House Judiciary panel set to grill AG Barr
WASHINGTON — Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have wanted to question Attorney General William Barr at an oversight hearing for more than a year, so they have a dizzying list of controversial topics for what promises to be a highly watched showdown Tuesday.
It will be Barr’s first public testimony before a committee that has some of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics, at a time when the nation’s focus increasingly turns to the presidential election less than 100 days away.
Until now, House Democrats have been increasingly frustrated in any effort to force Barr’s compliance with congressional oversight demands. The House already found Barr in contempt of Congress last year in connection with stonewalling oversight attempts.
Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York filed legislation to defund Barr’s personal office by $50 million this month for defiance of Congress, and committee members have called for Barr’s impeachment or the use of Congress’ inherent contempt power to fine officials.
Last month, the Judiciary Committee spent a hearing focusing on Barr’s actions. Right now, he is the only attorney general in modern times to have never testified before the committee — but that is set to change Tuesday.
His appearance would end a standoff between Barr and the Judiciary Committee that stretches back to at least May 2019. Barr eventually had agreed to testify March 31, but the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled that hearing.
Barr then cited the pandemic again when he declined the committee’s invitation to reschedule the hearing for June 9, which prompted Nadler to call a hearing about Barr last month, with testimony from two Justice Department lawyers and former officials.
Democrats are expected to drill down on their concerns that Barr is misusing the Justice Department with actions that support Trump’s reelection campaign and personal interests, such as Barr’s role in federal officers using tear gas to disperse protesters at Lafayette Square near the White House ahead of a photo opportunity with Trump holding a Bible.
There’s the Trump administration’s expanding use of federal officers in cities such as Portland, Oregon, which committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland dubbed a “banana-republic-style secret police unit,” and the administration’s latest effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census.
There are criticisms about how Barr removed the federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where there are investigations that might affect Trump and his associates, a move that prompted Nadler to say Barr
“clearly cares very little about the law.”
Barr has a federal prosecutor investigating the origins of the department’s Trump-Russia investigation and hasn’t ruled out that it could result in criminal charges ahead of the November election.
He also leads a Justice Department that dropped the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and sought a reduced sentence for Trump ally Roger Stone for convictions that include lying to Congress about investigations focused on Trump.
And there’s Trump’s pardon of Stone, which makes it almost certain a committee member will ask about Barr’s comments during his own confirmation hearing that it would be a crime for a president to offer a pardon in exchange for a witness’s silence.
But those are just the events from the past few months.
Concerns from committee Democrats stretch back to early 2019, and they still want Barr to answer for what they say was misleading the public about what former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found out about Trump during a 20month investigation into the 2016 presidential election.