Barr's legacy is going to be the hardest to live up to by any future Attorney General.
Originally Posted by smokedog01
FTFY.
Barr vs. the Beltway
Swamp creatures heap abuse on him for exposing abuse at the Justice Department.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
May 14, 2020 7:24 pm ET
In the Bible, we are told that the truth will set us free. In the Beltway, we find that the truth-tellers get hammered.
Take William Barr. The attorney general in recent weeks has made good on his pledge to be transparent about the Justice Department’s actions in the 2016 election and to right wrongs. The department’s decision to withdraw its false-statements case against former national security adviser Mike Flynn was its first public acknowledgment that past leaders sullied their mission.
That’s not an opinion, but the reality as shown by new documents released in the Flynn case. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation debated if the goal of the interview with Mr. Flynn was to “get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” Then-Director James Comey refused to brief the Trump administration about the bureau’s Flynn concerns. The interviewing agents encouraged Mr. Flynn to forgo legal counsel and denied him the standard warning that lying was a crime. Prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence from Mr. Flynn’s defense attorneys. No self-respecting lawyer could defend any of this.
Thanks to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, we also got a document this week showing the Obama political team was in on the Flynn sandbagging. The list of Obama partisans who “unmasked” Mr. Flynn—snooping on his phone conversations—include Vice President Joe Biden, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. The dates suggest the administration was listening in on Mr. Flynn from the start.
Yet instead of applauding Mr. Barr for divulging these facts, the Beltway has responded with ire.
Mr. Barr’s transparency threatens to reveal further that the Russia-collusion narrative was pure fantasy, to puncture the self-righteousness of the likes of Mr. Comey and his scribes, to question the appropriateness of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, and to expose how hatred of Donald Trump drove people of power to break rules and destroy norms. Thus the vicious campaign to undermine Mr. Barr’s credibility, an operation that has now been joined not only by Democrats and the press, but also by Justice Department alumni and even the federal judge presiding over Mr. Flynn’s case.
The press spent all week flogging an open letter from 1,900 former Justice Department employees calling on Mr. Barr to resign for having “assaulted the rule of law” by withdrawing the charges against Mr. Flynn. Never mind that this crew is an insignificant fraction of the tens of thousands of former department employees who didn’t sign a letter. Many stories also conveniently neglected to mention that the letter was organized by Protect Democracy, a nonprofit formed in 2017 by former counsels for President Obama.
The proof of the skullduggery behind these attacks and press stories is in the name they don’t mention: U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen. He’s the man Mr. Barr tapped in January to review the Flynn case, and who made the recommendation to withdraw the charges. Career prosecutors worked on the withdrawal brief. No one has dared suggest Mr. Jensen is anything but a fine lawyer—because they can’t. He spent 10 years at the FBI and 10 as a career prosecutor. His involvement refutes the critics’ assertion that this was a “politicized” decision by Mr. Barr on behalf of Mr. Trump. So they’ve excised him—and the career prosecutors—from the story.
Then there’s Judge Emmet Sullivan’s decision to join the smear campaign against Mr. Barr. Rather than grant the prosecution’s request to withdraw the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan appointed a retired judge, John Gleeson, to oppose the effort and to investigate whether Mr. Flynn engaged in perjury—an offense with which he wasn’t charged—by changing his plea. Mr. Gleason is singularly unsuited for this task. A former prosecutor, he once worked alongside Mueller “pit bull” Andrew Weissmann, who as a member of Mr. Mueller’s team helped railroad Mr. Flynn. And Mr. Gleeson has admitted his palpable bias in a Washington Post op-ed this week that urged Judge Sullivan to deny the prosecution motion and leave Mr. Flynn’s conviction in place.
All this highlights the nakedly political nature of Judge Sullivan’s actions. From a purely legal perspective, this is an insignificant case; “lying to the feds” charges are a dime a dozen, and even Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors initially recommended little or no prison time for Mr. Flynn. The judge’s moves are simply over the top. More important, they are legally and ethically dubious. As no less than Judge Gleeson once wrote in an opinion: “The government has near-absolute power . . . to extinguish a case that it has brought.” Judge Sullivan is providing ample evidence of hostility toward a defendant—of a malevolent intent to punish—that would be strong grounds for appeal.
The only reason to do it is to provide Mr. Barr’s critics a talking point to counter the ugly truths the attorney general is revealing.
The bright light in this morass of rough justice and partisan slander is Mr. Barr himself. He knew what was coming and appears unfazed and unwilling to be rolled into meekness.
The country is lucky to have a top law-enforcement officer who cares more about justice and his department’s reputation than about the former officials who abused its power. The more they howl, the more obvious their guilt.
Write to
kim@wsj.com.
