Trump, lagging in polls, pressures Justice again

President wants results of probe of political rivals

President Donald Trump publicly pressured the Justice Department on Friday to move against his political adversaries and complained that Attorney General William Barr is not doing enough to deliver results of a probe into how the Obama administration investigated possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The delayed report is “a disgrace,” and Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed, Trump said in a rambling radio interview, one day after he argued on Twitter that his current Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is a criminal who should be barred from running.

Three weeks before the election and trailing Biden nationally as well as in key states, Trump is issuing a new torrent of threats and demands for federal action against Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, that go beyond his familiar and often erroneous claims of wrongdoing by his perceived political enemies.

One main difference is in the level of anger being leveled at Barr, a deeply conservative lawyer picked for the job after Trump complained that his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, was disloyal.

The president’s calls for the Justice Department to target his political opposition in the heat of a presidential campaign is a jarring moment without precedent in modern American history. But it is in keeping with Trump’s actions when he has faced adversity, which now includes testing positive for COVID -19 last week after for month minimizing the threat posed by a deadly virus that has killed more than 211,000 Americans.

“The behavior would be shocking in a normal presidency, but Trump has literally been doing this for years,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said of Trump’s calls to go after Democrats. “So it is reprehensible, but not shocking.”