Day: February 17, 2020

William Barr’s outburst about Donald Trump’s tweets seems not to have impressed

benfell

Updates

  1. Originally published, February 17, 7:09 pm.
  2. February 17, 7:38 pm:
    • The number of former Justice Department employees signing that petition asking William Barr to resign is now over 2,000 and the Federal Judges Association is convening an emergency meeting to consider Donald Trump’s and Barr’s interference with line prosecutors.[1]

There is a new blog post entitled, “Fiction as truth.”

William Barr

It would seem that William Barr’s outburst about Donald Trump’s tweets[2] was insufficient to impress “[m]ore than 1,100 former Justice Department employees” who called on him to resign.[3]

The real problem, of course, is constitutional: The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch. But it would be a problem anywhere in government. It’s a problem for which I lack a solution,[4] and I’m still pretty grumpy about that.

Andrew Duehren and Sadie Gurman, “Former Justice Department Employees Sign Letter Urging Barr to Resign,” Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-justice-department-employees-sign-letter-urging-barr-to-resign-11581877946

Kevin Johnson, “Federal judges’ association calls emergency meeting after DOJ intervenes in case of Trump ally Roger Stone,” USA Today, February 17, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/17/roger-stone-sentence-judges-worried-political-interference/4788155002/

  1. [1]Kevin Johnson, “Federal judges’ association calls emergency meeting after DOJ intervenes in case of Trump ally Roger Stone,” USA Today, February 17, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/17/roger-stone-sentence-judges-worried-political-interference/4788155002/↩
  2. [2]Jon Allsop, “Angry Barr and whether the press is getting played,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 14, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/william_barr_roger_stone_trump.php; Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner, “Trump bucks Barr’s request to stop tweeting about Justice Dept., declaring a ‘legal right’ to seek intervention in criminal cases,” Washington Post, February 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-appears-to-escalate-standoff-with-attorney-general-and-justice-dept-declaring-on-twitter-a-legal-right-to-influence-criminal-cases/2020/02/14/8c152c36-4f2f-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html↩
  3. [3]Andrew Duehren and Sadie Gurman, “Former Justice Department Employees Sign Letter Urging Barr to Resign,” Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-justice-department-employees-sign-letter-urging-barr-to-resign-11581877946↩
  4. [4]David Benfell, “On the difficulty of having the Department of Justice in the executive branch,” Not Housebroken, June 15, 2018, https://disunitedstates.org/2018/06/15/on-the-difficulty-of-having-the-department-of-justice-in-the-executive-branch/↩