OUR PRESIDENT IS AN AUTOCRAT THAT THINKS HE'S A DICTATOR!

…This man, Bill Barr, is not doing his job as our Attorney General.

The president’s major supporter is someone that is supposed to be impartial.

“I have so far chosen not to!” President Trump said recently, describing his right to interfere with criminal cases, and even to order up criminal prosecutions.  So far, these are only words from a radical, ignorant president that could change is mind in a nano-second. So much for his attorney general’s negative statement about Trump’s tweeting about the Justice Department.  The A.G. said he might resign, but we all know, that isn’t going to happen.

Perhaps no president, including Richard Nixon, has been so convinced that he is entitled to use the law to punish his political enemies.  Or to use his power to help his allies work around any criminal accusations.  For years, Trump has continued to complain that he is limited in using the nation’s laws for his benefit.

“You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” Trump said in 2017. “Look at what’s happening with the Justice Department. Why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails? . . . I’m very unhappy with it.

Now, even though the president’s unhappiness continues, his behavior has gotten worse.  Trump is surrounded by his enablers and he has gone off-the-rails since his Senate acquittal.  According to a report in The Post, the president “has publicly and privately raged in recent months about wanting investigations of those he sees as enemies, including former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, former FBI director James B. Comey and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.”

But even his major supporter, the Attorney General William Barr has responded negatively to comments made by President Trump ridiculing the Justice Department.

But instead of the A.G. being strong against the president, he has become another enabler and a virtual “Trump firewall”.  Here is the Attorney General William Barr’s comment: “I’m happy to say that in fact, the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case,” Barr assured ABC News’s Pierre Thomas. “If he were to say, you know, go investigate somebody . . . and you sense it’s because they’re a political opponent, then an attorney general shouldn’t carry that out, wouldn’t carry that out.” Perhaps to drive that point home, Barr’s Justice Department announced Friday that it would not pursue charges against McCabe for allegedly lying to investigators.

But Barr actually had threatened to resign if the president didn’t stop tweeting about the Justice Dept or the department’s personnel.  He has since backed down from that threat.

We have a president who is an autocrat, one who does not share the common understanding as expressed by his own  A.G.. The president doesn’t believe that the Justice Dept. should not be used against political opponents. As Trump has tweeted, he may as president have “the legal right” to interfere in a criminal case in the sense that nothing in the Constitution prohibits him from doing so.  But that doesn’t mean that it is right to be as Trump has been.  Other presidents have left the Justice department to be “the Peoples” Justice Department, not the president’s “personal legal department”, as the A.G. has become.

Previous presidents have understood that it is wrong to use the criminal-justice system, either ours or that of a foreign country, for their own political purpose.  As Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes explain in their new book, “Unmaking the Presidency, Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office,”,” Trump “has never made the slightest pretense of respecting his highest prosecutors’ autonomy. The most remarkable feature of his behavior toward law enforcement is how overt it is. Where mid-century presidents struck a pose of virtue in public and quietly tolerated or encouraged abuses, Trump openly calls for the abuses.”

The real scary concept is that of A.G. Barr as a Trump firewall. Let’s assume that Barr, as he has stated, would not agree to an outright order by the president to pursue a political opponent. Of course, Trump could fire Barr, as he did his previous attorney general, as he did the director of the FBI.  But if past performance is any guide, congressional Republicans are too cowed to respond.  Today, it doesn’t appear that Barr, to keep his job, would not agree to do whatever the president asked.

In any event, there are many ways in which the attorney general can bend federal prosecution to presidential desires.  One was on display recently when Barr took the extraordinary step of withdrawing the sentencing recommendation of career prosecutors in the case of Trump’s crony, Roger Stone.  (You will recall that all four of the career prosecutors that made the recommendation resigned in protest after the A.G. interfered.  And a thousand federal prosecutors across the nation signed a letter against Barr’s actions.)

Barr insisted that he acted on his own and that he reached the decision before the president tweeted about the proposed 7-to-9 year sentence as a “horrible and unfair situation.”  (The recommendation was totally in line with the fact that Roger Stone was found guilty on all counts by a jury of his peers.)  But Barr was fully aware of the president’s fury over Stone’s conviction for lying to Congress and witness tampering. The attorney general knew how the president felt and he used the president’s desires without having them actually being made to him.

Perhaps, as Barr argued, the prosecutors did recommended too strong of a sentence.  But it is not the attorney general’s job to question a sentencing memorandum.  It appears obvious that Barr had reviewed the Stone recommendation precisely because of Stone’s past association with the president….which is exactly why he should not have inserted himself into the issue. The sentencing decision is up to the judges, not the A.G..

But Barr’s involvement was not irregular for him. Since taking office a year ago, the attorney general has taken on the role of a “presidential wingman”, including the “spinning” of the special counsel Mueller’s report on Trump’s behalf.  Now comes the news that Barr has asked some outside prosecutors to review the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, about whom the president once asked FBI director James B. Comey: “Can you give him a break?”  This being illegal out in the open, and no one is questioning these actions...?

How convenient for Trump. He doesn’t have to order his attorney general to do anything if Barr is going to do Trump’s bidding without even being asked.

Just one more issue of the loss of our fragile experiment in democracy. 

And all of this is happening, while the Democratic Party can’t seem to get its act together in agreeing on someone that can actually beat Trump in November.

God help us all.

Copyright G. Ater 2020