Barr: "It's Not a Crime" for Trump to Demand Staffers Lie to Investigators
Even before Attorney General William Barr released his four-page summary of the Mueller report, lawmakers and concerned citizens alike were worried that his bias for Donald Trump would lead him to act less like the top lawyer for the federal government and more like the president’s personal attorney. (Why else send a 19-page, unsolicited memo to the Justice Department calling the special counsel’s inquiry into potential obstruction of justice “fatally misconceived” and “grossly irresponsible”?) Those fears were not at all dispelled when Barr declined to prosecute Trump for obstruction, despite the 10 incidents laid out by Robert Mueller in which the president tried to do just that, or when he claimed that Trump couldn’t have had corrupt intent, when Mueller actually found numerous compromising episodes involving Russia and the Trump campaign that the president would have preferred to keep hidden.
In case there was any remaining doubt that William Barr sees his job as protecting Donald Trump, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee on Wednesday—the first of two days of public hearings on Capitol Hill—made perfectly clear where the attorney general’s allegiance lies. Even in a case where Trump literally instructed a White House lawyer to lie on the record (obstruction) to hide the fact that he tried to fire the man investigating him (obstruction).
“You . . . have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer’s account in order to prevent further criticism of himself,” Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barr during her allotted five minutes, pointing to the fact that the president told former White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to investigators about Trump instructing him to remove Mueller. Why, she wondered, is that not obstruction of justice? To which Barr responded, “Well, that’s not a crime.”
“So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?” Feinstein asked.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/barr-not-a-crime-for-trump-to-demand-staffers-lie-to-investigators?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=Thematic_Ballot_05012019&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9f8cb24c17c6adf0e5d24&cndid=25394153&utm_content=B&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers
= new reply since forum marked as read
...if Hillary was doing this.
