William Barr's Interview Does Little to Stifle Calls for His Resignation

In ABC's much publicized interview with William Barr this week, the Attorney General said that Trump’s tweeting was making it “impossible “ to do his job.  Suddenly, Barr was reported in some media as having recovered some of his reputation-- but is that really true?  Hardly.  Ari Melber, chief legal correspondent at MSNBC, offered up a more accurate rewording of what Barr actually meant: “I stand by intervening to help a convicted Trump adviser, but I wish Trump did not admit what we are doing on Twitter.”

What is not being reported on by the media is the ongoing subservience of the Justice Department to the will and power of the president-- that is what Barr is working to implement. Barr believes in the centralization of presidential power—just to the point, critics say, where the president is effectively above the law.   A year ago, when the Senate voted to confirm Barr, his views were hardly a secret; we just chose not to emphasize them. Since then, a succession of magazine articles—in the New Yorker, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere—have elucidated his troubling judicial philosophy.

But day-to-day reporting still tends to overlook it, or to mention it only in passing. That’s regrettable, since Barr’s conception of the presidency will likely have consequences that outlast Trump. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a chief executive who is more powerful than the king,” Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, told the New Yorker. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.”

Barr's efforts to weaken the independence of DOJ and the rule of law in favor of the President has now prompted action by over 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials.   In an open letter, the former officials say Barr broke Justice Department rules when he overruled federal prosecutors in Stone’s criminal case, seeking a far more lenient sentence than the potential nine years prosecutors originally recommended. 

“It is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President,” they said.  In their call for Barr’s resignation, the former Justice Department officials suggested his behavior is a threat to democracy.  “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies,” they wrote.  The letter went on to say, "an independent, nonpolitical Justice Department is vital to the “Department’s sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law.”

“Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.”