Tag: Bill Barr

NYC Bar Association issues stunning rebuke of AG Bill Barr — and asks Congress to investigate him for bias

AlterNet logoThe New York City Bar Association has taken the extraordinary step of asking Congress to investigate Attorney General Bill Barr for being too politically biased to faithfully execute his duties as America’s top law enforcement official.

Bloomberg reports that the Bar Association is claiming that Barr’s recent statements and actions indicate that he may be enabling and encouraging “political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others.”

The association also accuses Barr of disregarding “fundamental obligations in several public statements during the past few months,” including his duty to “act impartially, to avoid even the appearance of partiality and impropriety, and to avoid manifesting bias, prejudice or partisanship in the exercise of official responsibilities.” Continue reading.

Historian breaks down why AG Barr’s ‘anti-democratic’ rhetoric recalls crackdowns on civil rights activists in the 1960s

AlterNet logoProponents of police accountability — from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the NAACP to the Rev. Al Sharpton — have repeatedly stressed that they aren’t anti-law enforcement. But as Attorney General William Barr sees it, an anti-police mood is sweeping the U.S., and historian Joshua Clark Davis points out the parallels between Barr’s rhetoric and a crackdown on dissent in the 1960s.

Davis, in an article for The Nation, notes that when Barr spoke at a December 3 event honoring recipients of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Award for Distinguished Service in Policing, he asserted that Americans must show “the respect and support that law enforcement deserves.” And Barr had a threatening tone when he added, “If communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

Barr, Davis explains, “could have just as easily uttered these sentiments in the 1960s as in 2019.” And Davis (who teaches at the University of Baltimore) draws a parallel between Barr’s remarks and what Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker had to say during a speech in 1964, when he asserted, “The law applies to everyone, and no one is permitted to violate it regardless of what their excuses are. Detractors of the police establishment seized upon the cry of ‘police brutality’ as their most effective tool.” Continue reading

William Barr is on a theocratic mission to use the power of the DOJ to deliver America from eternal damnation: columnists

AlterNet logoAttorney General William Barr is worse than a simple right-wing partisan, wrote religious nationalism biographer Katherine Stewart and former American Constitutional Society president Caroline Fredrickson for The New York Times.

Rather, they argued, he is best understood as a fanatical theocrat who believes America is damned to burn in hell — and seeks to use the powers of his office to course correct the nation’s sinful ways.

“Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?” they wrote. “A deeper understanding of William Barr is emerging, and it reveals something profound and disturbing about the evolution of conservatism in 21st-century America.” Continue reading

Legal experts blast AG Barr over impeachment and Ukraine: He is ‘up to his eyeballs’ in the ‘corruption surrounding Trump’

AlterNet logoWhen the U.S. Senate voted to confirm William Barr as President Donald Trump’s attorney general, some optimists hoped he would bring a more traditional view of conservatism to the Trump Administration — noting that Barr had previously held the same position under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. But Barr has turned out to be a full-fledged Trump loyalist, and legal experts are lambasting him for becoming, in effect, Trump’s personal attorney during the Ukraine scandal and the president’s impeachment. Barr hasn’t been hiding his feelings on Trump’s impeachment, claiming that Democrats in Congress are “trivializing” impeachment and are using it as a “political tool.”

Journalist Alexandra Hutzler, in an article published by Newsweek on December 23, gathers some views from legal experts. One of them is attorney Nick Akerman, who told Newsweek, “This is a really strange situation with Barr, who has so many conflicts and is up to his eyeballs in all of the corruption surrounding Trump.”

Former federal prosecutor Michael J. Stern was equally critical, asserting that Barr’s loyalty to Trump is a “perversion” of his position as U.S. attorney general. Stern told Newsweek, “There is an inherent conflict in Barr’s designated role as the chief law enforcement officer of this country and his efforts to protect the man who gave him his job. It is unfortunate that Bill Barr never misses an opportunity to place his thumb on the scales of justice in favor of Donald Trump. That’s not how it is supposed to be.” Continue reading

Durham Surprises Even Allies With Statement on F.B.I.’s Trump Case

New York Times logoThe federal prosecutor leading a review of the origins of the Russia inquiry has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut. At a sensitive moment, he didn’t.

WASHINGTON — Whether investigating charges of torture by the C.I.A., rolling up an organized crime network or prosecuting crooked government officials, John H. Durham, the veteran federal prosecutor named by Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the origins of the Russia inquiry, burnished his reputation for impartiality over the years by keeping his mouth closed about his work.

At the height of the Boston mob prosecution that made his name, he not only rebuffed a local newspaper’s interview request, but he also told his office not to release his résumé or photo.

