Here’s what you need to know:
- Lawmakers focused on protests — to different ends.
- Republicans played a video highlighting violence against police.
- Democrats want answers on Mr. Barr’s interventions in the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn cases.
- Republicans want details on the Justice Dept.’s scrutiny of the Russia inquiry.
- Mr. Barr may also be questioned about his warning of widespread voter fraud.
Lawmakers focused on protests — to different ends.
Today’s testimony by Attorney General William P. Barr in front of the House Judiciary Committee got off to a tense start. Democrats immediately accused Mr. Barr of making overtly political decisions to help Mr. Trump. “You have aided and abetted the worst failings of the president,” Representative Jerrold R. Nadler of New York, the committee chairman, said to Mr. Barr, who sat impassively.
Mr. Nadler added, “The message these actions send is clear: In this Justice Department, the president’s enemies will be punished and his friends will be protected, no matter the cost to liberty, no matter the cost to justice.” He said that Mr. Barr’s actions eroded the separation of powers and damaged norms and the public’s faith in the administration of justice.
Mr. Barr came out swinging. In a prepared opening statement released Monday night, he accused Democrats of demonizing him because he believed the Trump-Russia investigation was misguided and aggressively defended the federal response to the nationwide protests after the killing of George Floyd in May while he was in police custody in Minneapolis.
The attorney general appears to have played a primary role in using federal agents to violently clear protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House last month before a photo opportunity for Mr. Trump in front of a church. Though the White House initially said Mr. Barr had ordered the clearance, he later said he had not given a “tactical” order. Either way, Democrats were livid over his presence and have come to see Mr. Barr as a key impediment to overhauls of policing that enjoy broad public support.
More recently, he has become a face of the Trump administration’s pledge to surge federal agents into Democratic-led cities like Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Kansas City, Mo., where, the White House says, protests have descended into violence, including against federal buildings. The federal intervention — the details of which remain hazy — is quickly becoming another flash point in the monthslong cultural reckoning over systemic racism, and it appears to be a key campaign strategy by Mr. Trump who is trying to stoke a sense that Democrats are leading the country into chaos.
Republicans played a video highlighting violence against police.
Republicans had counterpunches of their own. Their most visceral case came in the form of a five-minute video montage that appeared to show protesters or people infiltrating their ranks across the country turning to violence.
“I want to thank you for defending law enforcement, for pointing out what a crazy idea the defund the police policy, whatever you want to call it, is, and standing up for the rule of law,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the panel’s top Republican, told Mr. Barr before playing the video. It began with footage of cable news anchors describing the protests as “peaceful” before streaming through scenes like a police precinct being set ablaze in Minneapolis, American flags burning, cans being hurled at police and stores looted.
The attorney general needed little help defending himself, though. In his prepared remarks, he warned that “violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction” in places like Portland, Ore.
In his prepared statement submitted to the committee, which he did not fully read aloud, Mr. Barr also said: “We should all be able to agree that there is no place in this country for armed mobs that seek to establish autonomous zones beyond government control, or tear down statues and monuments that law-abiding communities chose to erect, or to destroy the property and livelihoods of innocent business owners.”
His comments were the latest attempt by federal officials to draw more attention to vandals’ nightly bids to damage federal buildings in Portland, accusing local police of doing little to stop them. City officials have accused federal agents of being heavy-handed and said their presence reinvigorated tensions that had been subsiding.
While some protesters have been violent, many others have been peaceful and have included high school students, military veterans, off-duty lawyers and lines of mothers who call themselves the “Wall of Moms.”
The video that Mr. Jordan played omitted instances where federal agents, who arrived in the city on July 4, had responded aggressively and sometimes with disproportionate force through the use of tear gas, and flash bangs and pepper balls.
Video shows that in come cases, agents attacked protesters when there was no apparent threat, including the case of a Navy veteran whose hands were smashed by officers.
Democrats want answers on Mr. Barr’s interventions in the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn cases.
House Democrats have sought to press Mr. Barr on his handling of the Russia report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for more than a year. They will finally have their chance.
