Barr: Obama, Biden not under criminal investigation
WASHINGTON – Attorney General William Barr said Monday that former President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are not under investigation, despite President Donald Trump’s assertions that his predecessor’s administration had committed criminal offenses.
Trump has repeatedly accused Obama of unjustly targeting his associates in what he calls “Obamagate,” and has called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to call his predecessor to testify in hearings about the origins of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump, however, has yet to explain what crime he thinks Obama had committed.
Barr said he would not allow the criminal justice system to be “used as a political weapon.”
“The criminal justice system will not be used for partisan political ends,” Barr said, before launching a blistering critique of the Russia investigation.
The attorney general has tapped John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to lead a parallel inquiry into the origins of the Russia probe. Barr said the Russia inquiry, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, promoted an “utterly false” theory that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government.
“What happened to the president in the 2016 election and throughout the first two years of his presidency was abhorrent. It was a grave injustice and it was unprecedented in American history,” Barr said. “The Durham investigation is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And it will determine whether there are federal laws broken. Those who broke the laws will be held to account.”
While Barr said Monday that he does not expect Durham’s work to lead to a criminal investigation of either Obama or Biden, he suggested that “others” could be vulnerable in the criminal inquiry. In a tweet last week, Trump urged Sen. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to call Obama to testify “about the biggest political crime and scandal” in the country’s history. Pressed later by a reporter to say what crime his predecessor had committed and whether the Justice Department should investigate, Trump did not answer.
Graham, R-S.C., pushed back against the president’s request to call Obama to testify. “I am greatly concerned about the precedent that would be set by calling a former president for oversight,” he said in a statement.
Trump and his allies have seized on the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, one of the first targets of Mueller’s inquiry, claiming that the retired lieutenant general was entrapped by FBI agents into lying about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected,” Trump told reporters this month. “And if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at, now, all of this information that’s being released ... some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”
When pressed about the criminal accusations by a Washington Post reporter, Trump added: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
Earlier this month, the Barr Justice Department announced that it intended to abandon the Flynn case, asserting that the prosecution was “unjustified.”
A federal judge, who will ultimately decide Flynn’s fate, has since appointed a retired judge to challenge the Justice effort to drop the case and explore whether Flynn had committed perjury.