That wall of silence cracked this month when Mr. Durham, serving in the most politically charged role of his career, released an extraordinary statement questioning one key element of an overlapping investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz.

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A ‘longtime friend’ of Bill Barr just scorched the attorney general in an impassioned op-ed

AlterNet logoWilliam Webster, a former director of both the CIA and the FBI, published an incisive op-ed on Monday in the New York Times in which he took aim at, among others, his “longtime friend” Attorney General Bill Barr.

The ominous piece warned that Webster sees an “ominous threat to the country I love” under President Donald Trump.

He explained:

I am deeply disturbed by the assertion of President Trump that our “current director” — as he refers to the man he selected for the job of running the F.B.I. — cannot fix what the president calls a broken agency. The 10-year term given to all directors following J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year tenure was created to provide independence for the director and for the bureau. The president’s thinly veiled suggestion that the director, Christopher Wray, like his banished predecessor, James Comey, could be on the chopping block, disturbs me greatly. The independence of both the F.B.I. and its director is critical and should be fiercely protected by each branch of government.

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John Durham has a stellar reputation for investigating corruption. Some fear his work for Barr could tarnish it.

Washington Post logoWhen the U.S. government needed a prosecutor to ferret out corruption in its own law-enforcement and intelligence ranks, John Durham was its go-to guy. The longtime prosecutor helped exonerate men wrongly convicted on murder charges, exposed an FBI agent tied to one of Boston’s most notorious gangsters and dug into the CIA’s destruction of video tapes thought to show foreign detainees being tortured.

But some of Durham’s actions in his latest high-profile assignment — examining the FBI’s 2016 investigation of President Trump’s campaign — have sparked a debate in Washington about whether he is even-handedly assessing possible wrongdoing, or carrying out a conservative political errand.

Last week, after the Justice Department inspector general released a report concluding the bureau had adequate cause to open the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, Durham issued a remarkable public statement registering his disagreement.

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Bill Barr finally revealed the real reason he’s such an aggressive Trump defender

AlterNet logoAttorney General Bill Barr has become a lightning rod of sorts in administration, standing out front and taking public hits as he does President Donald Trump’s dirty work at the Justice Department.

Far from being the institutionalist even many critics of Trump hoped Barr would be, the attorney general showed his true colors when he spun Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the conclusions of the Russia investigation. Mueller and his team so objected to that presentation that they sent Barr a letter arguing that the report had been distorted to the public. Barr later said that the letter was “snitty.” Since the end of the Mueller investigation, Barr has repeatedly and consistently proven himself to be a fierce defender of the president’s interests, regardless of the consequence of U.S. institutions.

So what, exactly, does Barr think he’s doing? Why is the attorney general acting like the personal attorney of the president? In a new interview this week, Barr finally gave a clear reason why, from his perspective, he acts the way he does.

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Justice Dept Inspector Urges Change To Allow Probe Of Attorney General

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) elicited an important and revealing response from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Wednesday when she raised the prospect of Attorney General Bill Barr’s potential wrongdoing.

Harris noted that one of Barr’s ongoing investigations was “launched to do the bidding of President Trump, [and] has two objectives: One, to undermine the integrity of our intelligence community; the goal, to cast doubt on the finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to benefit the Trump campaign. And two: to intimidate the men and women of our intelligence committee by suggesting that our national security professionals will face serious consequences if they investigate wrongdoing on the part of this president or his operatives.”

She said that Horowitz has an obligation “to investigate misconduct committed by the attorney general of the United States, who is doing the bidding of the president to undermine our intelligence community. I trust you take that duty seriously.”

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The real problems the inspector general found

Washington Post logo“I WAS surprised by the statement,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. We could think of a few more ways he could have felt — frustrated, dismayed, outraged — at the spin that senior Justice Department officials put on his long-awaited report. The review of the department’s investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian election meddling found that the probe was properly launched and that there was no indication of political bias. It also found that the FBI breached protocol in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. That deserves further discussion — but not, as Attorney General William P. Barr has done, to dignify the president’s “deep state” conspiracy theories.

Almost simultaneously with the report’s release Monday, Mr. Barr dismissed and minimized Mr. Horowitz’s findings — or, at least, the ones that failed to paint the FBI as a rogue agency nursing an anti-Trump agenda. “The FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said. The next day he raised “the possibility that there was bad faith.”

U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Mr. Barr handpicked to conduct yet another investigation of the Russia probe, piled on, saying that “we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened” and implied that he had uncovered new evidence that might shift the picture. This was the statement that surprised Mr. Horowitz. Its innuendo left unanswered whether Mr. Durham has turned up something new.

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