Tag: William Barr

Barr to withhold bail from asylum seekers in latest border crackdown

Migrants who come to the United States seeking asylum may instead wind up jailed indefinitely while they wait for their claims to be processed, the Trump administration ruled Tuesday in its latest crackdown at the border.

Attorney General William P. Barr’s written decision, a policy reversal, applies to migrants who have already established “a credible fear of persecution or torture” in their home country.

Barr ordered immigration judges to stop allowing some asylum seekers to post bail while they wait the months or years for their cases to be heard — a system that President Trump has derided as “catch and release.”

View the complete April 17 article by Reis Thebault and Michael Brice-Saddler on The Washington Post website here.

Redacted Mueller Report

If you have an interest in reading the full redacted Mueller report, we have a link to a copy below.  (Where it’s a large PDF file, it takes a bit of time to load into preview mode.)  You’ll be able to read it in your browser window or download a copy to read offline:

https://app.luminpdf.com/viewer/CNFEcohiARvepzMtk

If you’d prefer to immediately download the file, here’s another link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C-id3YJBYAvSC5IoyIk6Du_S6Y6F3ZAU/view?usp=sharing

Mueller report to be released Thursday

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report will be released on Thursday morning, a Justice Department spokesperson said.

Democrats in Congress have been insisting on the release of the full report, but Attorney General William Barr has said that certain information — like grand jury material and information relating to other ongoing investigations — will be redacted from the document.

Barr sent a letter to Congress late last month announcing the end of Mueller’s probe and outlining the core conclusions of the special counsel’s investigation, including a finding that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 election.

View the complete April 15 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Fox News Judge: Barr’s Four-Page Memo Didn’t ‘Exonerate’ Trump

When Attorney General William Barr released his four-page assessment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page report, I was disappointed at many of my colleagues who immediately jumped on board the “no collusion” and “no obstruction” and “presidential exoneration” bandwagons.

As I write, Barr and his team are scrutinizing the Mueller report for legally required redactions. These include grand jury testimony about people not indicted — referred to by lawyers as 6(e) materials — as well as evidence that is classified, pertains to ongoing investigations or the revelation of which might harm national security.

Mueller impaneled two grand juries, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Arlington, Virginia. Together they indicted 37 people and entities for violating a variety of federal crimes. Most of those indicted are Russian agents in Russia who have been charged with computer hacking and related crimes in an effort to affect the 2016 presidential election. They will never be tried.

View the complete April 13 article by Andrew Napolitano on the National Memo website here.

Dems say attorney general undermined credibility with Trump talking point

Democrats on Thursday accused Attorney General William Barr of playing into President Trump’s attacks on the FBI after he testified the day before that he is reviewing whether U.S. officials were improperly “spying” on the 2016 campaign.

They warned that Barr is undermining his credibility by using language that echoes Trump and his allies.

“When someone is given real information that Russia interfered with our elections, of course they’re supposed to look into it, that’s part of their job,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said from the Senate floor on Thursday.

View the complete April 11 article by Cristina Marcos on The Hill website here.

Trump seizes on Barr’s ‘spying’ remark

President Trump said Thursday that he “absolutely” believes there was “unprecedented” spying on his campaign in 2016, a day after Attorney General William Barr made the assertion during testimony on Capitol Hill.

“I think what he said was absolutely true,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with the South Korean president.

“There was absolutely spying into my campaign,” he continued. “I’ll go a step further. In my opinion it was illegal spying, unprecedented spying and something that should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”

View the complete April 11 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

GOP strategist buries Bill Barr’s ‘dangerous’ testimony: He’s dedicating himseGOP strategist buries Bill Barr’s ‘dangerous’ testimony: He’s dedicating himself ‘to the service of evil’lf ‘to the service of evil’

Longtime Republican strategist Rick Wilson has written a scathing column in The Daily Beast ripping apart Attorney General Bill Barr for his Senate testimony where he said that the Trump campaign had been “spied” upon without citing any evidence to back up his claim.

Wilson takes Barr to task for transforming from a civil servant into a stooge for an authoritarian president — or as Wilson puts it, Barr has joined a long list of historical figures who began as “competent people” before being “given over to the service of evil.”

“Bad governments don’t start as nihilist terror; they’re the work of people who look like your neighbors,” Wilson writes. “They build anodyne policy directives to justify the acidic erosion of the rule of law. They put the tools of government and administration to darker and darker purposes while compartmentalizing inevitable excesses in the name of political expediency.”

View the complete April 11 article by Brad Reed of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Did you say ‘spying?’ Barr walks back testimony after making a stir

Barr clears up his Senate testimony after cable news and social media buzz over one of his word choices

Attorney General William Barr sought to “please add one point of clarification” at the end of his testimony Wednesday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee — and the veteran law enforcement official needed it.

Cable news and social media were abuzz with one of Barr’s earlier word choices, when he told senators that he would look into the work of U.S. intelligence agencies directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election because “spying did occur.”

Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz, had pointedly given Barr an opportunity to rephrase that, “because when the attorney general of the United States uses the word ‘spying,’ it’s rather provocative and in my view unnecessarily inflammatory.”

View the complete April 10 article by Todd Ruger on The Roll Call website here.

Barr says Mueller report will be released ‘within a week’

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday that he will release a public version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “within a week.”

Barr also said that the redactions made to the report would be color-coded and footnoted so that the public knows why the Justice Department decided to redact those portions.

“The process is going along very well,” Barr said during testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request. “My original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.”

View the complete April 9 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Road ahead: Barr testifying on DOJ budget, likely to get grilled about Mueller report

House to vote on net neutrality bill before Democratic retreat, Senate picks up pace on nominations after going nuclear

All eyes will be on the House and Senate Appropriations committees this week — but not necessarily because of President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget blueprint.

Attorney General William P. Barr is scheduled to testify Tuesday in the House and Wednesday in the Senate about the Justice Department’s budget, but the conversation is sure to turn to his handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

Barr has come under criticism over reports that Mueller’s findings showed more evidence against the president, particularly regarding possible obstruction of justice, than the attorney general suggested in his four-page letter summarizing the report’s key conclusions.

View the complete April 8 article by Niels Lesniewski on The Roll Call website here.