Barr-ing the rule of law
Attorney General Barr breaks DOJ’s independence from President
Eric Boose / Opinion Editor / The USD Vista
The attorney general is not the president’s lawyer. The attorney general is not even the White House’s lawyer. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) themselves, the attorney general is “chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government,” and “represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested.” The attorney general is then, in the simplest sense, the federal government’s lawyer. In service of the rule of law — the idea that no American, not even the president, is above the law — the DOJ has long exercised a sort of independence from the rest of the executive branch.
However, there have been multiple occasions during William Barr’s ongoing tenure as attorney general in which he has acted almost blatantly in the interest of the president’s personal interest, the most recent being the DOJ’s intervention in the sentencing of Trump ally Roger Stone.
Stone, a former Trump consultant, was recommended a sentence of seven to nine years in prison for lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. Last week, President Trump tweeted that Stone’s sentence was too harsh, saying, “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Only hours after Trump’s tweet, the DOJ released a memo calling the recommended sentence too harsh. Shortly after the memo’s release, the president was back on Twitter, congratulating Barr for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have been brought.”
Is Trump’s tweet an outright admission of pressuring the DOJ to help out a friend? Not exactly. Does it call into question the DOJ’s historical independence from the rest of the executive branch? Sure. Did 2,000 former DOJ officials call for Barr’s resignation over the weekend? Absolutely. In a letter made public on Sunday, the group — made up of officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations — wrote, “Barr’s actions in doing the president’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.” The letter also urged current officials to “take appropriate action to uphold their oaths of office and defend nonpartisan, apolitical justice.”
In defense of himself and his department, Barr expressed frustration at Trump’s tweets, saying they make it “impossible” for him to do his job. While Barr insists that Trump has never directly asked him to interfere in a criminal case, he admitted that “to have public statements and tweets made about the department, about our people … about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”
However, as the former DOJ officials said, actions speak louder than words. It is also important to note that the president’s tweets do not carry the force of law. In fact, they carry the same force as any other tweet — that is to say, none. The point is, Barr’s implication that the president is somehow interfering with the DOJ or forcing the department’s hand by tweeting should be taken with multiple grains of salt, especially considering that this is not the first time that Barr has meddled with the dispensation of justice in ways which benefitted Trump.
The chief example of such meddling comes from last spring’s release of Special Counsel Robert Muller’s report — the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Barr famously withheld the full report from the public for multiple days, opting instead to release a four-page memo summarizing the report. That memo allowed Barr to frame the interpretation of the report’s ambiguous language, especially Muller’s conclusion that he could not exonerate the president of a charge of obstruction of justice. The Guardian’s David Smith says Barr’s memo “misled the public” about the conclusions in the report. Following the report’s release, former Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein tweeted, “Barr said this morning that Trump ‘fully cooperated’ with the investigation, That’s just an outright lie, and Barr knew it.”
While Barr very well could have framed a potentially damning report in a way that favored the president by his own volition, such a protection of the president does not fall within the attorney general’s job description. Combine Barr’s protectionist overreach with Trump’s willingness, his enthusiasm even, for Barr to take such positions, and their combined behaviors can fairly be described as threatening the rule of law in this country.
The attorney general is not the president’s lawyer. It is not, nor has it ever been, the job of the attorney general to interfere with criminal proceedings at the urging of the president. Nor has it ever been the job of the attorney general to withhold the findings of an investigation involving the president. Nor has it ever been the job of the attorney general to preface the release of those findings in a way which sheds a positive light on the president. For almost the entire history of the Department of Justice, there has been a bar between it and the rest of the executive branch. Now, things are different. Now, there is a Barr in the Department of Justice.