Third Time the Charm?
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Twice already this year thousands of lawyers who spent their careers in the United States Department of Justice have publicly declared that the so-called man who now heads the joint is almost as unfit for office as his boss.
These people are prosecutors. Defense lawyers are known to run their mouth. Prosecutors, not so much. It just ain’t easy to get prosecutors to turn on one of their own.
Yet in February, when alleged Attorney General William Barr subverted justice to spare Trump co-conspirator Roger Stone a fair prison sentence, nearly three thousand prosecutors who worked in Barr’s building demanded that he resign.
Barr once more has done the fuehrer’s bidding by telling a federal judge the DOJ was just kidding when it charged that yet another Trump BFF (Best Felon Friend), former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, lied to the FBI. Never mind that Flynn has sworn under oath, at least twice, that he did lie to the FBI. (“Haha,” Barr seemed to tell the court. “you just can’t believe that liar.”)
Barr’s motion to dismiss reads like it was written by a failed criminal defense lawyer — twenty pages of soundbite and fury lacking for nothing except a credible legal argument.
So now there are two thousand, three hundred fresh signatures on a new letter demanding freshly disgraced Barr’s resignation, three months overdue.
“Attorney General Barr,” the prosecutors wrote, “has once again assaulted the rule of law.”
They note that the lead prosecutor in the case resigned after Barr’s action, and that the DOJ’s motion to dismiss charges against Flynn was signed only by a single political appointee, and by none of the line prosecutors who actually litigated the case.
They further urged Congress to take action against Barr “for his repeated assaults on the rule of law in doing the President’s personal bidding rather than acting in the public interest.”
If Congress does as well with Barr as it did with Trump, Barr may be working on his goose-step right up to 2025.