Bill Barr Is the Unindicted Co-Conspirator of Trump's Lawlessness and Unaccountable Executive Power
November 25, 2019
Barr absolved Trump of wrongdoing in the Mueller Report, even though there was extensive evidence of possible wrongdoing. (Truthout.org, Jared Rodriguez)
By William Berkowitz
In the less-than-a-year since William Barr has served as Attorney General he has become one of the most consistent of Team Trump’s sycophants. When Barr is not jetting around Europe seeking to substantiate President Trump’s wild conspiracy suppositions, he’s making news on his own. In a recent speech before the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, Barr lambasted Democrats for trying to take down the Trump administration. A group, called “Checks and Balances,” which is composed of former Republican administration officials, lawyers and law professors, also slammed Barr’s views on executive power.
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In recent comments to The Associated Press, Barr took on an affirmative stance toward the implementation of the death penalty, allowing that he’d be willing to take the administration's fight to restart federal executions to the Supreme Court if necessary. According to Fox News’ Vandana Rambaran, “Barr's comments to The Associated Press came after U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled Thursday to postpone four of five scheduled executions for next month; the fifth already had been halted. The Trump administration appealed the decision.”
Barr’s comments about moving executions forward came just days after another of his rants claiming that congressional Democrats are “using every tool” to “sabotage” the Trump administration. In a speech at the Federalist Society’s recent dinner, Barr said: “I deeply admire the American presidency as a political and constitutional institution. Unfortunately over the past several decades, we have seen a steady encroachment on executive authority by the other branches of the government.”
Barr went on: “Immediately after President Trump won the election, opponents inaugurated what they called the ‘resistance’ and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the executive branch and his administration.” (Barr was silent when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan regarding the Obama presidency by telling the National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”)
“The cost of this constant harassment is real,” Barr continued at the Federalist dinner.
“Now resistance is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous and, indeed, incendiary notation to import into the politics of a democratic republic.”
He added: “They essentially see themselves engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Barr declared: “In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law.” He continued, ”The fact is that, yes, while the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook and punctilio…he was upfront about what he was going to do and the people decided they wanted him to serve as President.”
It is no secret that the Federalist Society in enjoying a direct pipeline to the federal bench under the Trump administration. As Slate’s Jed Shugerman maintained, “To attack the speech as a speech is to grant Barr the terms he would prefer. Barr’s words and theories are intellectually dishonest and inappropriate for any federal official, but the problem isn’t merely that his political self-expression is disagreeable. It’s that his remarks are the defensive tactics of an unindicted co-conspirator desperate for attention and clinging to power.
“And so, as a politician in a political struggle, he sought to rally a gathering of his allies around their shared partisan mythology, or victimology. He is a criminal suspect, Trump’s fixer and enforcer, cloaking himself as both savior and martyr. Even though he probably sincerely believes in this Manichean culture war, he seems to have chosen the time, place, and vituperative manner to provoke an attack from ‘the Resistance’ and ‘secularists’ on his religio-political ideas. He is not only trying to distract. He also setting a trap to shift the debate from his alleged criminal involvement to his culture war terms.”
A little over a month after his speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School on religious freedom, in which he labeled progressives as a threat to Christians, Patricia Hackett, an adjunct professor at the school and Democratic congressional candidate, argued that Barr's remarks were "theologically ill-informed" and also "dangerous to the rule of law within our constitutional republic."
"Mr. Barr's analysis of religious freedom, in my judgment, is inconsistent with his duties as the sitting Attorney General of the United States," Hackett explained. "And what he said about the Judeo-Christian tradition was theologically and historically inaccurate. I would go so far to say that I have never read or heard remarks from a government official in the United States that were so inaccurate and disturbing."
In her own talk at McCartan Courtroom, the same cavernous law school auditorium that an invitation-only audience had filled for Barr's Oct. 11 address,
“Hackett began by reminding her audience that the duty of any attorney general of the United States is ‘to defend the religious liberty of all people, Christians and non-Christians, believers and non-believers alike,’” the National Catholic Reporter’s Catherine M. Odell pointed out. “But Barr, she said, appeared to justify ‘empowering certain religious institutions over the religious freedom and conscience of all Americans, whether religious or non-religious.’"
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