A former deputy attorney general in George H.W.
Bush’s administration has warned that the integrity of the Justice
Department has been compromised by the current attorney general, William
Barr, paving the way for “virtually autocratic” leadership by President
Donald Trump.
In an op-ed for The Atlantic published Monday,
Donald Ayer, who has known Barr for more than four decades and once
worked with him at the Department of Justice, warned of a grim future if
his former colleague is not removed from office.
Reflecting on Barr’s first year of service, Ayer
concluded that he has “appeared to function much more as the president’s
personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and
government of the United States.”
Any optimism that Barr would stand strong against
attempts to inject politics into the department’s work was misplaced,
Ayer wrote, highlighting a series of “disturbing” events beginning with
his “public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included
powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president,”
and ending with the “worst of all”: Barr’s reported intervention in the
criminal prosecution of Trump’s friend Roger Stone.
“For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that
the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit
of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires
to that status.”
The fundamental reason that Barr is unfit for
office, according to Ayer, is that he does not believe in the central
tenet of America’s democracy: that “no person is above the law.”
“Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go,” Ayer concluded.
“It is a banana republic where all are subject to
the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that,
we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately,
or failing that, be impeached.”
Ayer is just one of more than 2,000 former
prosecutors and DOJ officials to call for Barr’s resignation in the wake
of the extraordinary events of the past week. Last Tuesday, four career
prosecutors withdrew from the Stone case after top Justice Department
officials overruled their sentencing recommendation. Seemingly
confirming concerns that Barr had intervened on his behalf, the
president openly applauded Barr for “taking charge” of the case on
Twitter. Later in an interview, Barr said that constant tweets and
commentary were complicating his job.
Barr’s push back was faulted widely as an attempt
to cover up what critics suggested was a coordinated attempt between him
and Trump to defuse the firestorm over the preferential treatment given Trump’s longtime ally.
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