AG William Barr

https://billmoyers.com/story/the-long-read-barr-battles-the-rule-of-law/

When the story of the Trump era is written, history will pose a single defining question to every American lawyer: In the fight to preserve the rule of law, which side were you on?

America has seen which side William Barr is on. As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, the attorney general represents the “People of the United States.” Early in his tenure, Barr jettisoned that role.

Operating as Trump’s personal advocate, Barr has abused the power of his office to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation. Although troublesome, Barr’s actions are best viewed as a case study in his modus operandi. What Barr has done to that investigation and its key players, he can do to anything and anyone. That makes Barr’s methods ominous for the rule of law itself.

Hiring Barr was no accident. Early in 2017, before special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, Trump feared that he was losing control of the Trump-Russia investigation. He was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ (JD, Alabama, 73) for recusing himself from the ongoing probe. Referring to his former personal attorney, notorious fixer, and top aide to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) during the investigations of communist activity in the 1950s, Trump lamented, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

A year later, he got his answer. Barr sent Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (JD, Harvard, ’89) an unsolicited 19-page memo challenging the premise of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation and urging that the special counsel should not even be permitted to question Trump. In William Barr, Trump had finally found his Roy Cohn.

First came the lies and deceptions. According to The Washington Post, as of July 9, 2020, Trump had made more than 20,000 “false or misleading claims” since assuming office. Like Trump, Barr understands the rhetorical and psychological concepts of primacy and repetition. Whoever speaks first and most frequently on an important topic has the upper hand in controlling the resulting narrative, regardless of its veracity.

From his first days in office, Barr has reinforced Trump’s false assertions that the Trump-Russia investigation never should have happened. In the maelstrom that followed, truth became a casualty. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/william-barr-trumps-sword-and-shield

Barr showed no sign of tempering Trump’s instincts. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me, “I think he was nominated for his ability to protect Trump. His belief in executive power was his primary qualification.” In high-profile cases, Barr has repeatedly aided Trump politically. When Barr issued his summary of the Mueller report, he quoted part of a sentence saying that no conclusive proof of collusion had been found, but left out the rest, which suggested that Russia and the Trump campaign had worked at arm’s length toward similar goals.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155221/dereliction-william-barr

Barr, by comparison, seems to have no such scruples about carrying out Trump’s whims. He hasn’t really deviated from Sessions’s overall policy agenda since taking over DOJ. In some aspects of immigration and criminal-justice matters, he’s even gone further than Sessions ever did. But his greatest achievement so far is doing what his predecessor spent almost two years resisting: transforming the Justice Department from a semi-independent actor into an instrument of Trump’s political interests.

Trump never masked his views on how his attorneys general should act. He believes that the Justice Department should protect him and his friends from legal troubles while inflicting them on his enemies. Multiple White House aides told Mueller that Trump would describe Robert F. Kennedy and Eric Holder as attorneys general who shielded their presidents from political harm, and how he needed to find one like them. To Trump, the attorney general is just another lawyer who should be aggressively advancing his personal interests—another Roy Cohn, or Michael Cohen, or Rudy Giuliani.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/william-barrs-secret-memo-attorney-general-department-justice-mueller.html

So the fact that the president who believes the attorney general should be his Roy Cohn appointed a candidate who had submitted a long defense of Trump to the president’s lawyers turns out not to have been a massive coincidence.

https://www.justsecurity.org/71230/bill-barr-no-lap-dog-just-defending-his-idea-of-the-top-dog/

Barr sent an unsolicited memo to President Trump on June 8, 2018, seemingly in an audition to become Attorney General, making the argument that the aspects of the Mueller investigation were legally insupportable, particularly because the president per se cannot commit obstruction of law, unless he commits an actual crime such as witness tampering.  According to Barr’s memo, the president’s “discretionary prosecutorial power is unreviewable.” As Marty Lederman explained in his review of the memo, this was no simple version of the unitary executive theory.  As Lederman, who is not one to exaggerate, wrote, the 2018 memo advanced “a version of Barr’s notorious 1989 OLC memorandum, boosted by the proverbial ‘steroids.’… so shockingly categorical and so extreme.”

Barr is a fellow traveler in his belief of an all-powerful president with deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former D.C. Circuit judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who infamously fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal’s “Saturday night massacre” when none of his Justice Department’s superiors would do so – because Bork believed it was President Nixon’s right to do so. Under President George W. Bush, DOJ lawyers relied on the same theory to advance controversial positions allowing torture and warrantless wiretapping of Americans on U.S. soil.  While those are policy positions that DOJ lawyers regarded as allowed by the unitary executive theory, proponents argue that the ability to control all executive branch personnel, as well as prosecutorial decision-making, is compelled by the theory.  This position undergirds opposition to the just-cause removal proposals for agency inspectors general and to the similar provision applicable to the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau recently invalidated by the Supreme Court.