Opinion Writer
NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/opinion/trump-william-barr.html
Michelle Goldberg writes in the NY Times:
Just How Corrupt Is Bill Barr?
Opinion Columnist
SEPT. 26, 2019
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By now you have probably read the opening of the whistle-blower complaint filed by a member of the intelligence community accusing Donald Trump of manipulating American foreign policy for political gain. But the whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”
. . . . The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.
Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration.
In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.
The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.
According to Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, any lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”
Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens. Barr’s office insists that the president hasn’t spoken to Barr about the subject, but given the attorney general’s record of flagrant dishonesty — including his attempts to mislead the public about the contents of the Mueller report — there’s no reason to believe him. Besides, said Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”
But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.
“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.
That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”
I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.
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Another serious transgression: This shockingly biased and corrupt Trump political toady is literally running the U.S. Immigration Courts into the ground while neither Congress nor the Article IIIs have the guts to require that migrants receive the “fair and impartial” adjudications to which they are entitled under the Due Process Clause of our Constitution.
Sure, Billy Barr is “the pits!” But those in Congress and the Article IIIs who are “letting him get away with murder” are equally to blame. Bullies like Barr take advantage of the “go along to get along” cowardice of those charged with holding them accountable.
Another example of how Barr’s DOJ has become an “ethics free zone:” Yesterday, before Judge Dolly Gee in the Flores litigation Barr’s DOJ lawyer August Flentje presented a totally disingenuous position.
“How can you as officer of the court tell me that the regulations are not inconsistent with the settlement agreement?” the judge asked a Justice Department lawyer. “Just because you tell me it is night outside does not mean it is not day.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/migrant-children-flores-court.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
But in the end, even Judge Gee, no “shrinking violet,” merely expressed her displeasure and ruled against the DOJ.
Why weren’t Flentje and his supervisors, all the way up to Barr, referred to their respective state bars for ethical violations and knowingly trying to mislead the court by presenting a frivolous “defense?” Would private counsel’s dishonesty before the court have been treated as leniently? At one time DOJ lawyers were expected to have higher ethical standards than the minimum. Now they have become ethical scofflaws.
But, as long as Federal Courts are unwilling to hold Barr & company ethically accountable, the dishonesty and disrespect for the system will continue to grow. When the Article IIIs find themselves in the middle of a morass of frivolous litigation and outright lies presented by the DOJ, they will have only themselves to blame for the deterioration of civility and ethical standards.
Indeed, the Supremes’ own shameful performance in Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant, where they allowed the Solicitor General to unethically “short circuit the system,” dissolved a proper stay issued by a U.S. District Judge, and allowed an unconstitutional, illegal, not to mention immoral, program of racially targeted elimination of asylum opportunities sends a strong signal that the Supreme themselves have become part of the “ethics free zone.” Trump and Barr and their sycophantic subordinates have taken notice.
Chief Justice John Roberts might disingenuously moan the loss of civility and the dysfunction in the Legislative and Executive Branches. But, fact is, his Court’s unwillingness to fulfill their oaths of office by enforcing the Constitution and standing up for the rule of law by reinforcing it against Trump’s arrogant overreach is a major part of the problem. He and his spineless Supremes’ majority have essentially left America defenseless against the tyranny and corruption of Trump, Barr, and company.
And, as asylum applicants are abused, human lives are ruined, the Immigration Courts dissolve, and Trump’s betrayal of our nation unfolds each day, we see that there are “real life consequences” to the Supremes’ complicity.
09-28-19