Tag: William Barr

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.

House to hold Barr contempt vote over Mueller report next week

The House will vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for declining to comply with a subpoena for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and related evidence.

The resolution will also target former White House counsel Don McGahn, who has defied a Democratic subpoena to appear before Congress.

The vote, scheduled for June 11, marks a major escalation of tensions between the Trump administration and House Democrats, who have launched a series of investigations into the president’s conduct in office — probes in which the White House has largely refused to cooperate.

View the complete June 3 article by Cristina Marcos, Scott Wong and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

 

House committee to vote on holding Barr and Ross in contempt for failing to provide documents related to 2020 Census citizenship question

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee said Monday that the panel would vote to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with a bipartisan subpoena for documents on a Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), announced the move in letters to Barr and Ross on Monday. He gave them until Thursday to comply and raised the possibility of delaying the vote if they cooperate.

“Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern,” Cummings wrote to Barr and Ross in the letters. “The Trump administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented coverups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations.”

View the complete June 3 article by Felicia Sonmez Tara Bahrampour and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

A brief history of the theory Trump and Barr are using to resist Congressional oversight

The unitary theory of the presidency may be reaching its logical conclusion under President Donald J. Trump. That theory, which is referred to as the unitary executive, holds that presidents have broad, close to unlimited, powers over the executive branch. At its extreme, the theory holds that the president cannot be checked “by Congress or the Courts, especially in critical realms of authority,” as John P. MacKenzie wrote in his book Absolute Power.

The Unitary Executive, as put forward by Attorney General Barr, holds that presidential power over executive branch functions can only be limited by the voters at the next election, or by Congress through its impeachment power. This was essentially the position Barr took in his June 8, 2018 memo to the Justice Department. “Thus, under the Framer’s plan, the determination whether the President is making decisions based on ‘improper’ motives or whether he is ‘faithfully’ discharging his responsibilities is left to the People, through the election process, and the Congress, through the Impeachment process,” Barr wrote. Although Barr does not say it, a president who acted in an improper or faithless way, but who is reelected or who escapes impeachment, could indeed be above the law. Is this really what the Framers intended?

It is first important to recognize that the words “unitary executive” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, although supporters of the theory claim to be originalists. The first known use of the term occurred during the Reagan Administration, when Attorney General Meese first put the theory forward. It was later used to justify much of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, including extreme measures like torture in the post 9/11 world. Yet even Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, who advanced the theory during the Bush years by writing the infamous memo enabling the torture of terrorists, recently said in an interview with NPR that “the Constitution grants him [the president] a reservoir of executive power that’s not specifically set out in the Constitution.”

View the complete June 3 article by Donald J. Fraser from the History News Network on the AlterNet website here.

Barr’s ‘suspicious’ decision to ignore a federal judge’s order over the release of Flynn transcripts put the AG in major jeopardy: legal scholars

In interviews with a constitutional law scholar and a former federal prosecutor, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post highlighted the fact that Attorney Bill Barr’s refusal to turn over transcripts of phone calls between Donald Trump’s national security advisor Michael Flynn and the Russians is not only suspicious — but puts Barr on the spot with the judge for refusing.

According to Jennifer Rubin, legal scholar Laurence Tribe said Barr may have created a major headache for himself by defying a court order.

Noting that, “Federal prosecutors on Friday declined to make public transcripts of recorded conversations between Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the United States in December 2016, despite a judge’s order,” Tribe said Barr’s Justice Department broke with legal protocols.

View the complete June 2 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet 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.

Standing Where Barr Cleared Trump on Obstruction, Mueller Makes a Different Case

The special counsel hopes an appearance will be his first and last public statement about the Russia and obstruction investigation. But he left many things unsaid.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr stood at the Justice Department lectern six weeks ago and put the best possible spin on the Mueller report for his boss, declaring that the special counsel had amassed insufficient evidence to accuse President Trump of a crime.

Robert S. Mueller III delivered a starkly different presentation on Wednesday from the same lectern, saying that charging a sitting president was never an option, no matter the evidence. Instead, his investigators asked another question: Could they clear the president?

On potential obstruction of justice, the answer was no.

View the complete May 29 article by Mark Mazzettti and Charlie Savage on The New York Times 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.

Trump’s Roy Cohns: William Barr has the power, but Rudy Giuliani slings the mud

While he was in Japan, Donald Trump demanded that the American press “apologize” for reporting on the Russia investigation. That would include reporting such as this January 2018 article from The New York Times in which it was disclosed that Trump had ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to pressure then-Attorney General Jefferson Sessions into unrecusing himself from the Mueller investigation. The reporting of those events turned out to be exactly right, and Congress would still like to chat with McGahn about that episode of obstruction. Except Trump is obstructing it.

The whole issue of Sessions’ recusal is worth remembering for another reason. It was at this point, when he saw that the attorney general was following the law by stepping down from an investigation of a campaign in which he had personally played a key role, that Trump issued one of his most memorable laments: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?

View the complete May 28 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.