Trump calls on Barr to ‘act’ against Biden
President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to take action before Election Day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcement to help him politically.
The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox & Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the news media and, increasingly, Barr. He recently said the attorney general would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Democrats like Biden and former President Barack Obama.
“We’ve got toget the attorney general to act,” Trump said Tuesday when asked whether he wants to see investigations into unverified information about Biden and his son Hunter that the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claims he recently obtained. Giuliani, who has made a range of outlandish and false assertions in an effort to damage the president’s rivals and critics, has refused to provide news outlets with the information he claims to have.
Trump called on Barr to appoint a special prosecutor or similar official, saying: “He’s got to act. And he’s got to act fast.”
“This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election. And, by the way, we’re doing very well. We’re going to win the election.”
A spokesman for Biden declined to comment.
Critics have accused Barr on a number of occasions of intervening on issues to help Trump politically. But for the president to publicly call on him to take action against a political opponent was remarkable, especially two weeks before a presidential election. OnMonday, Trump repeatedly called Biden “a criminal.”
“He is sounding desperate,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “He’s been urging the attorney general in several ways to investigate his political opponents and to somehow validate his preposterous charges of criminality.”
“And even as loyal a henchman as Barr seems to have been able to draw the line somewhere and it’s driving Trump crazy,” Fried added.
Trump’s comments come less than a year after hewas impeached over another effort to compel an investigation of Biden and his son by the government of Ukraine in return for U.S. military aid. Asked after his February acquittal by the Republican Senate what lessons he had learned, Trump responded that Democrats were “crooked” and “vicious” and that he should not have been impeached.
The president’s comment about Barr came during an interview in which he criticized the Bidens, the news media and infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, his answers replete with a number of falsehoods.
After spending Monday attacking Fauci, who remains popular in public opinion polls, Trump claimed Tuesday that hewas “not at odds” with him, before renewing the attacks.