Tag: Attorney General Barr

William P. Barr to depart as attorney general, Trump announces

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William P. Barr is stepping down as attorney general, ending a controversial tenure in which critics say he repeatedly used the Justice Department to aid President Trump’s allies, only to have Trump turn on him when he did not announce investigations of political foes and disputed White House claims of widespread election fraud.

Trump revealed the move on Twitter, writing that he and Barr had a “nice meeting” at the White House, and that Barr would “be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.” Trump also posted a copy of Barr’s resignation letter, in which Barr indicated he had just provided the president an “update” on the department’s review of voter fraud allegations.

Barr’s letter said he was “greatly honored” to have served in the administration, and heaped praise on Trump for his “many successes and unprecedented achievements.” Trump on Twitter claimed of Barr, “Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!” Continue reading.

‘Irrelevant to the course of justice’: CNN reports Bill Barr dismissed Trump’s tweets as ‘the deposed king ranting’

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Attorney General Bill Barr is dismissing President Donald Trump’s tweets, according to a new report by CNN.

Barr reportedly said, according to CNN’s Jaimie Gangel, “none of this matters— it’s the deposed King ranting. Irrelevant to the course of justice and to Trump’s election loss.”

The report came after Trump had repeatedly lashed out at Barr on Twitter on Saturday. Continue reading.

Barr Is Said to Be Weighing Whether to Leave Before Trump’s Term Ends

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The attorney general’s future came into doubt after he acknowledged that the Justice Department had not found evidence of widespread voter fraud in the president’s election loss.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr is considering stepping down before President Trump’s term ends next month, according to three people familiar with his thinking. One said Mr. Barr could announce his departure before the end of the year.

It was not clear whether the attorney general’s deliberations were influenced by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr. Barr’s acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he still had confidence in his attorney general.

One of the people insisted that Mr. Barr had been weighing his departure since before last week and that Mr. Trump had not affected the attorney general’s thinking. Another said Mr. Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set out to accomplish at the Justice Department. Continue reading.

Trump declines to say whether he has confidence in Barr; Harris names chief of staff

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President Trump declined Thursday to say whether he retains confidence in Attorney General William P. Barr, who this week undercut the president by saying he had not seen any evidence of fraud on a scale that would alter the election results.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to the presidential election filed by Trump’s campaign, a new blow to his floundering efforts to overturn the election.

Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris named Tina Flournoy as her chief of staff and selected other key aides Thursday as the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead with its transition to power. View the post here.

No, Barr was not part of a secret plot against President Trump.

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Not long after Attorney General William P. Barr said on Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election last month, the pro-Trump media world began circulating a falsehood about him. In this telling, Mr. Barr had been part of a plot by a secret cabal of elites against President Trump all along.

The most prominent right-wing personality who spread the baseless narrative was the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. In his nightly show monologue on Tuesday, Mr. Dobbs said that Mr. Barr must be “either a liar or a fool or both” and suggested that he was “perhaps compromised.” Mr. Dobbs added that Mr. Barr “appeared to join in with the radical Dems and the deep state and the resistance.”

Mr. Dobbs’s unfounded accusation inspired dozens of Facebook posts and more than 14,000 likes and shares on the social network, as well as hundreds of posts on Twitter, over the past 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Continue reading.

FBI director stuck in the middle with ‘Obamagate’

The Hill logoFBI Director Christopher Wray is sitting in an increasingly hot seat as Republicans and the White House press forward with investigations into what President Trump is calling “Obamagate.”

Congressional Republicans are pressing Wray to provide more information after recently released FBI field notes showed officials debating how to handle the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The controversy over the notes contributed to Attorney General William Barr’s contentious decision to drop charges against Flynn, despite his guilty plea. Continue reading.

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

AlterNet logoStudents of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

View the complete October 25 article by Heather Digby Parton on the AlterNet website here.

Security experts warn AG Barr is trying to use foreign governments to ‘undermine’ FBI’s Russia investigation: ‘This is a gross abuse of power’

AlterNet logoWhen Attorney General William Barr was confirmed by the U.S. Senate earlier this year, his supporters noted he had previously held that position under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s and insisted that he would conduct himself like a traditional Republican rather than a Trump loyalist. But Barr has turned out to be very much a Trump loyalist, and an October 17 article by security experts James Lamond and Talia Dessel for Just Security outlines the ways in which Barr, with the help of U.S. Attorney John Durham, has been trying to use foreign governments to “undermine the FBI’s decision to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

“This effort is an abuse of power, purely designed to help President Donald Trump politically,” Lamond and Dessel warn. “The fact is, it would have been malpractice if the FBI had not opened its investigation in the summer of 2016.”

In his final report for the Russian investigation, former special counsel Robert Mueller made it clear that the Russian government aggressively interfered in 2016’s presidential election — and Mueller has warned that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters plan to do the same thing again in 2020. But Lamond and Dessel (both known for their expertise on intelligence and Russia-related matters) stress that Barr and Durham aren’t trying to “contest the findings of the Mueller investigation” but rather, are trying to “prove that the trigger for the FBI launching its original inquiry into Russian interference was, in fact, a set-up.”

View the complete October 17 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Pence, Pompeo, Barr and Mulvaney could be subpoenaed by House Dems — and also be impeached: Former GOP rep

AlterNet logoVice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr, and Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney all may be subpoenaed by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, says ex-Republican Congressman David Jolly.

“This has been methodical and is building up, I think, to subpoenaing Mike Pompeo, possibly the Vice President of the United States, Mick Mulvaney, and Bill Barr, because this touches them,” Jolly said Tuesday morning on MSNBC.

“And so all questions center on who knew what, when,” he added, speaking about Trump’s Ukraine extortion scandal, “who was in the room when these conversations took place.”

View the complete October 15 aritcle by David Badash from the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Shep Smith steps down at Fox News

Axios logoLongtime Fox News anchor Shep Smith announced on Friday that he is stepping down from his position as Fox News’ chief news anchor, managing editor of the network’s breaking news unit and anchor of his weekday news show, Shepard Smith Reporting. Smith has been with the network for 23 years.

Why it matters: His departure comes as a rift grows wider between daytime news anchors and primetime opinion hosts at Fox.

Details: Smith’s last broadcast was Friday. The network sent a press release ahead of his final remarks about his departure on his show.

    • “Recently I asked the company to allow me to leave Fox News and begin a new chapter. After requesting that I stay, they graciously obliged,” he said in a statement.
    • In his final broadcast remarks, Smith thanked the network, and said he appreciated the opportunities that afforded him to “travel the country and the world gathering the facts for you.”

View the complete October 11 article by Sara Fischer on the Axios website here.