Tag: Bill Barr

Bill Barr’s Mueller probe has inadvertently exposed the hypocrisy of Flynn’s defenders: legal experts

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FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will soon plead guilty to a felony in federal district court after he allegedly made false statements in connection with an FBI application to surveil Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

The case was brought by U.S. Attorney John Durham as part of his investigation into the origins of the Russia probe – an investigation that was initiated by Attorney General Bill Barr.

Writing for Lawfare, Barbara McQuade and Chuck Rosenberg note that the statute Clinesmith will plead guilty to is the same statute Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to twice in federal court. “One element of the statute to which Clinesmith will plead guilty requires that his false statement be ‘material.’… that means that his false statement had a ‘natural tendency’ to influence a pending matter (here, the surveillance application to the court) or was ‘capable’ of influencing that matter. This is typically an easy element to meet,” McQuade and Rosenberg write. Continue reading.

‘Nightmare scenario’: Conservative paints frightening portrait of Trump and Barr stealing the election

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With Donald Trump doing everything he can to disrupt mail-in voting before the November 3rd election day, conservative Matt Lewis suggested the country could be faced with a “nightmare scenario” where the media calls the election for the sitting president before all the ballots are tallied, setting the stage for the president to refuse to step aside.

In his column for the Daily Beast, Lewis noted that the president’s attacks on mail-in votes could backfire by discouraging older voters who might support him from participating and that Biden will likely be the recipient of the majority of those votes.

And that could be the problem that sets in motion a power struggle based upon the speed each state employs to count them — and if Attorney General Bill Barr steps in and lends the president a hand. Continue reading.

Trump’s re-election plan is straight out of the dictator’s playbook

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The single most consistent defining characteristic of an emerging dictatorship in a country that started as a democracy is that the dictator regularly holds elections and always wins, because he uses the instruments of government to make sure he wins.

Trump has now done this with the Justice Department, the Post Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, and our intelligence agencies.

Over at Justice, Attorney General Bill Barr has already said that he intends to investigate Joe Biden and his son’s activities in Ukraine and may report on that just before the election. Continue reading.

Trump’s solicitor general refuses to tell court why Barr is defending Flynn: ‘Some of it’s not’ public

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The acting solicitor general claimed before a judge that Attorney General William Barr had reasons to intervene in Michael Flynn’s case, but he can’t tell the court.

Jeff Wall, the U.S. government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court, told the District of Columbia Circuit Court that Barr had secret, undisclosed reasons for dismissing the case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser.

A full federal appeals court heard arguments Tuesday over whether to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his contacts with Russian officials before the inauguration. Continue reading.

Appeals court seems wary of ordering dismissal of Flynn case

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court in Washington appeared inclined Tuesday to let a judge decide on his own whether to grant the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the criminal case against former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Many members of the court expressed repeated skepticism at arguments from the Justice Department and Flynn’s attorneys that a judge was not empowered to probe the motives behind the government’s decision to abandon the prosecution of Flynn, who pleaded guilty as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation to lying to the FBI.

The nearly four hours of arguments were the latest step in a long-running legal saga that has prompted an extraordinary power struggle between the executive and judicial branches. The case will almost certainly persist for months if the court rejects Flynn’s efforts to get a speedy dismissal and returns it to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who refused to immediately grant the department’s request to drop the prosecution. Continue reading.

Bill Barr and Donald Trump are trying to torch the ‘Ancient Constitution’ that governed kings

AlterNet logoWith each passing day, it seems, the Trump administration seems intent on replaying the leadup to the English Revolution.

Like King James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland), Trump believes that he, to quote James’ tract of 1598, “The True Law of Free Monarchies,” “is above the law,” accountable only to God. He asserted in a July, 2019 speech that Article II of the Constitution means “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” Like James’ son, Charles I, who ruled England for 11 years without a parliament, Trump is increasingly governing through executive orders rather than making laws with the House and Senate.

Attorney General William Barr, Trump’s legal theorist, has put forward the notion that the president’s powers are “undivided and absolute.” Even more astonishing, Barr wrote in his June 2018 unsolicited memo to the Trump administration that “The Constitution itself places no limit on the president’s authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct  . . .” Both Barr and Trump believe that the chief executive’s prerogatives are not to be questioned. It is “presumption and high contempt, “James told Parliament in 1616, “to dispute what the king may do.” Barr said pretty much the same thing in his speech to the Federalist Society in November 2019, arguing that the “presidential power has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches.” Continue reading.

U.S. Attorney General Barr says the left wants to tear down system

U.S. Attorney General William Barr mounted a partisan attack on the Democratic Party in an interview that aired Sunday, claiming the left believes in “tearing down the system” and pursues absolute victory as “a substitute for religion.”

Barr also told a Fox News TV host he was worried that an increase in mail-in voting could lead to a contested presidential election in November, sounding in on an issue often raised by U.S. President Donald Trump.

In an interview with conservative pundit Mark Levin, Barr said Democrats had pulled away from classic liberal values and now were akin to the “Rousseauian Revolutionary Party” aimed at destroying the institutions upon which the country was built. Continue reading.

Here’s the major ‘tell’ that reveals exactly what Bill Barr will do to win Trump the election: ex-DOJ spokesperson

AlterNet logoFormer Justice Department lawyer Matt Miller said that Attorney General Bill Barr has a “tell” that Miller thinks reveals what Barr will do about his new attempt at a GOP-run Russia investigation.

The MSNBC panel discussion looked back at Barr’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, where he admitted that the White House government appointees have discussions about the 2020 campaign during Cabinet Meetings. Conducting politics under the government is strictly prohibited.

“He has a tell, and the one that you just showed is an example, where there’s an answer where you expect the attorney general to give,” Miller began. “In the confirmation hearing, the answer you expected him to give was that he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation because of his previous writings on the topic, a memo he had written that was seen as the audition for the job. And he didn’t give that answer, and I think we found out why shortly after, it was because he wanted to interfere in the Mueller probe. He’s wanted to go back and then discredit it afterward.” Continue reading.

Bill Barr Has ’Surged’ Federal Agents Into American Cities Before

As violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.

“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.

That was in 1992, during Barr’s first stint leading the Justice Department, under former President George H.W. Bush. Continue reading.

Barr Makes It Official—He’s Trump’s New “Fixer”

If and when the attorney general leaves, the Department of Justice faces a reckoning.

Of President Donald Trump’s many career skills, perhaps the least appreciated is his lifelong and uncanny ability to sniff out lawyers who will serve his will.

In slightly more than 500 days in office, Attorney General William Barr has pivoted from establishment D.C. attorney—sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States—into Trump’s family lawyer. The office of the attorney general is one of the oldest in our constitutional system, and the department is pledged “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” But Barr, instead, displays a tendency to use all the department’s levers—and with a $32 billion budget there are a lot of them—not to protect “all Americans” but to protect the president, personally and politically.

Is Election Day set by law? “I’ve never looked into it,” Barr demurred in his testimony this week. Is it appropriate for the president to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election? Barr’s first answer: “It depends what kind of assistance.” These are the answers of a man who has turned the once-proud Department of Justice into the president’s personal law firm. That is contrary to every tradition of the Justice Department, but consistent with how Trump has operated for his entire professional life. Continue reading. Continue reading.