Trump, Barr, and the Rule of Law

If there’s one thing that Attorney General William Barr’s testimony within the Senate ultimate week made abundantly clear, it’s that he is first-rate with appearing much less just like the chief law-enforcement officer of the USA and extra like the personal lawyer for a tantrum-prone customer named Donald Trump. Barr dissembled when answering questions about his handling of the Mueller file, then mischaracterized Robert Mueller’s objections to his spin on it, saying that the unique counsel was in the main bothered by how “the media was gambling this.” In fact, Mueller had written, in a letter to Barr, that he become concerned due to the fact the Attorney General’s summary “did no longer completely capture the context, nature, and substance” of his group’s work. Barr described that letter as “snitty” and probably written by using “staff people,” thereby dismissing objections that Mueller sincerely wanted within the historic document. By the give up of the day, Barr had stated that he would no longer come back and testify within the House, as he was scheduled to do. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, then stated that, in misrepresenting Mueller’s discontent, the Attorney General had lied to Congress, which is “against the law.”
Barr is apparently a believer in the “unitary executive” idea, an expansive analyzing of the powers of the Presidency that’s famous in conservative criminal circles. Theory aside, although, serving as Trump’s Attorney General—and maintaining the process—appears to intend signing on to the Roy Cohn approach that Trump so admires: treating anything, consisting of the Constitution, that doesn’t serve Trump’s pastimes as a pressing risk; projecting Trump’s very own venal reasons onto his critics and fighters; denying and stonewalling.
As a businessman, Trump was significantly litigious. In 2016, while he turned into walking for President, USA Today discovered that he have been worried in thirty-5 hundred complaints, and become the plaintiff in nearly thousand of them. That quantity of litigation was notable now not handiest for a Presidential candidate however even for a real-property multi-millionaire. As President, he’s pursuing a similar strategy—stacking up lawsuits and thwarting investigations in the hope that he can run out the clock earlier than the 2020 election. Last month, he sued the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Representative Elijah Cummings, who had asked some of his financial statistics from an accounting company. Then Trump, 3 of his youngsters, and his private agency sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One to save you them from liberating statistics approximately his financial preparations, which Democrats had subpoenaed. Trump also went to courtroom to try to block a lawsuit added by hundred contributors of Congress, which alleges that his business dealings violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution. And Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have to this point declined to supply the President’s tax returns for the House Ways and Means Committee, which requested them from the I.R.S. In early April. Since Richard Nixon, it’s been the practice for Presidents to release their returns, however, in Mnuchin’s words, Congress is making an “exceptional” call for—“publicity for the sake of publicity.”
Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated no to a request from the Senate Appropriations Committee to testify about his branch’s price range. Indeed, Trump has declared a close to-blanket denial of all congressional requests for data and testimony from participants of his Administration; after Barr’s testimony, Trump said that he could no longer allow the former White House counsel Don McGahn to seem earlier than the Senate. “I don’t want human beings attesting to a celebration, due to the fact that’s what they’re doing if they do this,” Trump informed the Washington Post, in April. Cummings advised journalists, “To date, the White House has refused to provide an unmarried piece of paper or an unmarried witness in any of the committee’s investigations this entire 12 months.”