Tag: Bill Barr willing to weaken the rule of law to protect Trump

Judge rejects Justice Dept. bid to short-circuit defamation case brought by woman who accused Trump of rape

Washington Post logo

A federal judge Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’s bid to make the U.S. government the defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says President Trump raped her decades ago, paving the way for the case to again proceed.

In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote that Trump did not qualify as a government “employee” under federal law, nor was he acting “within the scope of his employment” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he had raped journalist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store during the 1990s.

Carroll sued Trump over that denial in New York in November, and last month the Justice Department moved the case to federal court and asked a judge to substitute the U.S. government as the defendant. The department argued Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States” when he disputed Carroll’s allegations. Continue reading.

Top prosecutor on Barr’s investigation of the Russia probe just resigned out of fear of political influence: report

AlterNet logo

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy has been an important figure in the U.S. Department of Justice, serving as an aide to John Durham in his Russia investigation. But Dannehy, the Hartford Courant reported Friday, has resigned from that probe.

The Courant’s Edmund H. Mahony reports that Dannehy, according to her colleagues, is stepping down “at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done.”

Mahony explain “Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by e-mail Thursday evening. The short e-mail was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.” Continue reading.