Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence
In light of AG William Barr’s recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee we present Lonnie T. Brown, Jr.’s January 2020 blog post for Defending the Public's Enemy ».
During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.
Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”
My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.
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