Attorney General William Barr is failing to uphold his duty to defend the Constitution

From: Public Citizen <robert@citizen.org>

To: Mark M Giese <m.mk@...>

Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 16:30:46 -0400

Subject: Barr should be impeached

Message-ID: <d7346ab6-0e4e-4f74-bd1c-243867c07652@salsalabs.org>

 

Attorney General William Barr is failing to uphold his duty to defend the Constitution.

He is undermining the independence and integrity of the United States Department of Justice.

And he is failing to enforce the nation’s laws with an even hand.

Attorney General William Barr should be impeached.

Barr has served as attorney general under Donald Trump for a little more than a year. In that time, he has repeatedly committed impeachable offenses and made statements and acted in ways that prove him unfit to be the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Let’s start with today’s news.

A federal prosecutor has testified that the Justice Department’s criminal sentencing recommendation for Trump confederate Roger Stone was weakened due to interference from the top echelons of the department. The prosecutor — who left his post in protest — doesn’t know who ordered the reduced sentencing recommendation, but it’s highly unlikely to have occurred without Barr’s approval, at minimum.

That fits a pattern of distorting justice to protect the political interests of Donald Trump and his allies.

• Over the weekend, Barr engineered the ouster of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman. Berman had pursued prosecutions of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and other Trump allies.

• Barr’s Justice Department shockingly recommended that perjury charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn be dropped — even though Flynn had already pled guilty. (Earlier today, a federal appeals court authorized this jaw-dropping Justice Department move.)

• Barr mischaracterized the Mueller report to wrongly claim it exonerated Trump, and he blocked officials from complying with congressional subpoenas in the Trump impeachment investigation.

The list goes on and on.

Among the attorney general’s most sacrosanct duties are to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws and to protect our civil liberties.

Over the weekend, in an interview on Fox News, Barr said, in response to a question about the nationwide uprising sparked by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and so many more of our fellow Americans:

“No, I don’t think there’s systemic [racism].”

Barr was not misquoted. He was not taken out of context. He was not being grilled by “the liberal media.”

He was being fed softball questions by Trump TV.

This too fits a pattern of wrongful conduct by Barr:

• To defend Trump’s racist push for a citizenship question in the 2020 Census, Barr defied congressional subpoenas for information on how the question was designed to suppress responses from Latinos. The House voted to hold Barr in criminal contempt.

• Continuing the policy of his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, Barr has declined to use consent decrees with city police departments — a powerful tool used by the Obama administration to facilitate reform in departments with histories of discriminatory practices.

• With the nation facing a November 2020 election crisis due to the pandemic and needing to move swiftly to easy voting by mail, Barr has raised groundless concerns about how voting by mail might encourage fraud.

• Barr helped drive the militarized response to Black Lives Matters protests, including the decision to violently clear peaceful demonstrators from near Lafayette Park, in front of the White House.

For all of this, and much more, William Barr should be impeached.

Look, we don’t have any illusion that Congress is going to rush to impeach Barr. Congress remains shell-shocked from the Trump impeachment. It is barely functioning due to the coronavirus emergency. It has enormous work to do to mitigate the health and economic fallout from the pandemic. And there’s an election in just five months.

But the case against Barr is too strong to ignore.

Attorney General William Barr should be impeached.

Add your name if you agree.

Thanks for taking action.

Stay safe.

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen

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