Why the new case against Bill Barr could be a game-changer [View all]

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Why the new case against Bill Barr could be a game-changer

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/why-the-new-case-against-bill-barr-could-be-a-game-changer/


Published 8 hours ago on June 19, 2020


No attorney general since John Mitchell has gotten away with assaulting the rule of law more than Bill Barr. But unlike Mitchell, who served 19 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, Barr has yet to be held accountable for his ever-expanding laundry list of outrageous misdeeds and derelictions.

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But where Congress and Barr’s critics have come up empty, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement may ultimately succeed. On June 4, BLM’s Washington, D.C., chapter and five individuals filed a novel and potentially far-reaching federal lawsuit against Barr, President Trump, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Army Chief of Staff General James McConville and other law enforcement officials, alleging their First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated when peaceful demonstrators were violently removed from Lafayette Square, just outside the gates of the White House, on the evening of June 1.


The individual plaintiffs, who include a nine-year-old boy, were among thousands of demonstrators who had gathered to protest the murder of George Floyd. The lawsuit (as it was later amended) alleges that “without provocation,” and well before a 7 p.m. curfew was scheduled to take effect, “agents in the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Park Police, D.C. National Guard, Federal Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Military Police” fired “tear gas, pepper spray capsules, rubber bullets, and flash bombs into the crowd to shatter the peaceful gathering, forcing demonstrators to flee the area. Many peaceful demonstrators were injured, some severely.”

The reason the square was cleared, the lawsuit charges, was “to permit the president to walk to a photo opportunity” at St. John’s Episcopal Church, accompanied by Barr, Esper, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Ivanka Trump, and other senior advisers. Outside the church, Trump paused briefly for pictures, clumsily raising a Bible in his right hand. He returned to the White House at approximately 7:09 p.m. without entering the church or uttering a word of prayer, conciliation or condolence.

The photo stunt, according to the suit, “was a wholly illegal reason for abridging the constitutional rights of Plaintiffs and the others assembled in Lafayette Square.”............................