A federal judge has said that in summarizing the report himself weeks before releasing it, Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account that torqued public understanding of it in a way that favored Mr. Trump. Democrats felt at the time that those distortions brazenly helped protect Mr. Trump politically from possible impeachment — an accusation Mr. Barr denies.
Since then, the attorney general has directed a criminal prosecutor to scrutinize the F.B.I. inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and stepped in to reverse key prosecutorial decisions stemming from the investigation.
Specifically, Democrats will ask about his intervention to recommend a shorter prison sentence for Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven felony crimes — a sentence Mr. Trump has since commuted — and to drop charges against the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn even though he had pleaded guilty.
The Judiciary Committee heard testimony from a prosecutor on the Stone case last month accusing department leaders of changing a sentencing recommendation for Mr. Stone for “political reasons.” A second whistle-blower at that session also accused Mr. Barr of ordering antitrust investigations to harass marijuana sellers in states that have legalized the substance and to scrutinize California’s emissions deal with automakers after Mr. Trump attacked it.
Mr. Barr testified that he acted “without regard to political or personal.”
His written opening statement went further, suggesting that Democrats’ hatred of Mr. Trump has blinded them to abuses by law enforcement and intelligence officials, and saying: “Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the president’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.”
He has long been a critic of law enforcement and intelligence officials’ attempts to understand Russia’s efforts to tilt the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor and whether any Trump associates conspired.
Mr. Mueller’s report said that Russia favored Mr. Trump and that his campaign welcomed the interference and expected to benefit from it, but that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring criminal conspiracy charges.
Mr. Barr said that Mr. Trump has never tried to “interfere” in his decisions, and that he feels that he has “complete freedom” to do what he thinks is right.
But Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked the Justice Department’s investigations and employees. Mr. Barr himself expressed frustration with Mr. Trump’s attacks, saying in February that his public statements and tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”
Republicans want details on the Justice Dept.’s scrutiny of the Russia inquiry.
Republicans have cheered on Mr. Barr as he took steps to discredit the Russia investigation, and on Tuesday, they accused Democrats of trying to smear him because he called out members of their party when he said last year that he was scrutinizing the inquiry.
“They have been attacking you ever since for simply stating the truth that the Obama-Biden administration spied on the Trump campaign,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the panel.
They will be fishing for more clues about where he is going.
Mr. Barr appointed a criminal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to lead the scrutiny and has repeatedly hinted at possible indictments and could provide new details. He has suggested that he does not believe longstanding department policy against taking actions that could affect elections should apply to Mr. Durham’s work this fall and that he worries federal agents unfairly and dangerously targeted Mr. Trump and his campaign.
In the meantime, Republican lawmakers are likely to ask for Mr. Barr’s thoughts on a raft of recently declassified case files that they argue show F.B.I. agents were relying on shoddy foreign information to undertake key investigative actions into Mr. Trump’s associates.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators determined that Mr. Trump’s campaign welcomed Moscow’s help in 2016 but found insufficient evidence to charge any campaign officials or Trump associates with conspiring with the interference by a hostile foreign power.
Mr. Barr may also be questioned about his warning of widespread voter fraud.
With states preparing for record numbers of voters to cast ballots this fall by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Barr has provided key backup to Mr. Trump’s claims of rampant fraud. Democrats fear their comments are intended to or will at least have the effect of suppressing voter turnout or limiting access to the ballot box.
In an interview with Fox News last month, Mr. Barr said widespread vote by mail “opens the floodgates to fraud,” including by a foreign power.
“Right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot,” Mr. Barr said. He made similar comments to The New York Times.
“In terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in,” he said.
Like Mr. Trump, the attorney general has not presented evidence to back up his claims, but has mostly spoken in hypotheticals about the insecurity of mailboxes.
Experts say that tampering with ballots is nearly impossible because of how they are printed and tracked. Many states have been conducting elections by mail for years without any major security problems or widespread fraud.
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July 28, 2020 at 11:07PM
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William Barr House Testimony: Expected to Discuss Protests, Mueller and More - The New York Times
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