Tag: Bill Barr

Justice Dept. watchdog finds political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI’s Russia probe but documents other errors Add to list

Washington Post logoThe Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.

The report due out Dec. 9 from Inspector General Michael Horowitz will allege that a low-level FBI lawyer inappropriately altered a document that was used as part of a controversial application for electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, the officials said. The inspector general referred that finding to U.S. Attorney John Durham, so that he may investigate it as a possible crime, they said.

But Horowitz will conclude that the application still had a proper legal and factual basis, according to the officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive report.

View the complete November 22 article by Ellen Nakashima, Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett on The Washington Post website here.

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”

Trump’s AG gives a speech accusing left of ‘shredding’ norms and embracing ‘coercive state power.’ Project much?

AlterNet logoThe biggest moment in former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s impeachment-hearing testimony on Friday was when House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told her that President Trump was attacking her on Twitter as she was speaking.Trump’s defenders came out in force, offering various explanations for his mob-like behavior. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has been arguing that Trump was just testing the Ukrainians to see if they would fall into his trap and prove they were corrupt. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., using the abusive-husband excuse, insisted that it’s Trump’s political opponents who make him behave the way he does — they are “tormenting” him and should have just covered up his crimes for the good of the country. It’s clear that the only thing they can settle on is the inane story that Trump prefers: He did absolutely nothing wrong and anyone who says otherwise is a partisan hack acting in bad faith.

Trump himself was defiant when asked about his Twitter assault on Yovanovitch, saying he has the right of free speech, and simply refusing to acknowledge that intimidating and threatening people is illegal. His views on all this are clear, and he’s said it many times: “Article II means I have the right to do whatever I want.”

We know that Trump has never read the Constitution. His lack of basic civics knowledge is legendary and he wouldn’t sit still for a serious lecture on what it means. So where do you suppose he got this lie about Article II, which he bandies about as if it’s some obscure text that nobody’s ever heard of? (It’s rather similar to the way he constantly claims that few people realize Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.)

View the complete November 18 article by Heather Digby Parton from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

The unbearable wrongness of William Barr: Professor of secular studies explains why secularism doesn’t destroy moral order

AlterNet logoLast month, in what Jeffrey Toobin called “the worst speech given by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history,” Attorney General William Barr offered a lecture at Notre Dame Law School in which he denounced secularism as a “social pathology” that destroys the “moral order.” After blaming secularists for a host of contemporary problems — including depression, drug overdosing, and violence — Barr explained that without belief in a “transcendent Supreme Being” and adherence to “God’s eternal law,” the “possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.” Unless we follow “God’s instruction manual,” he sermonized, there will be “real-world consequences for man and society” — consequences that are not pretty, but quite grim. For without religion, there can be no “moral culture” and society will inevitably fall prey to humanity’s “capacity for great evil.”

Such hackneyed assertions are not new. Pious people of power have been scapegoating the non-religious for centuries, characterizing non-believers as threats to the nation, and declaring that without religion, there can be no moral social order. And like those before him who have made such claims — from Newt Gingrich to the prophet Muhammed — William Barr is wrong. Continue reading “The unbearable wrongness of William Barr: Professor of secular studies explains why secularism doesn’t destroy moral order”

Impeachment tests Barr-Trump relationship

The Hill logoWilliam Barr has become one of the most polarizing figures in Washington, and the ongoing Ukraine scandal has further thrust the attorney general and his relationship with President Trump under scrutiny.

In the 11 months since President Trump tapped him as his second attorney general, Barr has emerged as one of Trump’s most trusted Cabinet officials. He is a frequent face at official events at the White House and elsewhere, and the president regularly cheers him for the job he is doing as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Barr has also been at the center of multiple politically charged episodes in the Trump presidency, in part as a result of his proximity to the president. He’s a popular target of Democrats, who accuse him of politicizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) and acting as the president’s personal attorney. Indeed, some legal experts say Barr has taken steps that undermine his commitment to keep DOJ above politics.

View the complete November 9 article eye Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Bill Barr is racing to deliver a report that blows up the impeachment inquiry

AlterNet logoAttorney General William Barr is racing to complete a new “report” before Thanksgiving. And if Barr’s very poor summary of the Mueller report threw Trump a lifeline by distorting the real findings of the special counsel investigation, this new report looks to be more like an atom bomb, designed to incinerate Washington by putting the whole Justice Department behind a conspiracy theory that rewrites history and declares open warfare on political opponents. And Republicans are already meeting with Barr to plan a “roll out” for this supposedly classified report in order to maximize its impact.

Barr appears to have taken the results of an inspector general report that was expected to end weeks ago, rolled it together with the investigation-into-the-investigation that he launched under the nominal control of prosecutor John Durham, and capped it all with the “findings” of a world tour that included attempts to get the Australian government, the Italian government, and the U.K. government to participate in attacks on U.S. intelligence agencies. What’s going to come out the other end could be a dud, but it could launch an effort to derail the impeachment process—and more.

Barr’s effort to create a comprehensive, all-conspiracy-theories-combined report seems to have delayed delivery of the long-expected findings from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Republicans were generally thrilled by Horowitz’s earlier report in which he was critical of former FBI director James Comey for his handling of some classified materials. That report had right-wing news outlets clamoring over potential charges against Comey. But despite claims that the findings justified Republican attacks on the entire Russia investigation, the actual complaints were minor and led to nothing.

View the complete November 6 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Trump wanted Barr to hold news conference saying the president broke no laws in call with Ukrainian leader

Washington Post logoPresident Trump wanted Attorney General William P. Barr to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so, people familiar with the matter said.

The request from Trump traveled from the president to other White House officials and eventually to the Justice Department. The president has mentioned Barr’s demurral to associates in recent weeks, saying he wished Barr would have held the news conference, Trump advisers say.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has sought some distance from the White House, particularly on matters relating to the burgeoning controversy over Trump’s dealings on Ukraine and the impeachment inquiry they sparked.

View the complete November 6 article by Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig on The Washington Post website here.

Justice Dept. Asks for Identifying Details on Anonymous Op-Ed Author

New York Times logoThe writer, a senior Trump administration official, plans to write a book to be published this month.

The Justice Department is demanding identifying details about the senior Trump administration official who denounced the president in a New York Times Op-Ed last year under the byline Anonymous, according to a letter from a senior law enforcement official on Monday ahead of a forthcoming book by the still-unnamed writer.

Assistant Attorney General Joseph H. Hunt asked the book’s publisher and the author’s book agents for proof that the official never signed a nondisclosure agreement and had no access to classified information. Absent that evidence, Mr. Hunt asked that they hand over information about where the person worked in the government, and when.

“If the author is, in fact, a current or former ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration, publication of the book may violate that official’s legal obligations under one or more nondisclosure agreements,” Mr. Hunt wrote to Carol Ross of the Hachette Book Group, which is publishing Anonymous’s book, and to Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn, the agents for the former self-described senior official.

View the complete November 4 article by Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

AlterNet logoStudents of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

View the complete October 25 article by Heather Digby Parton on the AlterNet website here.

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.