By Melvin A. Goodman, 
Lowering the Barr
William Barr, Trump’s Cat’s Paw, was appointed as Attorney General of the United States in 2019. According to such political texts as How Democracy Dies by Harvard Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the first authoritarian step in compromising the rule of law and the rule of democracy is to compromise law enforcement. Barr’s loyalty over the past two years has been to the President of the United States and not to the American people. He has politicized the work of the Department of Justice and fired U.S. attorneys who have been investigating Trump’s financial dealings with his personal lawyer. At the same time, Trump has removed five Inspectors General to such key agencies as the Office of National Intelligence, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense, and has hollowed out such key departments as the Department of State and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Oversight Clawed Back
Barr has been a persistent critic of the work of Inspectors General. It is noteworthy that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 21 to 1 last month to expand the power of the Department of Justice’s independent watchdog to investigate allegations of ethical violations and professional misconduct by department lawyers, overriding Barr’s objections. The bipartisan measure, which unanimously passed the House last year would shift the responsibility for investigating lawyer misconduct from an office under Barr’s supervision to the DoJ’s independent Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.
The President as Chief Law Enforcement Officer
William Barr has been a loyal ally to Trump in all these endeavors. An advocate of the “unitary executive,” Barr has argued throughout his legal career that the president has “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding.” In 1992, President George H.W. Bush, on the advice of than Attorney General Barr, pardoned six administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, who were found guilty on charges relating to the Iran-Contra affair. The independent counsel for Iran-Contra, Lawrence Walsh, concluded in the wake of the pardons that “The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.” (See Wright’s authoritative book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 2003) Barr said that Walsh was a “head-hunter,” who had “completely lost perspective,” which is similar to his criticism of Robert Mueller. Even the conservative OpEd writer, William Safire, of the New York Times, referred to Barr as “Coverup-General Barr.”
Efforts to Support Trump and Vilify Trump’s Critics
- Barr led an unprecedented effort by the Department of Justice to drop all charges against Lt. General Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty on two occasions to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A dissenting judge called the ruling of the Appeals Court to drop the case the creation of an “impenetrable shield” to block the trial judge from scrutinizing why the Department of Justice took such a “bizarre approach” to the case.
- Barr has consistently weakened the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to understand the scope of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and even initiated a criminal investigation of the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency for their work on the “Russia investigation.” In doing so, Barr repudiated the work of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, who concluded that the initiation of the investigation was both justified and valid. A British intelligence official observed that the criminal investigation of the FBI and CIA was “like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services.“
- Barr has tried to weaken the cases and the sentences of those individuals who helped Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. In particular, Roger Stone, who was involved in coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks in the release of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton. One of the prosecutors of Stone testified that the Department of Justice was treating him “differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President.”
- Barr engineered the ouster of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York presumably to compromise the investigation of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Because Giuliani was trying to elicit information from Ukrainian officials to harm Joe Biden. Previously, Barr and Berman clashed over the decision to pursue charges against another Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Trump and Barr Threaten the 2020 Election
Barr has done nothing about avoiding the repetition of Russian disinformation, which was a major part of their interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has conceded that a large main-in vote would compromise his chances of reelection. Barr has echoed Trump’s debunked claims regarding the vulnerability of mail-in ballots. Specifically, he has told Fox News that mail-in voting would “open the floodgates of potential fraud,” providing no basis for such a statement. A legitimate Attorney General would make sure that voting in the United States would be as free and fair as possible; Barr and the Trump administration are doing nothing to make sure that American citizens have such a basic right.
- Barr has done nothing to discourage Republican governors from purging voter rolls, demanding voter IDs, and closing polling places.
- Barr has taken no steps to fight election-related disinformation in this election year. Even though Russia’s spread of disinformation was a major component in the run-up to the 2016 election.
- Meanwhile, thousands of Department of Justice alumni have called for Barr to step down, and Barr’s alma mater, George Washington Law School, has circulated a petition that condemns Barr’s actions.
The opinions expressed by Mel are wholly his own and do not imply in any way Florida Veterans For Common Sense, Inc. endorsement or agreement.