Tag: William Barr

Ex-federal prosecutor warns Bill Barr could ‘run interference’ on the Epstein case if Trump is potentially involved

AlterNet logoUPDATE: Since the publication of this story, it has been widely reported that Attorney General Bill Barr is recusing from the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah highlighted the troubling nature of Attorney General Bill Barr’s position leading the Justice Department in a new op-ed reflecting on the arrest of billionaire and alleged sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

While it often seems that sexual abusers and high-status men guilty of criminal wrongdoing face little actual accountability, Rocah argued, Epstein’s arrest indicates, at least in this instance, the justice might be served.

But she has serious concerns about the attorney general’s potential involvement. Barr oversees all federal prosecutions, even the charges, such as those against Epstein, brought by the famously independent Southern District of New York. While Barr may have no interest in going easy on Epstein, Rocah warned he may be tempted to get involved if the president falls within the scope of the investigation:

View the complete July 8 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Longtime colleague delivers brutal dressing down to Bill Barr: His goal is ‘assigning unchecked power to the president

AlterNet logoDonald Trump is not the first U.S. president who has chosen William Barr as his attorney general: Barr held the same position under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. One of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who knew Barr under Bush’s presidency was Donald Ayer, who explains why the attorney general is so bad for democracy in a blistering June 30 article for The Atlantic.

The 70-year-old Ayer (who is now in private practice) served as principle deputy solicitor general under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s and went on to serve as deputy attorney general under Bush in 1989 and 1990. In his article, Ayer explains that given Barr’s “prior service as attorney general in the by-the-book, norm-following administration of George H. W. Bush,” many Americans viewed him as “a mature adult dedicated to the rule of law who could be expected to hold the Trump Administration to established legal rules.”

But Barr, Ayer stresses, has proved to be a Trump loyalist who has “seen fit to support Trump in his lies and abuses.” Ayer is highly critical of Barr’s response to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russian investigation.

View the complete July 1 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

House Democrats to continue census probe

Panel will resume query into why a citizenship query was added to next year’s census.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee will continue to investigate the addition of a citizenship query to next year’s census, Chairman Elijah E. Cummings said Thursday in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to block the question.

The investigation has been a hotspot of conflict between the House and the administration. The committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over document subpoenas earlier this month. Cummings, D-Md., called on the pair to comply with the subpoenas.

“[I]t is now even more clear that our Committee’s investigation must get to the truth of why the Trump Administration was pushing the citizenship question and why it is engaging in this coverup,” Cummings said in a statement.

View the complete June 28 article by Michael Macagnone on The Roll Call website here.

House Oversight recommends contempt charge against Barr and Ross over citizenship question on census

AlterNet logoIn a morning press release, Democratic Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Elijah Cummings announced that the committee has filed a bipartisan report recommending that both Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross be held in contempt of Congress. The contempt recommendation comes after both Barr and Ross refused to speak to Congress about the reason that a question on citizenship was added to the 2020 census form, and after other witnesses were blocked from discussing the issue.

Included with the recommendation is a transcript of the committee’s interview with former Ross adviser James Uthmeier. The transcript shows that officials at the Department of Commerce blocked Uthmeier from replying almost one hundred times. He didn’t answer questions about the advice he gave on the citizenship question. He wouldn’t answer when asked whom he had spoken to about the idea. He wouldn’t talk about a secret memo he wrote on the topic and hand-delivered to the Justice Department.

Even so, Cummings says it wasn’t completely useless to have the former adviser testify. “Despite these restrictions, Mr. Uthmeier provided the Committee with some new information,” wrote the committee chair. “He disclosed that he sought advice on adding the citizenship question from John Baker, an outspoken advocate who has argued that ‘the citizenship question is necessary to collect the data for a redistricting of House seats that excludes aliens from the calculation.’  Mr. Baker’s views on the citizenship question have nothing to do with enforcing the Voting Rights Act, but instead are focused on redistricting.”

View the complete Jun 25 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos not he AlterNet 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 releases legal opinion backing Treasury’s refusal to release Trump tax returns

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday released a legal opinion backing up the Treasury Department’s decision to reject a request by congressional Democrats for six years of President Trump‘s tax returns.

“While the Executive Branch should accord due deference and respect to congressional requests, Treasury was not obliged to accept the Committee’s stated purpose without question, and based on all the facts and circumstances, we agreed that the Committee lacked a legitimate legislative purpose for its request,” Steven Engel, an assistant attorney general in DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, said in the 33-page opinion.

The opinion comes after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last month rejected a subpoena from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) demanding Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2013 through 2018.

View the complete June 14 article by Naomi Jagoda on The Hill website here.

House Oversight votes to hold Barr, Ross in contempt

The House Oversight and Reform Committee voted largely along party lines on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) broke with his party to vote with the panel’s Democrats.

The high-stakes vote took place just hours after the Justice and Commerce departments announced that President Trump had asserted executive privilege over the subpoenaed documents, which were tied to the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

View the complete June 12 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Investigating The Investigators? Don’t Forget That Manafort Meeting

Riddle me this: exactly how did the Deep State, anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and CIA persuade Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to hand over sensitive internal polling data to a Russian spy? Not to mention, what did Konstantin Kilimnik do with it?

More to the point, how is Attorney General William Barr going to explain it away? Particularly in view of the fact that Manafort remains locked up in a federal slammer, having violated a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about that very thing.

Because if Barr can’t explain, then all of his weasel-worded insinuations about FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign stand revealed for what they are: the desperate rationalizations of a cunning political operative willing to play along with an absurd conspiracy theory concocted to appease Donald J. Trump and distract his fervid supporters.

View the complete June 11 article by Gene Lyon on the National Memo 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.