A low point in Justice Department history
By Jennifer Rubin
May 2 at 9:45 AM
The consensus view outside Trumpland was that Attorney General William P. Barr came across at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as a political hack ...
There was no “worst” moment in the hearing, but rather a series of them ...
Barr conceded that he had not read the evidence underlying the report before taking the prosecutorial decision on himself. He claimed not to know that Mueller and his team objected to the report, but later called the letter — Mueller went to the trouble of putting his concerns in writing — “a bit snitty.” He insisted that Mueller was only upset about news coverage, not Barr’s four-page summary — which strains credulity. Barr then refused to turn over notes of his discussion with Mueller ...
At Wednesday’s hearing, Barr denied that Trump’s telling former White House counsel Donald McGahn to say that he hadn’t been instructed to fire Mueller was obstruction, and he also dismissed Trump’s apparent public threats to Michael Cohen as insufficient evidence of witness tampering. His position on what constitutes witness tampering and his refusal to look at the totality of evidence of obstruction would seem to contradict long-held Justice Department positions ...
Barr offered the radical opinion that a president can dismiss any investigation he thinks is unwarranted. “The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course,” Barr insisted. “The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.” That would have blessed President Richard M. Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and would give every president an exemption from investigation (no president thinks there is a predicate for investigating him), a notion entirely at odds with the notion that everyone must obey the law. We would never have an investigation of wrongdoing if the president could immediately short-circuit it; the result would be an open invitation to commit serious, serial crimes ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/02/barrs-testimony-was-low-point-doj-history/?utm_term=.09993d6815b2
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