A Call for the Resignation of United States Attorney General William Barr
As attorneys in the United States, we take our oaths to support the Constitution of the United States and to faithfully discharge our duties as officers of the courts. I write in support of the 2000+ alumni of the United States Department of Justice and in support of our colleagues of the Boston Bar Association and the New York City Bar Association who have publicly expressed concern about the efforts of Attorney General Barr and President Trump to use the Justice Department to reward the President’s friends and allies and to punish the President’s political enemies.[1]
We live in a nation divided by partisan loyalties, and we are in the middle of an election cycle. The role of the United States Department of Justice is to enforce the rule of law in an evenhanded manner, especially in these polarized times.
During the Nixon era, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the Treasury Departments were widely used by the President to persecute his political enemies and protect himself and his allies in order to secure his re-election. Since then, there has been a bright red line insulating the US criminal justice system from politically motivated decision-making that emanates from the President and the White House to target individual Americans.[2] Attorney General Barr’s leadership of the United States Department of Justice has been crossing that red line far too frequently.
The Justice Department’s authority to initiate investigations and criminal prosecutions must never be used to advance a President’s election or re-election as it was by Attorney General John Mitchell during and after the 1972 election. Likewise the FBI’s powers must never again be misused for political ends as they were during the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover.
We are a nation of laws not of men; we are a nation dedicated to the rule of law. The shining keystone of our democracy is our American judicial system, which must decide tough cases well argued by able attorneys for both sides. That lustre is deeply tarnished when the President tweets that his friend and political ally, Roger Stone, is being unfairly prosecuted and sentenced, and his Attorney General promptly withdraws the sentencing recommendations of the line prosecutors who tried the case and are deeply familiar with the circumstances of the Defendant’s conduct and then substitutes his own sentencing recommendations that are more concordant with the President’s and defense counsels’ wishes.
The conduct is especially troubling because this defendant, Roger Stone, lied to Congress and to federal investigators about his role as conduit between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks about the release of politically damaging e-mails stolen by the Russian intelligence services.[3] The President has attacked the prosecutors, the judge and even the jurors for convicting and sentencing the President’s friend and political ally. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, however, stood firm, condemned Roger Stone’s conduct and sentenced the President’s friend to 40 months in jail.
In a remarkable speech to the Federalist Society this fall, Attorney General Barr penned a paean to executive power and presented his views that the federal courts and Congress are acting counter to our founders’ wishes and expectations in investigating and sometimes checking the worst excesses of the Trump presidency.[4] In its wake, even traditional conservatives have warned of the dangers of an unharnessed executive as espoused by Attorney General Barr and exemplified by President Trump.[5]
Attorney General Barr has played a key role in implementing the President’s wishes to protect the President’s friends and persecute those who the President has identified as his political enemies. In that direction lies a corrupt banana republic where justice is ministry to a President’s cult of personal loyalty. As a nation, we have no other recourse but to ask Attorney General Barr to resign given the misuse of the Justice Department’s extraordinary powers and authority to protect the President’s allies and prosecute the President’s enemies. I hope you will join us.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 2/25/20
[1] Department of Justice Alumni Statement on the Events Surrounding the Sentencing of Roger Stone (Feb, 13, 2020) https://medium.com/@dojalumni/doj-alumni-statement-on-the-events-surrounding-the-sentencing-of-roger-stone-c2cb75ae4937. New York City Bar Association Letter on the Prosecution of Roger Stone (Feb. 12, 2020) at https://www.nycbar.org/media-listing/media/detail/prosecution-of-roger-stone-and-related-actions-by-the-department-of-justice. Boston Bar Association Statement on the Sentencing of Roger Stone (Feb. 14, 2020) https://bostonbar.org/membership/publications/news-release?ID=441
[2] Donald Ayer, Bill Barr Must Resign (Atlantic Magazine. Feb. 17, 2020) at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/donald-ayer-bill-barr-must-resign/606670/
[3] Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s Sentencing of Roger Stone (Feb. 21, 2020) at https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2020/02/20/at-roger-stones-sentencing-an-apology-from-the-justice-department/?slreturn=20200121120721 and https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/politics/amy-berman-jackson-quotes/index.html
[4] https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-19th-annual-barbara-k-olson-memorial-lecture
[5] Linker, William Barr’s Chilling Vision of Unchecked Presidential Power (The Week) at https://theweek.com/articles/879112/william-barrs-chilling-vision-unchecked-presidential-power. Somin, Bill Barr is Wrong to Claim Courts Cannot Examine Government Motives (Reason Magazine) at https://reason.com/2019/11/30/bill-barr-is-wrong-to-claim-courts-cannot-examine-government-motives/. Dreher, Bill Barr’s Blindness and Our Own (American Conservative) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bill-barr-blindness-long-twilight/ Weiner, Bill Barr’s Grand Presidency (American Enterprise Institute) at https://www.aei.org/op-eds/bill-barrs-grand-presidency/