OH NOES! The NY Times has caught Trump’s nominee for AG red-handed, criticizing the Mueller investigation!
Whatever will Trump do???
NY TIMES – William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, wrote an unsolicited memo to top Justice Department officials in June objecting to the notion that Mr. Trump may have committed the crime of obstruction of justice.
In a 19-page memo, Mr. Barr sharply criticized an apparent aspect of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Mr. Trump may have committed a crime by trying to get the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to quash the criminal investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and later by firing Mr. Comey.
Mr. Barr argued that the Justice Department must not accept the notion that a president can violate a statute that criminalizes obstruction of justice by exercising his constitutional authority in an otherwise lawful way — such as by firing a subordinate or using his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding” — but with a corrupt motive.
Mr. Barr’s views are likely to become a topic of intense scrutiny at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. They raise the question of whether, if he is confirmed and takes over supervision of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry as attorney general, he would order Mr. Mueller to shut down the obstruction-of-justice component of his investigation.
Here’s specifically what they cite from the memo by Barr:
“Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction,” Mr. Barr wrote, adding: “Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived. As I understand it, his theory is premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law. Moreover, in my view, if credited by the department, it would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the presidency and to the administration of law within the executive branch.”
Wow, that’s pretty good actually. Sounds a lot like what Mark Levin has been saying for a long time now.
Here’s more from Andy McCarthy on this memo from Barr, arguing that Barr is simply trying to protect the integrity of the Department of Justice and the presidency from improper prosecution:
Trump’s attorney-general nominee would help Mueller conclude his work within DOJ guidelines.
It is exactly what we need and should want in an attorney general of the United States: the ability to reason through complex legal questions in a rigorously academic way. Not to bloviate from the cheap seats, but to think these issues through the way a properly functioning Justice Department does: considering them against jurisprudence, statutes, rules, regulations, and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, with a healthy respect for facts that we do not know or about which we could be wrong — facts that could alter the analysis.
That is precisely what Bill Barr did in June, when he penned an unsolicited memorandum to top Justice Department officials on a matter of immense national significance: the obstruction aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump.
Barr, whom President Trump has nominated to be the next attorney general, was not prejudging the facts. He was addressing the law and Justice Department policy. With great persuasive force, the 19-page memo posits two contentions. First, based on what is publicly known, the special counsel’s theory of obstruction is legally flawed. Second, if a Justice Department investigation is going to be used to take down a democratically elected president, the social cohesion of our body politic demands that it be over a clear, very serious crime, not a novel and aggressive theory of prosecution.
As Barr elaborates, if a president may be prosecuted for obstruction based on carrying out the executive’s constitutional prerogatives — exercises of prosecutorial discretion, giving direction to the course of an investigation, making personnel and management decisions — then every other official in the Justice Department is similarly vulnerable. The apprehension that proper and necessary acts could be construed as improperly motivated, and therefore as actionable obstruction, would profoundly undermine the administration of justice.
The suggestion that there was something untoward about Barr’s submission is absurd. This, no doubt, is why the ethics analysts at the Justice Department concluded that the memo raises no issues of disqualification or recusal in connection with Barr’s nomination to be attorney general. These are the same career lawyers who advised former attorney general Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation that Mueller is now conducting, much to the president’s chagrin and the applause of his critics.
Read more of McCarthy’s article here.
Barr sounds like exactly what’s needed to lead the DOJ and you can bet this is one of the reasons Trump picked him as his nominee.
I just hope that, in the meantime, Acting AG Whitaker takes Barr’s memo to heart and acts on it accordingly as he now oversees the Russia investigation.