘tenure’ as attorney general has been ‘far worse than I expected’

AlterNet logoDuring Attorney General William Barr’s Senate confirmation hearing in February 2019, Neil Kinkopf (a professor of constitutional law at Georgia State University) urged senators to reject President Donald Trump’s nominee. And a year later, in an article for Just Security, Kinkopf asserts that Barr’s “tenure” as U.S. attorney general has turned out to be “far worse than I expected.”

Barr was confirmed, 54-45, along largely partisan lines. Only one Republican in the Senate, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, voted against Barr’s confirmation — and only three Senate Democrats voted in his favor: West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Alabama’s Doug Jones.

During his testimony, Kinkopf stressed that he was troubled by Barr’s expansive approach to the U.S. government’s executive branch. Kinkopf testified, “Public confidence in the rule of law depends on there being an attorney general who will not allow the president to do whatever he wants with the Justice Department. William Barr’s views of presidential power are so radically mistaken that he is simply the wrong man at the wrong time to be attorney general of the United States.”

Congress set for clash over surveillance reforms

The Hill logoCongress is gearing up for a high-profile fight over reauthorizing a handful of controversial surveillance programs months before the 2020 elections.

After punting late last year to give themselves more time to negotiate, lawmakers now have 15 working days to figure out whether and how to reauthorize expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act by the March 15 deadline.

The policy battle comes as tensions are already running high in Washington after a weeks-long fight emanating from the Justice Department — which will also be at the center of the surveillance discussion — and with the November elections injecting a higher dose of politics into any discussion involving Congress and President Trump. 

Trump tests Barr with more tweets about the Justice Department

President Trump continued to test his relationship with Attorney General William P. Barr on Wednesday by amplifying conservative allies demanding he “clean house” at the Justice Department and target those involved in the Russia investigation that once threatened his presidency.

The grievances shared by Trump in a flurry of morning tweets included claims of a “seditious conspiracy” against him, and attacks on a “criminal gang” at the FBI and the Justice Department.

A day after it was revealed that Barr told people close to Trump that he had considered quitting, the president and his attorney general seemed to reach a detente of sorts. Officials inside the Justice Department said they were watching the situation closely, mindful that a new string of tweets or comments could quickly upend the situation, but there were no indications that Barr would leave imminently. The attorney general did not mention the controversy when he spoke during an event Wednesday at FBI headquarters. Continue reading.

William Barr’s America vs. reality in 2020

Washington Post logoIt has become conventional wisdom on the right that religion is under assault from secular liberals — and that the waning of faith is bad for America.

Attorney General William P. Barr, a conservative Catholic, summed up this alarmist outlook last fall during an incendiary speech at Notre Dame. He bemoaned “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system” and the “growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism. By any honest assessment,” he thundered, “the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.” He went on to cite statistics on rising out-of-wedlock births (“illegitimacy”), along with “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.”

This tendentious reading of U.S. history ignores reality. By most metrics, the country is far better off than when Barr was a boy. He was born in 1950, when segregation was legal and homosexuality was not. Continue reading.

Justice Dept., in wrestling with how to handle Giuliani, tightens rules for Ukraine-related probes

Washington Post logoThe Justice Department revealed Tuesday that law enforcement officials running Ukraine-related investigations must seek approval before expanding their inquiries — a move that could have implications for Rudolph W. Giuliani, as President Trump’s personal attorney pushes for scrutiny of the president’s political foes while facing a federal probe into his own conduct.

The directive from Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen was disclosed in a response to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) after the House Judiciary Committee chairman demanded clarity on how the Justice Department is reviewing information from Giuliani, who has urged law enforcement to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son for their dealings in Ukraine.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote to Nadler that the department had tapped two U.S. attorneys to assist in the process — Scott Brady in Pittsburgh to receive and assess new information, and Richard Donoghue in Brooklyn to help coordinate personnel throughout the Justice Department involved in Giuliani’s case and others with a focus on Ukraine. An accompanying internal memo, circulated by Rosen in January, says that he and Donoghue must approve expansions of any inquiries. Continue reading.

.

‘The million-dollar question’: Finance editor breaks down DOJ’s bizarre abandonment of a Russian money laundering case against Deutsche bank

AlterNet logoWhen other banks weren’t making generous loans to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, Deutsche Bank was. David Enrich, finance editor of the New York Times and author of the new book, “Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction,” discussed Deutsche’s relationship Trump and a seemingly abandoned U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) case against the bank during a Monday night, February 17 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Maddow, noting that Trump “probably owes hundreds of millions of dollars to this one institution,” asked Enrich “whatever happened to” a possible U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) case against Deutsche Bank that involved a “Russian money laundering scandal.” And Enrich responded, “That is the million-dollar question.”

Enrich explained that during the final months of the Obama Administration, the DOJ was “close” to bringing a “criminal case” against Deutsche Bank “for its involvement in Russian money laundering” — but after Trump became president, the case fell by the wayside.  Continue reading.