In one year, U.S. Attorney General William “Bill” Barr has undermined the historical integrity and independence of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with appearances of insider corruption, carrying out political investigations of the president’s political opponents, providing legal support for a former national security official who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about the betrayal of his country, supporting the president’s lunatic and completely discredited conspiracy theories about the “Dark State,” and involving himself in national security/foreign affairs to serve the corrupt political agenda of the president.
In effect, William Barr has methodically reduced the Attorney General’s role to that of a consigliore of a mob crime family.
AG’s Interference with Criminal Proceedings
The Attorney General recently reinforced his image as a mob family consigliore when he overrode the seven-to-nine year sentencing recommendation made by the four Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in the Roger Stone corruption case. The four AUSAs—Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Jonathan Kravis and Michael Marando—immediately resigned from the Stone case after Barr’s blatant politically-motivated interference in the case.
Roger Stone is, and has been for decades, a corrupt political fixer for Donald J. Trump. It was inevitable that the president would intercede in the Stone case because of the vast amount of knowledge the political fixer has about Trump’s criminal wrongdoing over all those years.
So it came as no surprise when Trump at 1:48 a.m. on Tuesday, February 11, tweeted a broadside, scathing political attack against the AUSAs in the Stone case. The president wanted to make certain that Barr heard about the threatening tweet before the Attorney General could down his first cup of coffee that Tuesday morning.
President’s Tweet Pulls Strings of Puppet AG
The Attorney General quickly scurried to his office, assembled a group of his cronies, and instructed them to file new sentencing pleadings in the Stone case seeking a much more lenient sentence. Less than sixteen hours after the President’s lunatic tweet, Barr’s staff had those sentencing pleadings before U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson who is presiding over the Stone case.
Having bullied the subservient Barr into submission, Trump launched yet another lunatic tweeting assault shortly after nightfall on Tuesday—this time against Judge Berman-Jackson herself, who has also presided over trials of corrupt Trump cronies, including Paul Manafort. The tweet was an obvious attempt to undermine the judge’s judicial integrity and independence by trying to force her to impose a lenient sentence against Stone.
Based on the frenzied nature of president’s tweet, it is apparent that Stone had sent “word” to the Trump—who is still insanely enraged and mobster-bent on revenge because of his impeachment—that it is time for the president to take care of his “fixer” while Trump’s political base is still in the throes of celebration over their president’s impeachment “acquittal.”
It is nonetheless worth noting that President Trump has a history of criticizing federal prosecutors who go after him or his corrupt political cronies.
He sharply denounced Jeff Sessions after the former attorney general indicted two Republican Congressman—Rep. Duncan Hunter and Rep. Chris Collins, both staunch political allies of the president—on corruption charges. Trump even went so far as to order the Navy to rescind medals previously given to military prosecutors who had prosecuted the “war crimes” case against Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher.
This President of the United States firmly believes in both corruption and war crimes. This despite the fact that 27 percent of Americans believe he should be charged as a war criminal and another 44 percent do not support his impeachment acquittal and believe he should have been removed from office.
Millions of Americans Believe Trump is a Criminal
That’s roughly 145 million people who believe Donald Trump is guilty of criminal wrongdoing and should have been removed from office with 88 million of them believing he should be tried as a war criminal. Never in modern recorded history have so many Americans believed a President of the United States should not only be removed from office but prosecuted as a “war criminal.”
These Americans are not wrong.
The Mueller Report, the case laid out in the U.S. Senate by the House Impeachment Managers, his interference in the Stone case, his involvement in the Manafort case, his support in the Hunter/Collins cases, and his executive orders in the Gallagher case all demonstrate that President Trump is a corrupt, criminal politician who operates the White House like a “mob family.”
And it is this Michael Corleone-like president that Attorney General Barr has personally allied himself with and with whom the Attorney General has become politically subservient.
AG’s Subservience to President Extremely Disturbing
One federal prosecutor, speaking to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, said Barr’s involvement in Roger Stone’s sentencing recommendation is extremely disturbing.
“We’ve long known that Trump views his political opponent as crooks and his allies as righteous, regardless of the facts or the law,” the prosecutor said. “That was plain from his criticism of Jeff Sessions when the DOJ indicted two crooked Republican congressmen in 2018; it was plain from his continued support of Manafort up through his conviction. What’s remarkable now is that Barr appears to share the same corrupt view.”
DOJ Protecting Criminals
A current DOJ official added that it is “not often DOJ leaps to the defense of people [like Roger Stone] who threaten witnesses, judges, and who commit perjury.”
Thus, it can reasonably be said that in his first year in office, Attorney General, William Barr has done more damage to the DOJ than all the previous Attorney Generals indicted and/or convicted of criminal wrongdoing. The Attorney General has turned the DOJ into President Trump’s own personal “Pinkerton National Detective Agency.”
Under Barr’s iron-fisted leadership, the DOJ is not about justice anymore but rather is about serving with political whims and personal demands of President Trump—and the president has made it clear for everyone to hear that he has the “right” to do as he pleases with the DOJ.
The question every American must now ask themselves is not whether this nation will survive Donald Trump’s presidency but whether it can recover from its legacy.