Tag: Trump Justice Department

Democrats seek to rein in the contact between White House, Justice Department on probes

Washington Post logoSen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) still keeps handy a two-page chart that a staffer drew up a dozen years ago, illustrating traditional limits between how many presidential aides are allowed to discuss investigations with Justice Department officials.

“That was the way it was supposed to be, the top one. Four White House people, three DOJ people,” Whitehouse said.

That tradition began during the Clinton administration and carried into the first years of George W. Bush but, later in Bush’s presidency, the chart grew to include more than 800 officials talking to one another.

View the complete June 19 article by Paul Kane on The Washington Post website here.

Paul Manafort Seemed Headed to Rikers. Then the Justice Department Intervened.

The decision came after Attorney General William Barr’s top deputy sent a letter to state prosecutors. Mr. Manafort will now be held in a federal lockup while he faces state charges.

Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who is serving a federal prison sentence, had been expected to be transferred to the notorious Rikers Island jail complex this month to await trial on a separate state case.

But last week, Manhattan prosecutors were surprised to receive a letter from the second-highest law enforcement official in the country inquiring about Mr. Manafort’s case. The letter, from Jeffrey A. Rosen, Attorney General William P. Barr’s new top deputy, indicated that he was monitoring where Mr. Manafort would be held in New York.

And then, on Monday, federal prison officials weighed in, telling the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Mr. Manafort, 70, would not be going to Rikers.

View the complete June 17 article by William K. Rashbaum and Katie Benner on The New York Times website here.

Justice gives Congress new details on ‘spying’ probe

The Justice Department on Monday offered more details to Congress on the investigation that Attorney General William Barr ordered into the intelligence collection on the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 election.

In a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said that the inquiry is being primarily conducted by U.S. attorney John Durham out of Justice Department offices in Washington, D.C.

Boyd wrote that Durham, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut, is receiving assistance from a “number of U.S. Attorney’s Office personnel and other Department employees.”

View the complete June 10 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

‘The closest thing we have to Dick Cheney’: Legal experts explain how Barr is ‘putting his thumb on the scale’ for Trump

The New York Times on Monday published a deep-dive into the legal and political career of William Barr, purporting to show that Trump’s attorney general “is neither as apolitical as his defenders claim, nor as partisan as his detractors fear.” But the article also describes Barr’s deference to Article II of the U.S. Constitution, providing a number of examples related to the attorney general’s long-held belief in presidential powers — and effectively undermining claims he’s not as partisan as critics claim.

Last week, University of Michigan Law professor Julian David Mortensen published an essay in the Atlantic that challenged those who believe “executive power” grants the U.S. president  all “the prerogatives of a British king, except where the Constitution specifies otherwise.”

“‘The executive power’ granted at the American founding was conceptually, legally, and semantically incapable of conveying a reservoir of royal authority,” David Mortensen wrote. “The real meaning of executive power was something almost embarrassingly simple: the power to execute the law.”

View the complete June 10 article by Elizabeth Preza on the AlterNet website here.

Nadler reaches deal with Justice on Mueller documents on eve of contempt vote

The head of the House Judiciary Committee on Monday announced that his panel had reached an agreement with the Department of Justice to obtain key underlying evidence from the Mueller report, staving off an imminent court battle over access to the files.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement he will “hold the criminal contempt process in abeyance for now” amid the Justice Department’s cooperation, noting that lawmakers will be able to begin reviewing the first of these documents later Monday.

“All members of the Judiciary Committee — Democrats and Republicans alike — will be able to view them,” Nadler said in a statement.

View the complete June article by Olivia Beavers and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Barr Escalates Criticism of Mueller Team and Defends Trump

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr ratcheted up his criticisms of the special counsel’s office and defended President Trump’s actions in a wide-ranging interview broadcast on Friday.

Mr. Barr distanced the Justice Department from the report on Mr. Trump’s attempts to interfere in the Russia investigation written by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Barr also said he could have skipped writing his controversial summary of the special counsel’s work if investigators had done more to prepare the report for public consumption.

And in an interview with CBS News from Alaska, where he had visited law enforcement officials, Mr. Barr also blamed his decision to release a four-page letter in March summarizing the report’s main conclusions, rather than releasing the report in its entirety, on the special counsel’s office.

View the complete May 31 article by Katie Benner on The New York Times website here.

‘Grave Concern’ Among Allies Over Barr Declassification Of US Secrets

Trump’s recent decision to let Attorney General William Barr declassify sensitive intelligence as part of his investigation into baseless claims that the FBI spied on Trump in 2016 could lead to a rift with some of America’s closest allies around the globe, according to a Thursday CNN report.

“If the review were to declassify sensitive intelligence — especially if doing so compromised the safety of sources — that would cause very grave concern,” a former senior British ambassador said. “It could even affect the readiness of close allies like Britain to continue sharing the most sensitive material with the US.”

The concern stems from the broad authority Trump delegated to Barr, giving him carte blanche authority to declassify any intelligence he wants, meaning Barr has the ability to cherry-pick information to share with the public. Barr has already demonstrated his willingness to misrepresent information, in his misleading summary of the Mueller report, all for the sake of trying to help Trump.

View the complete May 30 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

The subtle way Robert Mueller just threw William Barr under the bus

Mueller wanted no part of Barr’s deceit.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced his resignation on Wednesday, bringing a formal close to his investigation into Russia’s efforts to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Along the way, however, Mueller subtly undercut one of Trump’s most strident defenders — Attorney General Bill Barr.

Since ascending to the office, Barr has repeatedly attempted to downplay the possibility that Trump either criminally obstructed justice or otherwise made an effort to thwart Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s electoral interference. Among other things, Barr has suggested that the special counsel’s decision not to charge Trump with a crime was based on the fact that Mueller failed to uncover sufficient evidence that Trump committed a crime — and not because of the Justice Department’s longstanding view that charging a sitting president is unconstitutional.

In a summary of Mueller’s report that Barr released weeks before the report itself became public, Barr stated that he and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that the evidence compiled by Mueller “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense” and that they made this determination “without regard to…the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.”

View the complete May 29 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

Mueller: Charging president with a crime was ‘not an option we could consider’

Special counsel Robert Mueller, in his first public comments on his two-year investigation surrounding President Trump and his campaign, said Wednesday that his office did not charge Trump with a crime because it “was not an option” under Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations.

Mueller, in a dramatic appearance at DOJ headquarters, said it would have been impossible to bring Trump to court and that his final report clearly spelled out that investigators did not conclude that the president was innocent of a crime.

“After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that,” Mueller said during his eight-minute address.

View the complete May 29 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Five takeaways from Barr’s new powers in ‘spying’ probe

President Trump this week gave Attorney General William Barr new authorities to examine and possibly release classified material related to the Justice Department’s inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.

The move is widely perceived as an effort by Trump to ramp up his administration’s probe of surveillance directed at members of his 2016 campaign. The president and his allies have suggested that federal agents biased against him improperly initiated the investigation into Russia’s election interference.

Barr said last month he would examine the “genesis and conduct” of the Russia probe, adding that he believed the Trump campaign was “spied” on and wanted to ensure it was “adequately predicated.” Those remarks drew fire from Democrats, who accused him of advancing a conspiracy theory.

View the complete May 25 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.