“Against the tableau of a raging pandemic and job market in freefall, on Thursday the justice department announced that it would be dropping its case against Michael Flynn, the president’s short-tenured national security adviser.
“The fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty and Donald Trump had previously accused him of lying to the vice-president no longer mattered. These days, Trump was claiming that Flynn had been exonerated and, after all, Barr was the president’s obedient servant. His tweets were Barr’s commands. To be sure, Barr had already been there before with Trump and decades earlier with George HW Bush.
“Little more than a year ago, after Robert Mueller had relayed his conclusions to the justice department, Barr issued a summary that distorted the special counsel’s report and turned them into a wholesale vindication of the president. When Mueller complained in writing of Barr’s deceit, ‘Barr became pissed,’ thought Mueller’s letter ‘nasty’ and felt personally ‘betrayed.’ Supposedly, the two men had been friends.
“But that wasn’t the end of his story. This past March, Barr also earned the ire of Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee to the federal bench. The judge ‘seriously’ questioned Barr’s integrity and credibility. The court’s March 2020 opinion deployed words like ‘distorted’ and ‘misleading’ to drive the point home, not the language generally used to describe the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
“To be sure, that was just another episode of Barr’s fealty to Trump. In February, Barr put his finger on the scale when it came to the sentencing of Roger Stone and overrode the recommendations of career prosecutors. For his valor, Barr won the president’s admiration. In a pre-8am tweet, Trump congratulated his attorney general and trashed Mueller, accusing him of lying to Congress. Like Roy Cohn, Trump’s personal lawyer of yore, Barr had attended Horace Mann and Columbia. History can repeat itself, in more ways than one.
“In the early 1990s, when Barr was George HW Bush’s attorney general, he repeatedly ran political interference for the man who hired him. Confronted with congressional demands for copies of classified documents and that Barr appoint an independent counsel to investigate Iraqgate, the extension of government credits to Saddam Hussein’s regime before its invasion of Kuwait, Barr pushed back hard.
“In a rebuke to congressional oversight, Barr refused to turn over the information. In a separate letter to the House judiciary committee, Barr denied the committee’s request for an independent counsel, tossing around such phrases as ‘not a crime’, ‘simply not criminal in any way’, ‘nothing illegal’, and ‘far from being a crime.’ In essence, Republican presidents were legally off-limits, ditto their appointees.
“But that wasn’t the end of Barr running interference for the elder Bush. After he lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton, Barr successfully argued for the pardon of Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, and others in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal.
“Then as now, Barr was attorney general: ‘I favored the broadest pardon authority,’ said Barr. He added, ‘There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, ‘No – in for a penny, in for a pound.’
“Not every attorney general is the president’s handmaiden. Likewise, not every president is determined to ride roughshod over DoJ. John Ashcroft, attorney general to George W Bush, refused to be steamrolled by the White House and declined to reauthorize ‘Stellar Wind,’ a domestic surveillance program. At the time, Ashcroft was in a hospital intensive care unit. The fact that the president’s counsel and the White House chief of staff were hovering over his bed did not alter the outcome.
“Indeed, unlike Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the younger Bush recognized that presidential pardons were not baubles. Bush commuted the prison sentence meted out to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, after a jury had convicted Libby of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with an investigation of unauthorized leaks of the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer. But despite Cheney’s repeated requests for a pardon he was rebuffed.
“At the time, Bill Burck, the deputy White House counsel, told the president: ‘You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.’
“The favoritism and unfairness of the process ‘frustrated’ Bush. Ultimately, the relationship between Bush and his vice-president took a permanent hit. As history would have it, Libby had represented Marc Rich, whose pardon further tarnished Clinton’s legacy.
“There is a coda. Trump subsequently pardoned Libby just as he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff found to be in contempt of court. For Trump, l’état, c’est moi [I am the State], and for Barr it’s pretty much what a Republican president says it is.”
Welcome to William Barr's America, where the truth makes way for the president by Lloyd Green, an attorney in New York,
Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign
and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992.
REPORTER: How will history look back on your decision to drop charges against Flynn?
ReplyDeleteBILL BARR: “Well, history is written by the winners. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
"...Dropping the Flynn case is a major step in Barr’s quest to wipe away the Russia investigation and the stain it has left on Trump’s presidency. But its true significance may lie in what it portends for the future. Thursday’s filing does not state outright that Flynn didn’t lie to FBI agents during an interview in the spring of 2017. Instead it argues that the agents didn’t have a lawful reason to investigate and question Flynn at the time, thus rendering it immaterial whether he lied or not. The filing, which draws heavily upon a questionable version of events, is signed only by Timothy Shea, the acting U.S. attorney for D.C. and a close Barr ally.
ReplyDelete"DOJ’s inspector general found last year that the FBI had a lawful basis to investigate connections between Trump and his associates and the Russian government. Barr disputed that assessment at the time, as did John Durham, his handpicked Russia investigation investigator, in an unusual public statement. By making this dubious case, the Barr Justice Department moves away from advocating on behalf of Trump’s political allies and towards attacking Trump’s political adversaries...
"'When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?' Herridge asked Barr in the Thursday interview. 'Well, history is written by the winner,' he said with a chuckle. 'So it largely depends on who’s writing the history'" (The New Republic).
“Nearly 2,000 former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations condemned the DOJ and Attorney General William Barr on Monday [May 11] for moving to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
ReplyDelete“The former officials said Barr ‘once again assaulted the rule of law’ and accused the attorney general of using the department ‘as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests.
“‘Make no mistake: The Department’s action is extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented,’ they wrote in a statement published on Medium. ‘If any of us, or anyone reading this statement who is not a friend of the President, were to lie to federal investigators in the course of a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation, and admit we did so under oath, we would be prosecuted for it.’…” (The Hill).